Hopi Quotes

“Don't be afraid to cry. It will free your mind of sorrowful thoughts.”
― Hopi Proverb

“James hoped the newsletter would garner support from Bahana, or white people, to stop a town well that the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted to dig and a tower it wanted to erect to store the water. The Hotevilla elders were willing to lay down their lives in this battle. They’d done it before, preventing the BIA from bringing electricity to the village by lying down in front of bulldozers. If that well went in, James explained, people would waste water. Their spring would dry out- an unthinkable tragedy, as it would make it impossible for them to live there any longer. Could two cultures be any different? I now wondered. We were taking federal money to mine water and would do so until the unlikely day that same government made us stop. The Hopi had been trying to prevent the government from giving them a well in the first place.”
― Julene Bair, The Ogallala Road: A Memoir of Love and Reckoning

“Human beings should protect all children. But among the ancient Hopis a "human being" was one who spoke and lived by truth while those who did not; were not..”
― Leland Lewis, Random Molecular Mirroring

“We write about what we know, what we love, and we then build a dream scenario about those facts. When I lived in northern Arizona I was living a dream existence, except it wasn't perfect. So I retold the story, but made it more exciting, and much closer to perfect.”
― D.L. Blanchard, Blue Moon Bench

“Some of the Big Mountain area lies in Navajo land and another part is within the Hopi reservation. The boundaries were not made by either the Hopis or the Navajos, but, in 1891, by some white government types who, as they always do, took a map of Arizona, drew a big square on it with the ruler, and said: “Okay, what’s inside the square is Hopi, and what’s outside is Navajo.” Then they probably slapped each other on the back and went to the nearest bar to have a drink. As long as no white rancher or farmer had any use for country that was looked upon as a wasteland, this “boundary” stuff didn’t matter.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“Things changed when certain outfits, like the Peabody Coal Company, became aware of all the coal and uranium buried in the land and decided to reap the profits from it. That started the so-called “Navajo-Hopi land conflict,” which really never existed as far as the traditional people were concerned.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“The elders talked about how there was no dispute between the Hopis and the Navajos over the land because of the many intermarriages that had happened. A lot of the traditional people had relatives among the Hopis. During all these generations they had always shared, and the elders said that they had given the Hopis the land where they were now meeting. Some of the elderly Navajo women would talk, and they’d start out by saying things like: “Hello, my grandchildren.” And then they’d talk about the land, and the generations, about the centuries they have lived up there and raised their sheep.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman