Page 268 - TheHopiIndians

260 MESA FOLiK OP HOPILAND
tell us yet more to excite our interest and admiration.
Among the inhabited Hopi pueblos are many seats
of the ancient people now become mounds or fallen
walls and their memory a tradition. There were four
mission churches; hardly a vestige of them remains,
and a few of the carved beams support the roofs of
pagan kivas. This bears strong testimony to the com
pleteness of the weeding out of the foreign missions
by the Hopi more than two centuries ago. The Hopi
have always been free and independent, even when
the search for gold by the Conquistadores had been
turned to the search for souls to the subjugation of
most of the other Pueblos in the Southwest.
Several of the interesting ruins in Tusayan have
been explored. Sikyatki, or "Yellow House," lying
on the sand hills four miles east of Walpi, has yielded
many strange and beautiful relics of pottery and
stone, as has Awatobi, a large town on a mesa ten
miles southeast of Walpi, destroyed about the year
1700 by the other villagers. Here may be traced the
walls of the mission of San Bernardino de Awatobi,
a large church built of blocks of adobe mixed with
straw. The church stood on the mesa commanding
a superb view of the lava buttes to the south and
must have been in its time an imposing building. The
old town of Kisakobi, near Walpi, has yielded relics
in profusion of a later period than the sites mentioned,
and it is here that we must look for the arts of the
Hopi just before they came into the light of history.