The Hopi, Sky Village on the Mesas

Roughly a thousand years ago, people were building villages on top of three rocky mesas that rise from the Colorado Plateau in northeastern Arizona. They built them there, high, windswept, nearly waterless, because the mesas were defensible. Because the views let you see enemies coming for miles. Because the land below, though harsh, held enough moisture for dry-farming corn if you knew exactly where to plant.

The Hopi have been there ever since.

Oraibi, on Third Mesa, may be the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in North America. Scholars date continuous habitation to at least eleven fifty CE, possibly earlier. It is not a ruin. People live there today.

The Hopi are a Pueblo people who speak a Uto-Aztecan language. Their reservation sits entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation, an anomaly of treaty history that has produced land-use disputes lasting into the twenty-first century. Hopi land amounts to about one and a half million acres; Navajo land wraps around it on all sides.

What sets the Hopi apart in the popular imagination is ceremony, specifically the kachina tradition, in which spiritual beings called katsinas are embodied by masked dancers at festivals held through the year. These ceremonies are not performances for visitors. They are religious obligations, timed to the agricultural calendar, conducted on the plazas of villages that predate the Mayflower by four hundred years.

The Hopi have survived drought cycles that collapsed other cultures, Spanish colonization, an attempted conquest, American settlement, and the Long Walk that took their Navajo neighbors away. They planted corn in sand, prayed for rain, and stayed on the mesas.