Future-proofing: How Arizona’s Hopi Arts Trail is preserving Indigenous heritage for the next generation

The highway roams the unforgiving landscape like an undulating snake. Giant boulders the size of houses and extraordinarily vast canyons appear on every hill brow and around every rattling bend. I squint through the blistering midday sun, searching for the blink-and-you-miss-it Iskasokpu Gallery from behind the wheel.

I arrive slightly late; I must have blinked. No phone signal makes Google Maps redundant on the arid Second Mesa plateau where Iva Honyestewa’s modest roadside gallery is located—hence my blissful unawareness. “Warm, isn’t it?” she says with a wry grin, when I do eventually find her. If an Arizonan is telling you it’s warm, then it definitely is.

I’ve come to meet Iva Honyestewa—Hopi name Iva Casuse Honwynum, meaning ‘Female Bear Walking’ in English—a prominent Second Mesa Hopi basket weaver and jeweler whose much heralded, award-winning work transcends this modest workshop which has spawned thousands of pieces over the last 30 years.

Hopi people date back thousands of years, making them one of the oldest living cultures in documented history. For some 2,000-plus years, the Hopis have lived as caretakers of the earth in the northeastern Arizona Hopi Reservation area, where the Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico borders meet. Most Hopi people today live across the 12 villages of the reservation’s three mesas (hills), with each mesa famous for its own crafts: First Mesa for pottery, Second Mesa for coiled basket weaving, and Third Mesa for wicker basket weaving, silversmithing and kachina doll carving.

I arrive at Iskasokpu mid-weave. Iva’s set-up is simple: She sits at a large, white, rectangular plastic desk with fold-out legs, like the ones from art class, with countless storage containers and drawers for crafting trinkets within easy reach and a couple of dozen metal and willow basket-shaping rings on coat hooks. A maroon blackout drape blocks the worst of the circa 90°F heat surging in from the window behind, save for the bunches of yucca leaves positioned in a slither of direct sunlight. They are being naturally bleached from yellow to white, I’m told, as they become easier to dye.

I’m here to learn about Iva’s latest creation, the pootsaya—a modern basket made from native yucca leaves that merges the traditional Hopi poota (coil) and tutsaya (sifter) baskets together as a physical reminder that everything is connected. “The central coil section is woven tight to reflect our tight-knit community,” she says. “The outer strands are then tied to the coil to represent bringing people back together.” Just two people in the entire Hopi reservation can weave the pootsaya; the other is her niece, Reba Ann Lonyestewa.

“These houses ahead have no electricity. The government has tried to set up facilities here, but local people resist. Some Hopis just prefer the traditional life.”

- Adam Suetokpa, Hopi guide

It soon becomes clear that everything Iva creates stems from a sense of connection. “You know that a few people objected to it?” she quips rhetorically. They claimed it wasn’t in keeping with Hopi traditions. “Older Hopi people like to push back on new ideas, but things change naturally in all walks of life.”

“For everything new, you must have a purpose, and our purpose is to keep our traditions alive,” she tells me. “We need to reach young people first and foremost, because if they don’t understand us, then the Hopi culture will be lost forever.”

Iskasokpu Gallery is on the Hopi Arts Trail, a route set up in recent years to connect visitors with artists and galleries in a respectful manner. It’s free of the usual gimmicks, actors and attractions you might expect and is a natural add-on to a trip to the Grand Canyon Village on the South Rim, around 130 miles east of the Hopi Reservation. Here, Mary Colter’s Hopi House—a pueblo-style stone building dating back to 1905—doubles up as both an introduction to the tribe, and as a Hopi crafts store.

Rather than being a literal trail to follow around, the Hopi Arts Trail acts as a unique invitation to connect with Hopi artists in their workshops, which are often their homes. It raises its funding through various arts projects and is carefully promoted by local tourist boards, as to not encourage overtourism.

And unlike visiting many other Indigenous communities, visiting the sacred Hopi reservation and meeting its people is only possible by guided tour. My guide Adam Suetokpa, from Experience Hopi Tours, is a Hopi and wood carver originally from the village of Hotevilla in Third Mesa. He meets me the next morning in the lobby of Moenkopi Legacy Inn & Suites.

“This is the first hotel built on Hopi tribal land for 50 years,” he says as we hop in his SUV. Alongside his tours, Adam also does odd jobs around the hotel like replenishing breakfast and setting up conference rooms. “Hopi tours are seen as more responsible than other tribal tours as only Hopi people can be approved as guides,” he says. We’ve barely left the hotel parking lot and this tour feels different.

To our first port of call, it’s an easy 45-minute drive along sun-scorched plains with the silhouetted San Francisco Peaks always on the horizon. Dust swirls across the windshield as we approach the cliff-edge perched Third Mesa pueblo (village) of Hotevilla, where Adam’s childhood home is still occupied by some of his family. We slow down beside it as he, unusually, points at the spindly electricity pylon ahead.

“This is where the power ends,” he says, adding that his childhood home is on the inner boundary of Hotevilla’s power. “These houses ahead have no electricity. The government has tried to set up facilities here, but local people resist. Some Hopis just prefer the traditional life.”

