The Hopi Pueblo is extremely isolated – in the middle of the Navajo reservation in northeast Arizona – but most of the other pueblo villages are more accessible, clustered near the Rio Grande valley in northeastern New Mexico. Since this area also contains the population center of New Mexico – from Albuquerque through Santa Fe to Taos – these pueblos attract many more tourists, and they have clearly learned how to manage this tourist influx to their benefit – providing income for the tribe, while minimizing the intrusion upon their way of life.

Acoma Pueblo is about 60 miles west of Albuquerque, and their village on top of a mesa, “Sky City” (they clearly hired a branding consultant before the other pueblos) has many similarities to the Hopi mesa villages – masonry and adobe houses tightly clustered around plazas, with a very defensible location hundreds of feet above the valley floor. There has been this ongoing dispute between Acoma and Walpi, as to which is the oldest existing settlement in the US, or the oldest continuously-inhabited, etc. The different clans own the houses in Acoma, just as in Walpi, but Acoma seems to have a more organized approach to actually living there. All the members of the tribe have more modern houses in the valley, but they sign up to be in residence on the mesa top for a year or so, living without running water or modern utilities.

As you enter the Acoma reservation, you first spot this mesa ahead, a striking and isolated element in the horizontal landscape. We were told that the Acoma people first considered this as the site for their village, but that two people were struck by lightning after climbing the mesa, and this was not taken as a good sign.

To visit Acoma you head to the Sky City Cultural Center, a new building at the foot of the mesa, which has a museum, meeting center, café and gift shop. The architecture is based upon the traditional Puebloan forms, with a series of boxy volumes that contrast in size and color. It is at a much bigger scale than the adobe buildings, and reminded me of some of the recent National Park buildings which work in the local vernacular, in a much more thoughtful way than you see in commercial buildings ineptly imitating the style.

You must visit the village as part of a tour group, and take a bus ride up the road to the top.

However, visitors are allowed to walk back down the ancient pathway at the end of the tour if they wish. It is easy to see how defensible this route is, and also how tiresome it would be to carry everything up.

The houses are set around medium-sized plazas, and most are in very good shape, with a combination of older building fabric and newer elements, such as windows.

There was a lot of construction going on while we were there, and in a very organized manner. It is clear that there is much greater concern for the historical integrity of the new building than at Walpi, and this might be directly due to the huge numbers of tourists who visit here. The tourists are probably much more interested in seeing authentic-looking buildings (rather than ones with obvious Simpson Strong-Tie connectors), and the tourist income can pay for those careful renovations.

Narrow streets run between the plazas in the village. The Hopi mesas are pretty narrow, and small villages are very near each other, whereas Acoma is one, much bigger settlement (Sky City, not Sky Village).

The traditional ovens were everywhere on the edge of the village.

Acoma is noted for its multi-story construction. This is the back side of the biggest building, facing onto a street, while the other side faces a plaza, and is stepped back with roof-top terraces.

The mesa is a big solid rock, so excavating kivas into the ground would have been difficult. So here they are built of masonry above ground, but still entered in the traditional way through the roof. These ladders are a recent reconstruction – when the native religion was being actively suppressed by the Spanish and the Americans, the big ceremonial ladders were a tip-off to the authorities, as well as a visible symbol. So the residents used less conspicuous ladders that could be hidden, and posted a lookout.

Most of the buildings show the wear of time,

but there are some new buildings. They are clearly based upon the same premises as the old style, but are not pretending to be ancient. Acoma felt more like a European village, where you can sometimes see this blending of old and new in a vernacular tradition.

The Catholic church, San Esteban del Rey from 1640, is by a large plaza and cemetery on one side of the mesa. While we were told the church is not used for any religious services, our guide was clear that we couldn’t take photos of the church interior, or of the cemetery, and implied that most of the current tribe members shunned the Church in favor of their traditional beliefs. When she was pressed by a tourist for some more detail on this, she just said, We don’t talk about that. It seemed to me that there was a big difference between Hopi and Acoma here – they didn’t want to discuss their beliefs, but they were generally unconcerned about photographs in the village, whereas with the Hopi it was the opposite. (The Hopi talk about their legends to a certain degree, but obviously there are many secret parts they’re not mentioning.)

