Hopi Mesas: The Villages That Were Never Conquered
Arizona
North of the Route Sixty-Six corridor, visible in the distance on clear days as low dark shapes rising from the desert floor, the Hopi mesas have been inhabited continuously for more than a thousand years. The village of Oraibi on Third Mesa has been occupied since at least eleven hundred CE. It may be the oldest continuously inhabited community in North America, a distinction it shares with Acoma Pueblo to the east.
The Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty was the most successful Indigenous uprising against European colonization in North American history. Pueblo nations across New Mexico rose simultaneously, killing Spanish missionaries and colonial administrators and driving the survivors south to El Paso del Norte. The Spanish did not return for twelve years. When they came back in sixteen ninety-two, they found Pueblo communities that had reconstituted their ceremonial life and had no intention of resuming colonial subjugation. Hopi warriors killed the Franciscan missionaries who had built churches on the mesas in sixteen eighty. When the Spanish returned in seventeen hundred and demanded submission, Hopi said no.
The federal government's boarding school campaign reached the Hopi mesas in the eighteen eighties. Children were to be removed from their families and sent to institutions where Hopi language, ceremony, and dress were forbidden. In eighteen ninety-four, when traditionalist leaders at Oraibi refused to surrender their children, federal troops arrested nineteen of the men and transported them to Alcatraz Island in California, where they were imprisoned for several months. The Hopi-Navajo land dispute of the twentieth century, litigated through the nineteen seventies and eighties, resulted in the forced relocation of thousands of Diné families from land both nations claimed, a displacement that is among the largest forced relocations of Indigenous people in twentieth-century American history.
The mesas are still inhabited. The ceremonies continue. The villages that the Spanish could not conquer, and that the federal government could not dissolve, are still there.
