{"it":{"id":"TX031","kind":"text","sub":"Hopi","name":"Hopi emergence & 'Ant People'/Kachina traditions","place":"Held in several collections","date":"oral; recorded 19th-20th c.","oldest":"Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi 1963","inst":"n/a","lang":"Hopi","src":[229],"tags":["North America"],"sum":"In a Hopi story, the faithful survived a world's destruction underground, sheltered by the Ant People.","why":"Hopi tellers in 1905 explained the ants' thin waists with a Katcina flogging. The saving Ant People come from Waters's Book of the Hopi and later ancient-astronaut writing.","nfacts":0,"nsrc":2,"yt":"Compare Hopi-authored accounts.","rel":["W16T06"],"hook":"In 1905 Hopi tellers said ants are thin from a ritual flogging. The saviour Ant People came later."},"S":{"229":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Hopi"]},"rec":{"id":"TX031","alias":["W15T14"],"ms":[],"lab":[],"eng":[],"ori":[],"gaps":[],"dat":[],"aa":[{"id":"AA132","a":"Ant People = ETs who sheltered Hopi; kachinas = visitors.","who":"Gary David; AA TV","main":"Oral tradition; Waters' book contested by Hopi and anthropologists (Geertz 1983).","ms":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Hopi","st":"unresolved","n":"interpretive claim; no measurable data","nl":1},{"id":"AA229","a":"Records contact with non-human/advanced beings or craft","who":"AA literature (see claimant_index)","main":"none","ms":"W15S17","st":"no data","n":"Opened Hopi pages contain no \"ant people\" passage; primary ethnographic source not reached (gap W15G04).","nl":"1"}],"ac":[],"me":[],"ci":[],"cq":[],"sd":[],"pas":[],"tr":[],"mo":[],"tl":[],"wit":[{"id":"W15T14","mw":"Hopi mythology varies by mesa/village; creator Tawa/Taiowa, Sotuknang, Spider Woman","kn":"none","pf":"oral tradition","st":"no data","sn":"Opened Hopi pages contain no \"ant people\" passage; primary ethnographic source not reached (gap W15G04).","b":"S","s":["W15S17"]}],"tx":{"mainstream_reading":"Oral tradition; Waters' book contested by Hopi and anthropologists (Geertz 1983).","alternative_reading":"Ant People = ETs who sheltered Hopi; kachinas = visitors.","alt_proponent":"Gary David; AA TV","mistranslation_or_dispute":"Waters' informant Oswald White Bear Fredericks; reliability disputed.","key_theme":"emergence through successive worlds; kachinas as spirit beings","language":"Hopi","physical_object_institution":"n/a","composition_date":"oral; recorded 19th-20th c.","oldest_ms_date":"Frank Waters, Book of the Hopi 1963","b":"S"},"sub":[],"src":[{"id":"W15S17","t":"Wikipedia Hopi mythology","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hopi_mythology&oldid=1378381735"},{"id":"S0444","t":"en.wikipedia.org","u":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Hopi"},{"id":"VTX031-3","t":"H. R. Voth, The Traditions of the Hopi (1905), sacred-texts: later chapter","u":"https://archive.sacred-texts.com/nam/hopi/toth/toth102.htm"},{"id":"VTX031-4","t":"H. R. Voth, The Traditions of the Hopi (1905), sacred-texts","u":"https://archive.sacred-texts.com/nam/hopi/toth/toth004.htm"},{"id":"VTX031-5","t":"KJZZ (2024): Fake Natives and a radio show spread misconceptions about Hopi spirituality for decades","u":"https://www.kjzz.org/the-show/2024-10-03/fake-natives-and-a-radio-show-spread-misconceptions-about-hopi-spirituality-for-decades"},{"id":"VTX031-6","t":"Aarhus University research portal: Book of the Hopi, the Hopis' book?","u":"https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/publications/book-of-the-hopi-the-hopis-book"},{"id":"VTX031-7","t":"Ancient Origins (guest opinion): the Ant People of the Hopi","u":"https://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends-americas-opinion-guest-authors/ant-people-hopi-00927"}],"sum":"# The Hopi Ant People: How a Story Changes as It Travels\n\nOne Ant sits on a rock outside the kiva, waiting. Inside, in the underground ceremonial chamber, the little Ant children have been brought in for their initiation. A sand picture has been laid on the floor, and the Ant priest has told them the sacred story in the same words a Hopi priest uses today. When it is done, the Ant on the rock swings one fore-foot hard as a signal. The masked Katcinas come running, circle the kiva several times, enter, and take their places opposite the sand picture. Then they flog the children. They flog them so hard \"that they almost cut them through in the middle of their body.\" And that, the story ends, \"is the reason why the ants are now so thin in the middle of their bodies.\"\n\nThe tale was recorded more than a century ago, in The Traditions of the Hopi, published in 1905 by the ethnographer H. R. Voth from stories told to him in the Hopi villages of northern Arizona. It is a small, funny, precise story, the kind that explains a feature of the world by tying it to a ceremony every Hopi child would know. It is also, now, the least famous version of the Ant People. The famous one says the ants saved humanity.\n\n## The Hopi and their emergence\n\nThe Hopi are a Pueblo people living on and around three mesas in northeastern Arizona, in villages among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America; Oraibi is the oldest of them. Their religious life is rich and private. Each mesa, sometimes each village, may tell a story its own way, and as the folklorist Harold Courlander put it, \"there is a Hopi reticence about discussing matters that could be considered ritual secrets or religion-oriented traditions.\" It has never been clear how much of what was told to outsiders was the real teaching and how much a story offered to the curious.