The questions of the tourists strongly reflected the preoccupations of modern Americans – sex and money. Acoma Pueblo is matrilineal, so the tourists were very interested in how that affected marriage conventions, divorce, and especially, disposition of property after a divorce. What struck me as strange was that all of these questions about Acoma society could be answered by reading a book, whereas the one aspect of their culture that required a visit to comprehend was the nature of their physical settlement. Yet I didn’t hear one question about the village or its buildings, which reinforced my feeling that Americans are generally completely oblivious to the meaning of the built environment around them, focussing more upon the more abstract organizational and relationship issues. Americans don’t really care about the house as a physical artifact, they just want to understand what it’s worth and who gets it after the divorce.

One of the larger plazas was remarkable in that it had a tree, the first one we had seen on any mesa top. It was the urbanized version of all the garden valleys in the desert we had been seeing, the organic surrounded by mineral. It is adjacent to a small pool, which acts as a cistern.

Santa Clara Pueblo is located on the Rio Grande River, between Santa Fe and Taos, in what might be called the Pueblo Belt – many different, distinct reservations are adjacent here. We were attracted to this pueblo by their renowned, abstract black-on-black pottery, and we stumbled upon a small gallery run by a potter of about my age, who showed us his and a few others’ work. He took the time to explain how their firing process worked, which was amazing in the contrast between simple and rather ad hoc facilities they used and the incredible sophistication of the final products. They don’t have large, permanent kilns, but rather build a small one every time out of rocks and metal sheets, achieving the black finish not though a glaze, but by packing the kiln shut with dirt at the right time, so the fire is dampened and the pots are smoked. They then burnish the pots with a stick to get the shiny surface. It must have taken generations to get that process right, a process that must be learned by every new potter. The approach relies upon a complex series of steps that must be guided by experience and judgement, rather than complicated tools or equipment. We leaned a lot, and once again we found that buying some art (in this case a couple of extraordinary small pots for Linda) gave us a great excuse to spend time talking to some wonderful people.

The pueblo is not set on a mesa or hill, but right alongside the river. The buildings were adobe rather than stone, but still had the characteristic masonry forms, organized around plazas.

Being in a river valley there was much more use of organic material in the built environment,

and there was a relatively lush landscape everywhere. There was a newer part of town immediately adjacent to the old village, with schools, administrative buildings and detached houses. Some of the older houses were in disrepair and boarded up, but others had been recently rebuilt. Santa Clara doesn’t get the tourist throngs of Acoma, as it more resembles a normal western town, and isn’t the anomaly of a Sky City. But its location right on the Albuquerque-Taos axis makes it much easier for the residents to participate in the larger economy off the reservation, and so rather than the large-scale and highly-coordinated renovations we saw at Acoma, the work we saw here was at the level of the individual house, probably based on what one family was able to accomplish.

Finally we visited Taos Pueblo, a UNESCO World Heritage site located north of the city of Taos, which is the Mecca of pueblos for architects. It is mainly known for the large building on the north side of the village, a multi-story complex which antedates our own multi-family condos by at least 600 years. Architects tend to respond to the simple cubic forms – the irregular but similar volumes based upon the construction system with bearing walls and the span of small trees.

Everywhere I’ve travelled in the past 35 years, I’ve noticed a bias inherent in how architects and historians think about and document important places: there is always an emphasis upon the building as an object, but a relative disregard for the importance of the setting, whether urban or natural. The north building at Taos is truly remarkable, an incredible pile of abstract forms that gets at the primal idea of dwelling in the same way as do the cliff dwellings, but the natural setting is no less incredible.

When we first arrived at Taos, I couldn’t believe the backdrop of the mountains.

