Page 250 - TheHopiIndians

242 MESA FOLK OF HOPILAND

a mixture of Hopi, ZULU, and Spanish, pieced out here
and there with sign language, they persuaded him to
desert the camp and set out with them for his native
town a hundred miles to the north.
The home-coming of Wupa was a great affair, and
his reintroduction to his mother was touching, for the
Hopi are more demonstrative than other Indians. The
event must have been a nine days7 wonder in the gos
sipy pueblo of Walpi. His education was taken up
at once with the intention of eradicating the evil ef
fects of Mexican training, especially on the side of his
religious instruction. If the grave priests are satis
fied with their labors in helping Wupa to begin anew
as a Hopi, an outsider would consider the results as
rather mixed. To this day Wupa is taunted with be
ing a Mexican; these taunts he answers with silence
and an air of superiority he knows so well how to as
sume; how, indeed, can they know what he has gone
through in his remarkable experiences?
While Wupa was willing to desert and become a
pagan, as were his ancestors, exchanging the quaint
cathedral of Albuquerque with its figures of saints
and grewsome Corpus Cristi in a glass case for a
dimly lighted room underground and familiarity with
rattlesnakes, his senora had other ideas. Wupa
mourned that his senora would not cast her lot with
the "Peaceful People" of Tusayan; but money was
scarce and the distance too great for a personal inter
view : the letters written bv a laborious Mexican scribe