Hopis and the Counterculture, page 19
Waters’s outline for the project reveals metaphysical predispositions that would color the final product. He expected to record a “complete and ritually esoteric history” representing a “deeply religious” worldview “unchanged from antiquity,” which would be presented to a world “now suffering an era of world unrest and moral confusion.”129 Most importantly, Waters believed Hopi ceremonialism was based on “universal truths [that] are not the exclusive property of any one race, nation, creed or sect.” Therefore, he felt justified in creating an interpretive “framework . . . universal in extent . . . limited not to the milieu of a small tribe.”130 For Waters, global salvation was the project’s purpose. He expected to reveal a Hopi version of “the relationship of the individual to the universal whole as a microcosmic replica of the macrocosm.”131 Sounding much like Gurdjieff, Waters proposed that descriptions of Hopi ceremonials would make known their “traditional techniques for helping to maintain universal harmony.” A final section of the book would address the global “conflict between ruthless temporal and morally religious forces for the domination of mankind.”132 Waters planned to portray space exploration, psychology, and psychiatry “as portending a new symbolic Emergence to the fifth world through the evolutionary development of the human mind—confirming . . . the initial premise that man is a microcosmic replica of the macrocosmic universe and that his evolutionary journey up through the symbolic underworlds has been made within himself.”133
Plainly, Waters was not prepared to record, report, and demystify Hopi cosmology. His faith in the truth and universality of his metaphysical cosmology prevented that as surely as racism prevents the bigot from achieving an accurate understanding of human variation. He was, quite simply, blind to the culturalness of his own worldview. Manifest in his outline for the project are well-known hallmarks of European and American metaphysical esotericism: the concept that “primitive” societies possess “unchanging” ancient beliefs of immense universal value, the hermetic theory of correspondence and mystical interaction between a macrocosm greater than our world and a microcosm of human scale, and the evolution of consciousness that an “ancient” community would help bring about.134 This was Waters’s worldview, not the Hopi’s.
A Fictive Product of Interpretive Ingenuity
For a book that would prove to be such a commercial and cultural success, Book of the Hopi had a remarkably controversial birth. The Southwest Museum, which managed the project’s funds and became the final home of White Bear’s tapes, refused to publish it after an internal review found the manuscript “full of inaccuracies and flights of imagination.”135 Waters dismissed the criticism as “the old frigid attitude of entrenched academicians against newly revealed truths.”136 When Viking was approached to publish the book, they sought John Collier’s opinion on the manuscript. The former Indian commissioner and close friend of Mabel Dodge Luhan was attuned to the same cosmology as Waters—he had once declared Pueblo Indians to be a Red Atlantis retaining ancient values that could save the world—so it is hardly surprising that he called the text “truly classic” and recommended publication.137
Among Hopis, Book of the Hopi met with searing disapproval. Despite being political foes, the Traditionalists and the Tribal Council both sought to block the book’s distribution in 1964.138 Putting his own metaphysical spin on objections from the Traditionalists, Craig Carpenter wrote to General Holdridge in March 1964. “Sure, we are disgusted with Waters and ‘White Bear’ for putting out that book on The Hopi but the so-called ‘secrets’ revealed therein won’t do anybody any good unless they have pure hearts and were ‘introduced’ to Higher Power through proscribed [sic] channels.” Carpenter, who had not read the book, anticipated spiritual “repercussions” for Waters and White Bear, but felt the Traditionalists’ “Hopi Power” would withstand such metaphysical threats.139 Several years later, Carpenter kept his concerns to himself as Book of the Hopi brought support the Traditionalists had not anticipated. Albert Yava, a prominent Hopi-Tewa and member of the One Horn religious society, captured sentiment outside the Traditionalist faction when he called Book of the Hopi “a hodgepodge of misinformation. . . . A lot of people felt that the book was full of inaccuracies and sometimes was pretty farfetched.”140 Indeed, many knowledgeable Hopis possess copies of the book they have annotated to mark content that is not true.141
Such negative reactions were lost on readers seeking access to ancient Native wisdom, however. Armin Geertz learned the hard way that trying to correct misunderstandings created by Book of the Hopi brought scathing rebukes from the reading public. So he wrote a detailed treatise on Hopi prophecy to counteract Waters’s misrepresentations. Waters, White Bear, and supporters responded to criticisms by claiming that their collaborating Hopi elders were the sources of the book’s material; thus, it must be authentic. But if that were so, why the unrelenting criticism, even from their sources? In an effort to find answers, Roxie McLeod undertook a study of the book’s creation and content, resulting in an extraordinary master’s thesis that answers many of the crucial questions.142 McLeod concludes that Book of the Hopi is “a fictive product of Waters’s (and White Bear’s) interpretive ingenuity,” reflecting Waters’s religious and cultural biases and White Bear’s personal ambitions.143 McLeod passed away without publishing, so her superb contribution is not widely available.144 With a few additions of my own, the following critique is based on her fine work.