In the Northwest we’re used to seeing big mountains from in town, but those mountains are usually 50 miles away from the cities, which are set on the water. In all the cities in northeastern New Mexico, the cities are right at the base of the mountains, and their visual presence dominates the place. This is even stronger at Taos Pueblo, and not just due to proximity. These mountains were the traditional preserve of the Pueblo, containing their sacred Blue Lake, but they ended up being part of the National Forest system. The Taos Indians fought a protracted legal battle to get them back, which they eventually won in 1970. So the overwhelming beauty of the city of Taos has really been preserved by the Pueblo, which has kept the mountains free of development (or logging).

When we see the mountains behind the pueblo, it is not merely the visual background/foreground relationship which gives it power. It is knowing that there is a deep cultural connection between the natural world and the built world, that the pueblo was built where it was to have that relationship to the mountains.

This relationship is then strengthened by the stream that comes from the mountains, and runs through the center of the pueblo. There are obviously great practical benefits to having a stream in the middle of your village, but once again, the power derives more from the symbolic relationship than the pragmatics. The mountain – the stream – the people: the primal aspect of dwelling in a specific place on earth couldn’t be made any stronger.

As with any great work of art, analysis can’t begin to capture the multiple layers of meaning implicit in the work itself. You can dissect the pieces to try to explicitly understand what is going on, but you just experience it more directly. Taos Pueblo is simply one of the most beautiful places built by humans I’ve ever seen, and we wandered around happily for hours, soaking up every aspect and detail.

Across the steam is the southern side of the village, which is not a monolithic wall, but a more typical pueblo arrangement of low houses around small streets and plazas.

The smaller-scale elements of day-to-day life are apparent – doorsteps, ovens, raised platforms used to keep carcasses and animal hides away from vermin and dogs.

There is a church near the stream too, which seems to be more active and integrated into the life of the village than at Acoma.

However, this is a newer church, built in 1850. The first church was destroyed in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, and the remains of the second can be seen below, standing in the middle of the cemetery. Taos was the center of a revolt resisting the transfer of power of when the territory was ceded to the US in 1847. The governor was killed, and the rebels retreated to this church, which was destroyed in a bombardment, killing all those within. The ruins now stand as a simple memorial.

The kivas and traditional ceremonial spaces are located towards the edge of the village, on both the north and south sides. Taos gets a lot of visitors, and they are explicit about which areas are off limits.

I haven’t seen many places in this country where there is such a complete or beautiful expression of people inhabiting a place, with their complex culture and history being made visible, accomplished with an abstract, built formalism that clearly says that residents are claiming this place,

while also integrating so seamlessly into the natural world.

Taos was right up there with the places we most wanted to visit on this trip, but the experience of seeing it was so much better than we anticipated. And seeing several pueblos led to a much better understanding of them all – before visiting we mainly could see the similarities among them, but now it is apparent how they are all clear and vivid places, something you have to directly experience to understand.

The urbanized corner of northeastern New Mexico (the part of New Mexico that has three actual cities) affords a pretty wide range of urban experience, given how small the cities are. Earlier in our trip, we’d gotten pretty blasé about medium-sized cities American cities – they started looking more like examples of a standard type, rather than really distinct places (JB Jackson’s essay on “The Stranger’s Path” comes to mind again). The major independent variable seemed to be the ratio of pre-war size to current size, with the cities that were bigger in the past often having a historic core that gave them some character, whereas the cities dominated by post-war growth all just looked alike. The New Mexico cities have all kept their pre-war cores, and they maintain a strong identity despite the more recent sprawl. Most interestingly, they are all really different from each other. Albuquerque is the relatively big, diverse city. Santa Fe is the boutique city of government, arts and wealthy visitors. Taos is the funkier town up in the mountains, which has its overlay of tourism and artiness, but in a less rarified way than Santa Fe. It also has the outdoor-activity jumping-off place feel to it, but at a lower level than places like Moab and Jackson. And with the Taos Pueblo just north of town, the native culture is more noticeable than in the bigger cities.