\n\nAt the centre of Hopi tradition is the emergence. In most tellings, people lived first in lower worlds and climbed up into this one, the Fourth World, through an opening called the sipapu. In Voth's 1905 version the people below were quarrelling, and some were very much depraved. The chiefs sent a bird to find a way out, and when the Mocking-bird found the opening they planted a pine, another pine, a reed and a sunflower, and sang them up toward the sky. Spider Woman and the twin war gods climbed first and held the stalks steady while the people climbed and the Mocking-bird sang the songs still chanted at the Wuwuchim ceremony. As each person emerged, the bird gave them a language and a people: Hopi, Navaho, Apache, Mohave, Mexican, and the White Man. When the songs ran out, those still on the ladders went back down.\n\nAt the top it was dark and cold, and there was no sun. Then the people saw a light in the distance and found a field of corn, beans and watermelons kept warm by a ring of fire, tended by a handsome man with four strands of turquoise round his neck. It was Masauwu, Skeleton, whose footsteps they had heard above them in the world below. In Voth's emergence story, no Ant People rescue anyone.\n\n## Book of the Hopi\n\nThe story most of the world knows comes from a different book. In the early 1960s the Southwest writer Frank Waters published Book of the Hopi, written with Oswald White Bear Fredericks on the Hopi reservation. In the tradition popularised in and after it, the earlier worlds were destroyed in turn, and during those catastrophes the virtuous were led to the Ant People, who took them into caves underground and fed them.\n\nHere the story turns on who was speaking for whom. The anthropologist Brian Haley, in his 2024 book Hopis and the Counterculture, explains that the book carried one faction's version of Hopi tradition. A group of so-called \"traditionalists\" had split from the rest of the community and declared themselves the keepers of the true tradition, and outsiders searching for meaning gathered around them. Waters, Haley says, \"had also reinvented himself as an Indian to give his work greater authority,\" and \"didn't understand the politics there at all.\"\n\nThe book spread through the 1960s counterculture, helped along by a late-night Los Angeles radio show. It is now available in about seven languages. It sold so widely, Haley says, that the bookstore at the Hopi Cultural Center \"had to stock it, because so many people asked for it all the time. They needed the money.\" A generation of Hopi young people grew up thinking it was accurate. Armin Geertz, a scholar of religion at Aarhus University in Denmark, had already questioned it in a 1983 paper whose title asked the question plainly: \"Book of the Hopi: the Hopi's Book?\"\n\n## The mainstream reading\n\nFor scholars the Hopi emergence is sacred oral tradition, varied from mesa to mesa, recorded imperfectly by outsiders, and shaped by the moments in which it was recorded. The Katcinas, or katsinam, are understood by the Hopi as spirits of all things, of rocks, stars, animals, plants and good ancestors, who live in the San Francisco Peaks and come to the villages for half of each year; Katcina masks and dancers appear in rock art from around 1325 CE. The record marks the modern claim, that the Ant People and the Katcinas were visitors from elsewhere, as unresolved interpretation with no measurable data, and notes that the primary ethnographic pages opened for it contain no Ant People passage at all.\n\n## The newest layer\n\nThe ancient-astronaut reading is newer still. In a 2013 essay the writer Gary A. David described the Ant People, in Hopi Anu Sinom, sheltering the virtuous underground after worlds were destroyed by fire and ice. He offered another reason for the ants' thin waists: they had starved themselves to feed the Hopi. He noted that the constellation Orion also has a thin waist, and linked the Hopi word anu to the Anunnaki of ancient Sumer.\n\nSet the versions side by side and a pattern appears. In 1905 the thin waist comes from a whipping at a children's initiation. In the 1960s the ants become saviours. By the 2010s they are tied to the stars and to Mesopotamian gods. Each step carries the story further from the people who first told it, and each step is taken by an outsider.\n\nThat does not make the deeper Hopi themes any less remarkable: worlds destroyed and remade, people sheltered underground, spirits that come down from the mountains to teach farming and bring rain. Those are old, and they are Hopi.\n\nWhen a people's story has been retold by outsiders for a hundred years, how do you find the version they tell themselves?","qs":["In 1905 the ants' thin waists came from a ritual whipping. Later writers linked them to Orion. How does a story change as it moves away from its tellers?","Book of the Hopi was sold at the Hopi Cultural Center because visitors asked for it. What happens when outsiders' versions start shaping what a community hears about itself?","Voth, Waters and Geertz were all outsiders. Whose account of Hopi tradition should carry the most weight?"]},"img":null,"md":{"h":"img/m/TX031-16x9.webp","w":1600,"hh":900,"alt":"Hopi emergence & 'Ant People'/Kachina traditions, Held in several collections — A twentieth-century Hopi kachina doll on display in the Horniman Museum. Object number 1437.","by":"Ethan Doyle White","lic":"CC BY-SA 4.0","lu":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0","p":"https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hopi_Kachina_in_the_Horniman_Museum.jpg","g":false,"ct":true,"cap":"","sec":[]},"hh":[{"v":"Hopi","h":"Language","s":[306]}],"hs":{"306":["en.wikipedia.org","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Hopi"]}}