Problems emerged early in making Book of the Hopi, according to McLeod. From the outset, White Bear exaggerated his knowledge and status by claiming to be a member of the Orayvi kikmongwi’s family with unfettered access to elders who had, he claimed, already asserted their support for the project. Although White Bear was the son of the chief’s brother, this mattered little in the Hopi system since he was not of the chief’s clan, one of the affiliations that configure inheritance of office and access to the privileged knowledge on which authority rests. Waters began to doubt White Bear’s claims before the work began after White Bear delivered a recording that proved to be a story commonly told to tourists. After arriving at the reservation, Waters realized that White Bear’s confidence and authority off the reservation were absent when he was at Hopi. Then, in December 1959, when Hotvela clan leaders sided with David Monongye against the project, forcing Katchongva to abandon support, Waters recognized that White Bear had not secured the support he had promised. When James Pongyayawma, who had recently returned to Hotvela, also sided with Monongye, White Bear and Waters were forced to abandon work at Hotvela altogether. Waters was disappointed anew that same month when Charles Frederick’s description of the Soyal ceremony proved less detailed than a previously published version. He angrily sent White Bear back to get more. By the next month, however, Waters felt that White Bear was doing a more reliable job.145
Waters claimed to have spent three years on the reservation carrying out the research. McLeod demolishes this claim by using Waters’s own journals. Waters’s association with White Bear isolated him at Kiqötsmovi, causing him to flee home to New Mexico after a frustrating first three months. White Bear was left to do the interviews himself. Waters returned to Hopi for six shorter stays. In total, he spent perhaps five months at Hopi. He only witnessed the public components of religious ceremonies. The only lasting friendship he forged during the project was with John Lansa, who was aligned with the Traditionalist faction. Waters exaggerated his time at Hopi to lend Book of the Hopi ethnographic authority. However, by depending on an untrained assistant to gather data, he adopted a method that ethnographers had long realized could yield inaccurate information. This “armchair anthropology” method amplified Waters’s misunderstandings of Hopi culture, allowing his preconceptions free reign.146
A more glaring problem is that White Bear and Waters did not rely consistently on sources that were authoritative by Hopi standards. Twenty-seven Hopis are named as contributors to Book of the Hopi. Of these, twenty-one were from Third Mesa villages, making it impossible to claim the book comprehensively represents Hopi religious beliefs, which vary from mesa to mesa, village to village, and clan to clan. Even worse, Waters and White Bear misreport many contributors’ clan and village affiliations, indicating that they had not learned basic biographical facts. Village-of-birth and clan affiliations are pathways for acquiring esoteric knowledge in the Hopi system and are crucial for speaking with authority on these topics. Thus, when thirteen of the reported village affiliations are to village of residence after marriage rather than to village of birth, and only nine of the contributors’ clans are accurately identified, the authority Waters and White Bear claim for their sources is severely undermined. This alone means that Book of the Hopi cannot be the authoritative testimony of traditional elders it is marketed as being.147
The problem of the contributors’ authority compounds when their ritual initiation is considered. Initiation is essential to gaining esoteric knowledge and authority. Several contributors were only Powamu initiates, meaning they were restricted to the knowledge historically accorded to children. Among these was John Lansa, a major source of petroglyph interpretations and one of the few elders to support the project. Four of the major contributors were Christian converts, which does not undermine their authority if they achieved higher order initiation before conversion but does raise unanswered questions of motive and possible Christian inflections in their testimony. Sixteen of the contributors were initiated into one or another of the four principle men’s societies. At least half of these had been initiated into Wuwtsim, several more into Soyal, and seven into secondary order societies with less privileged access. This is all good for Book of the Hopi’s authority; however, McLeod discovered in the project’s documents that only thirteen of the named twenty-seven made major contributions, and only seven or eight of these were documented initiates of principal kiva societies.148 The remaining five of the thirteen main contributors were initiated only into second- or third-order societies. Among the seven or eight with the most authoritative credentials were Katchongva, who ceased supporting the project after December 1959, and Paul Sewemaenewa, the former draft resister, who contributed in defiance of Monongye but without sharing esoteric knowledge.149
Seven or eight proper authorities plus five more with second-order authority is not twenty-seven as claimed, but it should be enough to compile some authoritative esoteric knowledge. However, McLeod shows this is not the validation it might seem, because the content attributed to certain contributors does not correspond to their clan or ritual affiliation. McLeod demonstrates that this problem of speaking out of place permeates much of the book.150 Thus, rather than containing the testimony of properly authorized spokespersons, Book of the Hopi consists primarily of the testimony of Hopis speculating on the privileged knowledge of clans and ritual societies to which they do not belong.151 Given Hopi rules of access and authority, this is the most serious flaw in the claims of authority made for Book of the Hopi. The problems of authority did not matter among Waters’s readers outside of the Hopi social field, but they were definitive within it.
Other problems stem from Waters dependence upon White Bear. For example, he claimed katsinas were extraterrestrials, a perspective in line with the Cold War UFO craze rather than with Hopi cosmology. White Bear pushed Paul Sewemaenewa to tie the Hopi to South America and prompted Joseph Robinson’s endorsement of a Hopi connection to the Aztec and Maya by showing him illustrations from a book giving a conservative Mormon interpretation of prehistory. White Bear’s interpretations of petroglyphs were influenced by this same Mormon text, which may be the source of his belief that the Maya were Hopis who had not completed their migrations.152 He also urged Lansa to extemporize on what White Bear called “vibratory centers of the human body,” wording that suggests Waters’s influence and certainly represents a concept alien to Lansa’s Hopi upbringing.153 Waters proved incapable of distinguishing between these and more authoritative Hopi statements.
Although White Bear claimed authority from the Bear clan of his father, his own Coyote clan lacks offices or major ceremonies. Without Wuwtsim initiation, White Bear had no claim on traditional ceremonial authority. Nonetheless, from 1959 through at least 1975, White Bear repeated the absurd claim that he had the right to become Orayvi’s kikmongwi because a “spaceman” katsina had told him he belonged to the Bear clan. Evidence suggests that White Bear dreamed of becoming kikmongwi of a restored Orayvi that would become a center of Hopi and possibly a broader, religious-political power.154 As the project progressed, Waters feared complications from White Bear’s “mounting, messianic obsession that he is the sole spokesman for all the Hopi people.”155 Waters complained to Howell in April 1963 that White Bear “is not recognized as [spokesman] by any village, by the Tribal council for secular matters, or by the Traditionals for religious matters as he is not a member of any kiva or society and is not permitted to attend their rituals.” Waters added, “This, of course, was the main obstacle I encountered during our research.”156
After White Bear read Waters’s draft for Book of the Hopi in November 1961, he complained to Howell that Waters had “projected” himself into the manuscript too much.157 Despite this, White Bear’s suggested corrections were mostly minor. Waters’s refusal to grant him a final prepublication review of the text became such a sore point that White Bear threatened to rebuke the book publicly. Howell intervened to prevent this, after which White Bear expressed satisfaction and promised support, but he still insisted that he could have prevented “mistakes” had he been granted one more review.158 Although he did ask for his name to be removed from a second edition, Katchongva was an early supporter of the project. His influence is evident in Waters’s portrayal of Orayvi as the “parental home of Hopi Ceremonialism” and of Hotvela as “ceremonially the most important village,” both of which were dogmatic positions of the Hotvela Traditionalists.159 Katchongva lost power at Hotvela due to disagreements over the project, which brought long-standing differences with Monongye to the breaking point. Lacking a grasp of the nature of Hopi political-religious status, Waters failed to anticipate such trouble.160