Each of these cities sits right where the high desert meets a mountain range, but in Taos the contrast is stronger and the connection to the mountains feels more immediate. Taos Mountain, at the end of the Sangre de Christo Mountains, dominates the views in the area, including the downtown. After a couple of months in the dry and usually hot Southwest, Taos felt different to us – a high-elevation city in the Rockies, near the desert, rather than a desert city from which you can see the mountains. It might have been the altitude, or the fact that it was cold and snowing, in May.

The downtown architecture is similar to that in Santa Fe, with a mixture of adobe and faux-dobe. The atmosphere is probably regulated as closely as in Santa Fe, but without the overlay of serious wealth, it doesn’t feel as precious.

The historic plaza is surrounded by shops selling Indian crafts, outdoor equipment and a nice hotel. On a cold Sunday afternoon, it was deserted. We assume that in the summer, it and the surrounding shopping streets would be full of tourists.

Moving away from the commercial core into the residential areas, there are some beautiful places, with adobe houses set in a landscape with trees and grass, something we found really appealing at this point.

Once again the simple vocabulary of the Puebloan style allows for variety of expression within the few rules, the elevations respond to interior needs, and the casual arrangement of the whole is held together by the discipline of the style.

There were older houses where the plasticity of the material was exploited – I became very fond of lumpy, curvy architecture with little attached blobs. Making these forms out of adobe and stucco makes a lot more sense than going to the extreme lengths current high-style architecture does, with its torturing of steel frames and metal panels into curvilinear forms which are only obtainable through the application of advanced computer modeling technology, computer-controlled fabrication, and tons of money. Here, there was probably a rough sketch from the architect, and a couple of good masons.

From everywhere in town, there were these intermittent views out to the landscape, such as here across a pasture to the smaller mountains to the south.

And then there were the random building agglomerations which made us feel that we were back in Eugene, but with stucco.

That feeling continued into the art world. Santa Fe had lots of outdoor art, all of which tried to seem very serious, even when it was pretentious and bad. Taos had more of the funky sculptor-puts-things-in-front-yard aspect to it, and the contrast between the sublime and the ridiculous again made us feel at home.

At Rancho de Taos, just south of the city proper, we saw the mission church made famous by Georgia O’Keefe.

Even 100 years after this was discovered by O’Keefe and other modernists, and even after knowing what to expect from seeing their representations, the church is riveting in its stark, geometric forms. The simple shapes, the play of light and shadows over the surfaces – it’s obvious why it was a revelation and inspiration to them. The clarity present here, due to the demands of the material and the vision of the artisans who knew how to use that material, stands in contrast to the self-conscious striving for technical difficulty and obscure meaning in the current milieu. Our appreciation of this architecture may sometimes be overly naïve and romantic, but seeing this church in person reinforced how powerful simple and clear forms can be.

Taos is in an incredible landscape, so we spent a couple of days exploring outside the city. We took the much-recommended “high road” back south towards Santa Fe, which was a combination of broad perspectives over the high country of mountains and ranchland,

and small towns that at first glance were completely casual and untouched by the larger regional culture, but if you looked more closely you could always find a few artists’ studios mixed in.

Santuario de Chimayo is an old mission church, which is reputed to have holy soil with curative powers. We read some disclaimers from the Church on how the soil doesn’t have any power beyond its ability to focus believers’ faith in God’s power to heal, and so only indirectly leads to miraculous recoveries, etc. But everywhere we looked there was lots of evidence of a strange, fantastic mysticism,

with shrines that showed the devotions of Hispanic pilgrims,

and even those originally from Viet Nam, now living in this very different world.

