An occasionally repetitive but fully illuminating account for any who relish the rich history and traditions of the Hopi.
Rather than a tale of bloody carnage, Brooks (History and Anthropology/Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, 2002) delivers a sharp scholarly account of the Hopi and their history, myths, and traditions.
The story of the Awat’ovi massacre on Antelope Mesa in 1700 stands out as perhaps the most traumatic event in Hopi history, shaping the history of the “Peaceful People.” However, apparently they were not all that peaceful; the massacre occurred because of a fissure between those who converted to Catholicism at the hands of the Franciscans' coercion and studied violence and those who clung to the old ways. While the author states that the event is well-remembered, it is also one the Hopi would rather forget. It is the embodiment of the Pahanna prophecy, a dialectic of destruction and resurrection. The leader of the Awat’ovi, Ta’polo, despaired for those who were rejecting the traditional rites, quarreling, robbing their neighbors, raping, and stealing. Ta’polo convinced the neighboring Walpi and Oraibi to attack and destroy the pueblo, opening the gate and allowing them in. The massacre, however, was not the first self-inflicted in the Hopi nation. The Hopi did not consider themselves as belonging to the same tribe; their village was their nationality—e.g., they were Walpi before Hopi. The long history of the Hopi includes other instances of this purification through obliteration. The purpose was to wash away corruption, bring renewal, and restore balance. In the event of obliteration, there was no looting; in fact, after the massacre, no Hopi would claim the land since it was an evil place. The narratives the author provides about the Hopi, some of which may be more about a time than a place, reveal the fascinating complexity of this early civilization.
An occasionally repetitive but fully illuminating account for any who relish the rich history and traditions of the Hopi.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-06125-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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