Yampah Mountain High School Portfolio...

Put Yourself Out There




The Hopi Trip to Kykotsmovi Village.

Picture
          This year with my senior class we took our senior trip to Arizona to the Hopi reservation in Kykotsmovi Village. We spent a week learning about the culture of the Hopi people. It was an amazing experience to go an live like the Hopi live to this day,i learned that they still live the way they did 100's of years ago. But its not all completely the same. They try an keep tradition but the younger generations are dying off  in tradition. learning about Hopi culture was interesting I have never heard of anything like it before i mean of coarse its similar to other cultures but not quite. 
The Hopi are made up of clans there are various clans like the bear clan and the Eagle which our home stay parents were apart of Diana being from the Eagle clan and Lee being from the Bear clan, which there only two clans out of many. They believe that everyone in the Hopi tribe is related in one way or another they don't let anyone be alone. Diana and Lee had a joke about that since in there culture everyone is related so when there is a new boyfriend or girlfriend coming into the family they joke around and say "What is your Clan?" There Culture is very interesting i mean they think of it just as us Americans think of ours but when you see a different culture like the Hopi it becomes or seems to me very complicated. Us as Americans  its usually a tradition to take the last name of our Father. In there culture its tradition to take after the mother but they don't just take the last name of there mother they take the clan. Diana is from the Eagle clan which all her children are all boys and one girl and that  isn't so good since the Women take the clan. So the only hope for her clan to keep going is if her daughter has girls but if not then the Eagle clan will die off.

          We also learned about how there families work in there culture there are no such thing as cousins. What? Yes, no cousins its really hard to explain there beliefs on how there family chain goes. Okay so Since in there culture there is no such thing as cousins. Lets say your sibling has children and you have children they would be cousins in American society but the Hopi don't work that way. in Hopi tradition your children and your siblings children will now become brothers and sisters. You would now take the responsibility of not only your children but your siblings children too. Its a really confusing system we will probably never actually know how the Hopi truly live there lives. 

          They also have medicine men and women that they believe are i guess you can say Holy people in a way. One of the students asked if they frowned apon homosexuality and if they except it or not. the answer we got was No, they except it and they believe every ones here for a reason and homosexuality is looked at as a blessing and they are usually medicine people.

          In there families they believe that the husband and wife cant do things without each other no matter what the circumstance maybe there are certain things that the women don't know about what the males do so its pretty impossible to live without one another. the women do all of the cooking and cleaning and craft making. the males do all the farming an manly labor. when we were visiting we made baskets from a yucca plant. We went out to the desert where there farm is and dug out the plants the next day we cleaned the plant and went through a process of dying the plant. this is one of the things that the males can not be around for because there belief is that when there around it messes up the dying process and the color wont hold on the yucca, while we were dying the guys were making the rings that are a big part of the basket the rings were made out of a tree branch. After we dyed the yucca the next day we began to weave the baskets. It took us two in a half days to complete this process. In there tradition they don't believe anything should be wasted the root of the yucca plant is used as a shampoo.We learned many different things that they do in tradition that work with things they get from mother earth that we
Americans spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on medication and other day to day necessities.