Greta was nonplussed by all of this. Even I, who went to Catholic school for 12 years and was quite used to little old ladies lighting devotional candles at Our Lady of Sorrows, found this strangely alien and fetishistic, having more in common with the traditional practices we’d been coming across at the pueblos than with doctrinaire Catholicism. We’d been hearing about the syncretism in Southwestern religious beliefs, but this was the evidence we’d seen that this was a living system, not just a curious bit of history. Greta is a child of the Enlightenment and lives in the secular atmosphere of one of the most irreligious states; most of what she knows about Christianity has come from watching Monty Python’s Life of Brian, and she had no idea what this was all about. Like many teenagers these days, she reads a lot of fantasy, but coming face-to-face with actual, iconic expressions of non-rational religious faith (that weren’t in a folk art museum), was completely outside of her prior experience. But we both really liked this painting of the Mission which was in the lobby; probably we’re both more comfortable with magical realism than mystical religion.

While the high road to Taos is relentlessly beautiful mountain terrain, we found the “low road” to be equally beautiful. It goes through the more densely populated corridor along the Rio Grande, and provides access to many pueblos (and casinos). When the main highway and the river diverge, we turned off onto a dirt road along the river, the lower reaches of which were peaceful and calm, with a range of good camping opportunities.

Eventually the road climbed up the western canyon wall, and we hiked into the canyon on an escarpment, leading to this view. We then realized that this was the second time we’d hiked into a deep canyon on the Rio Grande – the first was two months earlier, in Big Bend, way downstream.

The road climbs up to the desert plain above, until it reaches this bridge which spans the Rio Grande, and we then took the highway which led back into Taos.

Taos was our gateway back into high mountain country. We hadn’t seen what we westerners would call real mountains since Big Bend a couple of months before, and we hadn’t been in the Rockies since leaving Yellowstone in September. When we left we drove north and west towards Mesa Verde, and truly appreciated the landscape of mountains, conifers and snow.

We crossed a mountain pass at 10,000 feet, and went through small towns and ranchland nestled in the foothills, an amazingly different environment from the one in which we’d spent the past few months. We would soon head back through the desert on our way west, but for a few days we were back in the more familiar and comparatively lush world of precipitation, vegetation, and snow-capped mountains.

We live in a new country, with few places where the evidence of the distant past can be seen; when there are traces, they are seldom older than a couple of hundred years. The vast majority of our surroundings are quite new, and we live modern lives within that familiar context. So when Americans travel abroad, we often aim to see older places, cities and landscapes where traces of earlier eras survive. In first world locations, such as Europe, there is the strange contrast between the remnants of older cultures and normal modern life, not that different from ours. But sometimes we can experience not just the physical remains, but ways of life that are remnants of an older culture – perhaps in the food, customs, festivals, or folkways.

If we want similar experiences in our own country, the only place to go is the desert Southwest. The ruins of the ancient civilization there are the only widespread, significant remains of a pre-modern, non-European culture we have. But these ruins have been empty for over 700 years – the original inhabitants moved on – their descendants are no longer there. If we want to see the living, cultural descendants of this civilization, we can visit the pueblos.

As we wandered around the Southwest for seven weeks, we traced the migrations of the ancient native peoples through space and time. Our path wasn’t direct – we skipped around and circled back a few times to avoid winter weather in April. But their path was not very direct either, as they moved and their habitations evolved, partly driven by changes in the climate. There were early traces of inhabitation in pit dwellings, which then coalesced in the great center at Chaco Canyon. Chaco was abandoned, and the residents shifted into cliff dwellings, scattered over a wide area, but likely centered at Mesa Verde. The cliff dwellings were slowly abandoned too, and these ancient people moved south to the 21 different Pueblos, where they remain to this day.

Twenty years ago I had visited the Hopi Pueblo and been astonished. I remember standing on the edge of the cliff on First Mesa, looking across the desert to the San Francisco Mountains in a snowstorm and thinking, am I really in the United States in the 20th century? It was the most alien place I’d ever been, one where the history, culture, environment and language had nothing to do with the ones in which I lived, and it seemed bizarre that these people and I were now part of the same country; thinking of the US as an empire rather than a nation began to make a lot more sense. One of the major goals of this trip has been introducing Greta to very different ways of life, and life in a pueblo struck me as one of the most extreme outliers we could experience.

