All Hopis Lost

A violent storm blew over the Sierras and I drove late into the night. I tried ineptly to pitch a tent after dark in the mountain cold, gave up, and slept in a motel near Lake Isabella. The next morning I rose at 5:30 and drove through a bright red sunrise to Death Valley. I capered in the white dunes there, throwing myself like a zealot down the soft steep slopes. Later I joined a group of senior citizens who were listening to a Park Ranger's fascinating, effusive monologue -- he was like the Stage Manager from Thornton Wilder's play Our Town, if the Stage Manager had been an aficionado of the Old West. He told us all about the discovery of boron in Death Valley over a hundred years ago. The Ranger stood tall by the very wagon once pulled by the famous Twenty-Mule Team (!) and reminisced about the players in this desert drama, as intimately as if he had known them: the men who drove that wagon to the coast; the Chinese immigrants who lived in the 120-degree mineral flats and operated the hand-built refinery; the Indians who sold them mesquite to fuel that refinery; and the tycoon who went from boom to bust when borax -- which was once almost as precious in America as gold -- suddenly and permanently lost its value. People will achieve expertise in the oddest and obscurest subjects; this Ranger, lost deep inside the murderous Mojave, probably knows more about the history of borax than anyone else alive.

I made it to Flagstaff that night, where I whiled away a couple of beers at the Weatherford Hotel bar until an aggressively loquacious woman -- a.k.a barfly -- decimated my patience and drove me away. The next morning, I got back in the car and drove up through Sunset Crater National Monument, hiked for a couple of hours there, and then toured Wupatki, an ancient Indian ruins. After lunch at the Cameron Trading Post, I continued on to the Hopi reservation.

But I haven't answered a basic question: Why this fascination with the Hopis? They're probably the very first Americans -- they claim ancestral ties to the ancient Anasazi -- but most of us know less about them than we do, for example, about Cambodia, a little wedge of jungle on the other side of the world. This marginal tribe claims just 11,000 members, compared with over a quarter million Navajos, whose reservation completely and uncomfortably surrounds the Hopis'. The Hopis still live in high mesa-top dwellings as old as the temples at Angkor, some still without electricity or plumbing. (One Navajo epithet for the Hopis is "Cliffshitters.") To this day, the tribe has no treaty with the US Government.

The Great Anasazi Question -- which is simply, but rather ominously, What Happened to The Anasazi? -- has never been satisfactorily answered. Their civilization seems to have suddenly, perhaps catastrophically, collapsed, as evidenced by an apparent mass abandonment around 1250 AD of Chaco Canyon, the center of Anasazi society and one of the great ancient cities of this continent, in northwestern New Mexico. Did hostile forces slaughter them or drive them out? Did they starve or thirst to death? Migrate to more arable land?

The Turners' book Man Corn propounds a controversial but compellingly evidenced theory that the Anasazi may have been cannibals. The book speculates that a small band of messianic marauders came up from Mexico, where the Toltecs and Aztecs, it is widely believed, practiced cannibalism as a form of religious sacrifice, and also as a deterrent to hostile forces. These Mexican invaders took control of the Puebloans (as the Anasazi are also known), previously assumed to have enjoyed an egalitarian ethos, and either continually terrorized them through anthropophagy, or incited the Anasazi to practice it themselves. The book does not aim to explain how this imported cannibalism doomed Chaco, nor what became of its inhabitants. The Turners seek only data, not narrative analysis. Because human flesh does not seem to have been a staple food -- it was only occasionally eaten -- Man Corn sticks to the prevailing theory that the Anasazi simply left Chaco Canyon when food grew scarce. That's why the Turners have ruffled so many feathers -- they imply that Pueblo cannibalism was a ritual social practice, not a desperate and fatally destructive act of sustenance.

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