Page 221 - TheHopiIndians

MESA FOLK OF HOPILAND 213

no children and hence my maternal ancestor's sister
became chief, and her badge of office, or tiponi, came
to mc. Some of the other Awatobi women knew how
to bring rain, and such of them as were willing to
teach their songs were spared and went to different
villages. The Oraibi chief saved a man who knew
how to cause the peach to grow, and that is why
Oraibi has such an abundance of peaches now. The
Miconinovi chief saved a prisoner who knew how to
make the sweet, small-ear corn grow, and this is why
it is more abundant there than elsewhere. All the
women who knew prayers and were willing to teach
them were spared, and no children were designedly
killed, but were divided among the villages, most of
them going to Miconinovi. The remainder of the
prisoners, men and women, were again tortured and
dismembered and left to die on the sand hills, and
there their bones are, and the place is called Masteomo,
or Death Mound. This is the story of Awatobi told
by my people.1'
It is difficult to conceive of the conservatism of
some of the older Hopi. A glimpse of the clinging
to the myth of the golden age is shown by the speech
of the old chief Nashihiptuwa, to whom the past
was an ideal time of plenty and contentment under
the bright sky of Tusayan.
It was Sunday and the camp by a peach orchard
in a deep valley at the Middle Mesa was made lively
i« ' ' Preliminary account of an expedition to the cliff
villages of the Bed Rock country; and the Tnsayan rains of
Sikyatki and Awatobi, Arizona, in 1895." By J. Walter
Fewkes, from the Smithsonian Report for 1895, pp. 568-569.