The Hopi reservation centers on the three mesas, (more accurately well-defined escarpments from one higher table land), completely surrounded by the Navajo reservation. The original villages were built on these mesas over 700 years ago, and have evolved over time – buildings come and go, and whole villages have disappeared too. The buildings are masonry, usually made from the local stone; when you look at one of the mesas from a distance, it is often hard to see where the native stone ends and the buildings begin, as here at First Mesa,

unless you zoom in closer.

There is strong sense of the buildings being of the earth. Local stone, adobe, and trees for roof framing (which had to be transported long distances).

The Hopi have not allowed visitors to take photos in their villages since around 1907. As early visitors often came to witness ceremonies and dances, the intrusive taking of pictures disrupted the rituals, and the Hopi wisely banned them altogether. (In fact, they banned all recording – including sketching and note-taking.) While residents of all historic venues have to put up with tourists poking around, it was probably extremely annoying here, as the Hopi themselves were the subjects of the photos as well as their surroundings.   So while I was somewhat frustrated by the photography ban (couldn’t they just let serious architecture professors take photos?) I respected their decision, and was frankly amazed that they had figured this out so long ago. So all the photos I have from the Hopi reservation were taken from long distances, well outside the villages from the highways below. However, the Hopi aren’t worried about earlier documentation (you can buy books of older photographs which show the villages quite well), or rigorous contemporary research (there is a project at the University of Redlands which is building three-dimensional digital models of the villages, including historic reconstructions).

We first visited Shongopavi on Second Mesa, driving through the newer areas on the outskirts of the village and walking in to the historic center. The houses are tightly clustered, one or two stories, sharing common walls. They surround small plazas, which are the sites of dances and ceremonies. The buildings are loosely rectilinear, but there is no rigidity to their location – there may be a more or less regular street wall line, but buildings set back various amounts. There are irregular passageways and alleys, and you simply find your way through the connections.

As soon as we arrived we were checked out by a few calm reservation dogs, who lost interest and wandered off. As we walked through one plaza, a young man named Benedict left his house and welcomed us to his village, explaining a bit about their life, and how he was working with youngsters to get them farming in a traditional manner. Eventually he asked if we’d like to buy some art, showing us some beautiful colored drawings he’d done of Hopi legends and spirits (kachinas). This established the pattern we’d find at all the other villages – many of the Hopi are artists, and make a living by selling drawings, and especially kachina carvings, to the tourists who come by. Greta and I are not really souvenir collectors (except for rocks and shells), but this was different; the work was really beautiful, and it also gave us an opportunity to talk to the artists themselves, who explained the meaning of their work and the processes they used. We met Robert on the other side of the plaza, a man of about my age who was watching one of his grandchildren. We were invited into his house, then we walked over to another house where he had more carvings stored. We ended up buying a lot of art on the Hopi reservation (and the other pueblos we visited), always from the artists themselves.

Talking to Robert was also our introduction to how the Hopi seem to feel about historic preservation. His house was a one-room masonry house, probably a couple of hundred years old, but it actually belonged to his wife’s family – the Hopi are matrilineal. Robert belonged to a different clan, and had moved there from another village on Second Mesa when they married. Robert remarked that his wife, as head of the clan, thought they should have a bigger, newer house, and she hoped to tear this house down and build the new one. We noticed that some of the nearby houses were newer, and often built of concrete block. I asked him how they felt about this, and he was unconcerned – it appeared that the physical house didn’t matter that much to them, but the location on the plaza did – that had been in the clan for a long time.

We headed over to the other Second mesa villages, Sipaulovi and Mishongnovi. All of the mesa tops can now be reached by roads built in the late 20th century.

Again we wandered around quietly, trying to not intrude too much on people’s lives, although we did run into the only somewhat threatening res dog of the whole trip. As we passed a cluster of little kids, one small girl spotted the two palefaces in their big sunscreen hats, and excitedly called out, Hi cowboys! As we headed up towards the end of one small street, a woman came out of her house and told us we shouldn’t go that way, which was again something we encountered a few times. There are important ritual areas near the villages (especially some cemeteries) which should be avoided and certainly never photographed), but they don’t make a big deal out of it – no signs or barriers. They just politely but firmly say you can’t go there.

