Síitálpuva, " Through the Land Brightened with Flowers " : Ecology and Cosmology in Mural and Pottery Painting, Hopi and Beyond (original) (raw)

When dark clouds drift eastward from the San Francisco Peaks to the high desert and raindrops spatter the dry sand, Hopi people know the land will soon bring forth flowers, birds, butterflies, and sustenance for human beings. Over four hundred years ago, deep inside subterranean rooms at the villages of Awat'ovi and Kawàyka'a on Antelope Mesa, someone painted on the walls images of the land in bloom and of those who sang and prayed, calling the clouds for life-giving rain (Figure 7.26). In the Antelope Mesa murals, flowers, birds, butterflies, and other features of the natural landscape are not central images, but seemingly peripheral details. Nonetheless, they provide keys to understanding the paintings. Even small details of imagery, shape, color, choice of raw materials, and gestures performed in Hopi art and technology had important meaning to those who made them and to those who experience them in their cultural context today. Of course the Hopi people today are not the same as their ancestors who painted the murals, but carefully using contemporary information about Hopi language and culture sheds more light on the kiva murals and related pottery painting than any other source of information or analogy. 1 Information obtained from historic and contemporary Hopi sources can be augmented and to some extent corroborated by comparing Hopi imagery and contexts with those of other Puebloan cultures, and with ancient Mesoamerican art and texts, as other chapters in this volume also demonstrate. This chapter explores relationships among landscapes, lifeways, language, and the many meanings of mural and pottery painting. We begin with an ancient and widespread complex of verbal imagery describing a flowery spiritual world and this world made flowery through songs, ast revised 15 Aug khg