- Marie Laure
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- Jan 2, 2024
- 3 min read
Years ago, fourteen to be exact, I was in the midst of writing a graduate thesis on pilgrimage. I undertook some solo pilgrimages to corroborate my own writing which would have otherwise qualified as research trips, if it had been that cut and dried. Pilgrimage is anything but, and opens up worlds beyond one’s limited imagination. But, academia being what it is, I had to qualify whatever I put on the page. As preparation for a pilgrimage to the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, I contacted my daughter’s fifth grade American History teacher to ask for books he might share about Native Americans. “We do not teach about Native Americans in American History,” he said, unapologetically. An explanation did not follow. Clearly, this too is part of the dreadful apocalyptic story of Indigenous peoples in the U.S. and elsewhere. I then asked the College President and Dean, Steven Charleston, a native Choctaw, how to approach the Hopi, “people of peace.” He offered the following: “The Hopi are the most secluded of all Indigenous people. In order to preserve their rituals and culture, the Hopi have retreated from the world.” I would not be allowed to photograph or to participate in any rituals of the clan, if I was lucky enough to catch one of their impromptu ceremonies. A few days at the Hopi/CulturalCenter/Museum/Restaurant/Inn offered a glimpse of a way of life that both seemed different and the same in some ways to my own small community on the tip of Cape Cod. Encounters were brief. I spent more time driving alone in a car without cell phone service or radio for long distances between mesas stirring up a sense of endlessness. "Take only what you carry in your heart," say the Hopi. What I took home from the pilgrimage, was an enormous sense of an endless world of time and space. The Hopi have been living on "Turtle Island," aka North America, for longer than any other native peoples and "longer than anyone can count," says Charleston in his new book in which he dedicates a full chapter to the Hopi. He does not reveal sacred rituals to the reader but instead points to an enlightened way of approaching a world and culture destined for apocalypse, as all native peoples have endured and survived. Hence the title: We Survived the End of the World.
Many people today are anticipating an apocalyptic 2024 given global crises manifesting everywhere at once. Rather than spelling these out, I will say they are all of a piece, all tightly woven together without knowing exactly which is most important or what can be done about any one of the major issues facing the whole world. How did the Native peoples do it when faced with the fear of decimation of all they valued and held sacred? Apocalypse, is the word that Charleston explores through their eyes. Doomsday was not in their vocabulary.
The lessons to be learned from Hopi and Native peoples is that it is the very nature of rituals and cultural norms that hold the community together in spite of a looming apocalypse that threatened to destroy it all. An apocalypse will not come as an ending the way that fearful minds imagine, but will effectively end the detrimental ways that we ourselves have wrought by our choices for or against wars and weapons and human and animal rights, and all the rest of it.
The day is coming, many would agree, when change will end life as we know it today. How that will look in the end, which according to Hopi is never ending, is a choice we can each make for ourselves, and collectively as community. When my pilgrimage to Hopi Land was coming to an “end,” I saw posted on the Center’s door a notice for a ceremony in the plaza that Saturday. No time was given. The location was: “Tuwanasavi: The Center of the Universe.”