We also had a nice conversation with a high school boy who was weeding the plaza in front of his house in the photo above. He asked where we were from, and then asked what Oregon was like. I told him that we lived on top of a hill about the same height as his mesa from which we too could see mountains in the distance, but that our house was also surrounded by 100-foot-tall trees. He just stared at us in amazement. We then finished off the afternoon in a conversation with three guys who were probably high, and who had spotted us while driving by in their muscle car. They offered to show us around for $20, but I said we had already walked through the villages and were heading back to the motel. One pointed out that they could take us to forbidden places, such as the cemetery by the Corn Rock, and we could even take photos. I said we had been told that was explicitly forbidden, but he said it would be okay if we were with them. Eventually we negotiated a deal whereby they would leave us alone for $10, which seemed like a fair price for admission to their village.

The next morning we went to Old Oraibi on Third Mesa, where a much more respectable woman offered to guide us around, explaining the locations of the kivas, ovens, houses, etc. She pointed out the old mission church below the village (seen to the left in this photo) which had been burnt out in one of the not-infrequent revolts of the Puebloan people against the Spanish. Throughout the trip we became aware of the complex relationship between Puebloan people and the Catholic Church. It ran the gamut from devout Catholicism, to complete disavowal and a return to traditional practices, but many people seemed to fall somewhere in the middle, partaking in the traditional Hopi rituals while still attending the church.

In Oraibi we were also able to buy a Hopi staple, parched corn, from the aunt of our guide. Kernels are heated in a pot packed with sand, and the corn expands, but not nearly to the extent of our popcorn. It was somehow more satisfying and tastier than popcorn, and is taken along by the Hopi as a snack when they are heading out into the fields to work. When we mentioned this later on First Mesa, our guide was surprised to hear someone was selling this, and thought she might have to head over herself to track it down.

Walpi, at the end of First Mesa (about six miles from Second Mesa), is the oldest of the Hopi villages. We drove up a precipitous road to the top, then passed through the villages of Hano and Sichomovi. (Hano is inhabited by Tewa people, who have lived next to the Hopi for 600 years, but still speak their own language.) You must have a guide on First Mesa, so we met her at a small parking area before the narrow ridge into Walpi; if you pulled your truck a little too far forward you’d plunge a few hundred feet off a cliif on one side of the mesa, and if you backed up a little too far, you’d go off the cliff on the other side.

The site is extraordinary – First Mesa is like a ship in the desert, and Walpi is the bridge deck at the top.

You can see 60 miles southwest to the San Francisco Mountains, or to the buttes in the southeast where the Hopi catch eagles for their feathers.

Beyond the narrow entry ridge, Walpi itself is just two streets wide, with one main spine of buildings up the middle, and a few other houses located on the east and west edges, along with the kivas and plazas. Around a half-dozen houses share each of the plaza areas.

No one now lives in Walpi full time; when I was there twenty years ago I met an old woman who must have been one of the last residents. The different clans own the individual houses, and they congregate there for important festivals and occasions. There were two young artists we spoke to, who were using what I believe to be the Fire and Coyote clan house as their studio, to the left in the picture below. It was a narrow room, with windows looking across the plaza and desert to the east, and windows in the opposite wall looking out to the sunset in the west. It was a mixture of very old masonry and newer renovations, and they had plans on how they were going to fix it up further, some of which had to do with the pleasures of sitting outside on the west side barbecuing in the evening.