We drive on towards the far western edge of the village, where earthy orange adobe houses blend seamlessly with the distant valley and its deserted sand tracks zig-zag like a Moroccan souk. It would be easy to get lost here.

In Hotevilla, everyone is self-sufficient, and everything is constructed by local hands—boundary walls; housing, even a deep natural water spring. Just off its main village square, I spot a small brick building with a thick wooden ladder leading underground. “That’s our kiva,” Adam says. A kiva is a private underground space where Hopis conduct spiritual ceremonies, before spilling out into the public square above.

Hotevilla wasn’t on the original itinerary, so we remain in the car. I refrain from taking photographs. Adam tells me that Walpi, in First Mesa, remains the only Hopi village certified to allow guided tours on foot by an approved guide. This prevents overtourism across its delicate pueblos. “You might get questioned if you drove around Hotevilla on your own,” he says, stressing both his social responsibility and Hopi privacy. Tours often differ depending on where the guide grew up, so I feel privileged to be on Adam’s.

Native American arts are typically passed down from parent to child, but Hopi silversmith Duane Tawahongva taught himself by watching his brothers, who are also silversmiths: “Young people don’t have the patience,” he says, when I ask whether it’s something he could ever envisage passing down to his children. “I’d like to teach them, but they’re not interested.”

Touring the Hopi reservation is deemed one of the few authentic US tribal experiences left, but as Hopis are naturally private people, some remain ambivalent about tourists. To protect authenticity, futureproof the land, and further ensure its sacred sites are visited only by responsible travelers, visitors must book tours of the reservation with approved local Hopi guides. Driving off the main roads alone, taking photos unaccompanied by an official guide, and bringing alcohol onto the reservation all remain strictly prohibited.

Visitors at certain times of year may even be lucky enough to watch a religious Hopi dance ceremony, considered to be the most complex dance of all the southwestern tribes. Most are held behind closed doors, though some social dances are open to the public and usually held from August through February.

As part of the trail Hopi craftspeople welcome guests into their private workspaces and homes, further elevating what is an authentic—and wholly responsible—experience. In Mishongnovi Village, a five-minute drive along the twisty rock-edge road behind Iskasokpu Gallery is Duane Tawahongva’s home and silversmith studio. He probably has the best view in all of Second Mesa.

“I bet you never get bored of that view,” I say.

“I don’t.” If I didn’t know better, I could be on Mars. Duane’s home workshop peers over miles and miles of vivid tan-colored, rocky lower valley grassland peppered with hardy creosote bushes and soon-to-be tumbleweed. Inside, locally made kachina dolls, pottery and jewelry are on display beside Duane’s workbench, where he often demonstrates his silversmithing skills.

“My designs are typically Hopi symbols. Everything you see is cut by hand, even the smallest pieces of jewelry,” he says, as he pulls out a tiny metal stencil around the size of my little fingernail. Duane is carefully crafting another pendant, initially made by stenciling a design onto a piece of silver and soldering it to another backing piece.

He then cuts the design out with a miniature metal saw and rounds off the edges, before bonding it all together using flux and a blowtorch. Several finishing touches with oxidizing sulfur and boric acid bring the sheen out in the jewelry, but Duane’s trusty final shining sidekick is an unexpected spray of Windex.

Native American arts are typically passed down from parent to child, but Duane taught himself by watching his brothers, who are also silversmiths. He now makes up to 100 pieces a week but admits it’s an arduous process, as even the smallest of pendants take three hours or more.

“Young people don’t have the patience,” he says, when I ask whether it’s something he could ever envisage passing down to his children. “I’d like to teach them, but they’re not interested at the moment.”

Duane has found a way to keep connected with younger people though. “A few years ago, I started receiving requests from grandmothers for themed popular culture jewelry,” he says. “I now make jewelry featuring animated characters like Minions on request, but some film-themed requests, like The Hunger Games, became so popular that I make them anyway.”

But the most unexpected discovery of the tour would follow after, as Adam drives us down an unmarked dust track towards the dead end of a grass meadow. The horseshoe-bend cliff of Dawa Park opens up in front of us. Here, the Hisaatsinom—or ancient people—inscribed thousands of petroglyphs depicting stories of its people and animals, with many dating back as far as 900 AD. Some may be even earlier.

“The high cliff and its natural U-bend shape made this site ideal to herd animals in for rituals as they couldn’t escape,” he says, pointing at a sheep symbol. “The bighorn sheep is connected by a line to a chief, who would lead the ritual, and the chief is then connected to his clan symbol, which connects back to the villagers.”

With Adam’s tour nearing its end, he spots something in the corner of his eye.

“I don’t think I’ve seen this one before,” he says with a lit-up face. We hop over the bone-dry brook and face the 200-foot cliff summit. It’s a faded petroglyph. He gets his phone out to take photos of this rock art that he believes could date even earlier than the rest. It seems there’s wonder here for all of us.

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The writer was a guest of Visit Arizona and Experience Hopi. Full-day tours are guided and include lunch at the Hopi Cultural Center. 

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