Looking beyond McLeod’s analysis, one finds indications that White Bear brought some of the Western metaphysics into the project that theretofore had been attributed only to Waters. One obvious hint of White Bear’s developing metaphysical inclinations was his desire to recruit Waters because Masked Gods revealed its author’s “spirit” and “temper.” It is difficult to envision a reader enthusing about Masked Gods if they objected to its underlying metaphysics, so apparent is it throughout the text. Similarly, White Bear’s equating of katsinas with extraterrestrials suggests interactions with the UFO cult and the pseudoscience at the heart of certain metaphysical traditions. By the early 1970s, White Bear had close ties to various New Agers, including Norman Paulsen, founder of the Brotherhood of the Sun in Santa Barbara, California, a metaphysical religious group that used Book of the Hopi as one of its spiritual sources. By then, White Bear embraced the Hermetic cosmology of microcosmic-macrocosmic correspondence, the restorative power of ancient wisdom, ancestral civilizations on lost continents, and powerful extraterrestrial masters, all elements of Theosophy and related religions. In a German book published in 1979, White Bear linked lost continents, ancient Andean and Mesoamerican civilizations, and flying saucers with the Hopi. A text attributed to White Bear, but published by a Sedona resident after his death, touts Lemurian origins for the Hopi.161 White Bear may have been referring to just such a lost civilization and continent when he told Katchongva in October 1959 that “wise ones among the white people” were finding evidence of “a great civilization that existed before they came.”162 These signs suggest that White Bear was turning to metaphysical religion at the time of the project.
Waters’s entrenched romantic and universalizing dualism plague his interpretations throughout Book of the Hopi. The book is most disturbing precisely because Waters insists that Hopi religious culture was a dying “remnant of . . . a once great civilization” whose chief value was that it could rejuvenate non-Native society.163 He believed the Hopi were incapable of any change other than losing their ancestral culture. He was blind to Hopi religion’s continuing vigor, to Songòopavi’s success in maintaining its ceremonial system, and to the reinventions and innovations by Traditionalists at Hotvela after the Orayvi split. Waters’s romanticism led him to overlook the obvious, as in, for example, his depiction of Lansa as the archetype of a man living in spiritual harmony—despite Lansa’s lack of Wuwtsim status. Waters claimed Katchongva as his spiritual guide even though Hotvela’s internal politics forced Katchongva to share little with Waters. Waters lionized Katchongva in Pumpkin Seed Point, but McLeod shows that Waters altered and embroidered a sequence of events from his journal to make Katchongva’s interpretation of Waters’s dreams appear prophetic. Waters claimed that his own Native heritage permitted his unconscious to produce the dream sequence. In fact, Waters’s fictitious Cheyenne ancestry and equally fictitious childhood Indian encounters are repeated inside the front cover of Book of the Hopi to enhance the book’s authority.164
In Tune with the Timeless Unities
Despite its serious shortcomings, Book of the Hopi is well written and appears consistent and authoritative to nonspecialists. It has the advantage of being organized around a unifying cosmology recognizable to romantic primitivists, the metaphysically inclined, and Waters’s established readers. Appearing shortly before public concerns about the Vietnam War, civil rights, and the repressiveness of the Cold War all came to a head, the book became available just as a critical mass of people began to seek alternatives to the cultural mainstream. Its commercial success reflects Waters’s well-tuned ear for the conditions of the time. In closing her thesis, McLeod speculates that Book of the Hopi might “possess a history of usefulness in Traditionalist campaigns for political visibility,” for enhancing the off-reservation careers of particular Traditionalists, and for fostering New Age beliefs about Hopi as a sacred place and people.165 She was on the right track, for as the next chapter will show, Book of the Hopi, combined with the activism of Craig Carpenter, the Firesign Theatre, and others, drew support for Hopi Traditionalists and inspired more neo-Indians. By the late 1960s, Hopis were encountering visitors in their villages who cited Book of the Hopi as the source of their interest or were even carrying it with them.166