The nearby Snake clan house had been damaged by fire when a propane stove was installed incorrectly, and it was being rebuilt. I was surprised to see that a porch section, where the floor joists had probably been four-inch diameter trees was now being constructed with badly-sawn 2x6s and Simpson joist hangers. The same lack of interest in historic methods and materials we had seen in Shongopavi held true at this even older location, perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited village in the country. I couldn’t figure it out – many of the Hopi are fine artists, creating carvings, pottery, paintings and prints, but this widespread focus on artistic production didn’t extend to architecture. It may be due to poverty – selling art to tourists brings income, whereas restoring a house accurately would just cost more money. At Ebey’s Landing on Whidbey Island, many of the historic buildings are on active farms, where the owners can’t afford to restore or even maintain them in an appropriate way, so a fund has been established to provide grants for preservation work. Perhaps an arrangement like that could work here – gifts and ticket sales to tourists might generate enough capital.

This contrast between the incredible physical location, and the lack of economic opportunity in that remote location was evident throughout the reservation. Many buildings were in an extreme state of disrepair, and selling artwork and handcrafts was clearly a major source of income for many residents. Many of the younger Hopi we spoke to had spent years off the reservation – working jobs in Phoenix or Albuquerque, or in the military. The problems of rural areas in America are magnified here – by a more severe climate, extreme isolation, and limited employment opportunities.

There are signs of growth and development – a new school, a medical complex, plans for a new commercial center down the road from First Mesa. But all of this redevelopment is down below the mesas – the population in the traditional villages continues to decline. There are real disadvantages to living on top of a mesa – lack of running water and other creature comforts, lack of privacy, small cold houses. The newer housing down below is fairly standard for detached American houses, although somewhat inflected towards a more traditional Hopi style. The development pattern is typically western American too – large lots with small houses surrounded by many vehicles. The traditional day-to-day life in a small village has mostly disappeared, revived only for festivals and special occasions. But even if they are living in new buildings below, the Hopi are maintaining their traditional life in many ways, in the landscape where they’ve lived for 700 years. Just staying on the reservation is in itself a huge commitment, not succumbing to the attractions of modern life in a big city. Perhaps this move down from the mesas is just the latest stage of the Puebloan people responding to changes in the environment – from Chaco to cliff dwellings to the mesas, and now into suburbia.

We stayed in the motel at the Hopi Cultural Center for three nights – there’s no camping on the reservation, and the nearest spot off the res was 70 miles away. It was another opportunity to talk to the Hopi, as the place wasn’t just full of tourists, and conversations with local residents in the lobby late at night (where the wifi was strong) were really informative. The Hopi have a devotion to their separate culture, which gets defined in many ways, large and even small: Arizona doesn’t observe daylight savings time, while the Navajo do, but the Hopi, wholly contained within the Navajo reservation, don’t. We started to pick up on the cultural distinctions which we outsiders don’t often hear about. They live between two very different worlds, and while maintaining their own society, still seem very open to the outside world.

The Hopi we met were all remarkably friendly and welcoming, willing to explain aspects of their culture to us, maybe because it was April and they hadn’t gotten tired of tourists yet. But the more we learned of the culture, the more clear it became that we would never really be able to understand anything about it in a deep way. I’ve been rereading Reyner Banham’s America Deserta recently, and at one point he observes that native culture is essentially foreign and completely incomprehensible to him – there is no way he could ever comprehend what is going on. I think this is true – the natives have to understand enough about the American mass culture to survive within it, but I can’t imagine being able to understand this culture without being part of it. The paradox is that this is the one place in the US where we can go to see a non-European physical environment, inhabited by the current members of that culture, but there is still no way that we can truly experience it except as foreign tourists. But even being able to witness it from the outside was very satisfying.

There was one cultural event which we only learned about at the last minute, and unfortunately had to miss. Sitting in the lobby before we left I spoke with one of several young Jamaican guys I’d seen around the night before. He turned out to be a member of a reggae band that was going to perform the next night at the events center on the reservation. I later spoke to the young woman at the front desk about this, and she said, yeah, the Hopi really like reggae. There would be two bands at this concert, and there would be a traditional Hopi dance in the intermission in between. I mentioned how I’d seen these guys the night before and how I could tell they were from somewhere else. She looked at me quizzically, and I said, I thought that maybe they were Navajo. She cracked up and said, no, couldn’t be, the Navajo just like heavy metal.