Hopi Tribe Research Articles

Doris Howes Calloway: Her Work and Legacy on Nutritionally Vulnerable Populations in North America

Dr Doris Howes Calloway had a keen interest in nutritionally vulnerable populations in North America and around the world. Given her scientific reputation and interests, she advised many national and international agencies on improving the health and well-being of populations at increased risk of malnutrition. In North America, she and her graduate students laid the groundwork for improvement of the diets of several Indigenous peoples including the Cocopah, Hopi, and Navajo. They found that improvement of the nutritional and health status of the Cocopah tribe was unlikely without addressing underlying social and economic factors. Among the Hopi tribe, the replacement of traditional foods by energy-dense foods of low nutritional quality increased the risks of nutrient inadequacies and obesity. Dr Calloway also had a keen interest in understanding the effects of nutrition on biological functions that increase nutritional demand and thus vulnerability, as demonstrated in studies of pregnancy and lactation among Navajo women, and growth of children from Mexican American farmworker families. They demonstrated the limits of federal nutrition programs at that time. They identified the double burden of stunting and obesity among Mexican American children. Dr Calloway's standards of academic excellence and rigorous research influenced her students to pursue careers that enhanced science-based policies and programs to promote the health and wellness of nutritionally vulnerable populations.

Grants and Acquisitions

Special Collections and Archives (SCA) at Northern Arizona University’s (NAU) Cline Library was awarded a $349,526 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the digitization of 400 rare and unique moving images held by SCA and three regional cultural heritage partners: the Hopi Tribe, the Hualapai Tribe, and Diné College on the Navajo Nation. SCA holds early images, including river running the Colorado River, exploration of Grand and Glen canyons, and landscapes of the American Southwest. The goal of the three-year project is to preserve and make available these historically and culturally significant, at-risk analog moving images that depict people, places, and events on the Colorado Plateau. The project also supports Cline Library’s implementation of the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials, which offer guidance for nontribal institutions regarding the culturally responsive and respectful care of materials connected to Native American communities. The protocols will guide the selection of and access to films, which will be done in collaboration with tribal partners. In the third year of the project, NAU and its tribal partners will contribute a selection of the digitized films to the Tribesourcing Southwest Films project ( https://tribesourcingfilm.com ) for culturally appropriate description and re-narration by communities of origin.

COVID-19 response by the Hopi Tribe: impact of systems improvement during the first wave on the second wave of the pandemic

The Hopi Tribe is a sovereign nation home to ~7500 Hopi persons living primarily in 12 remote villages. The Hopi Tribe, like many other American Indian nations, has been disproportionately...

A SARS-CoV-2 Outbreak Illustrating the Challenges in Limiting the Spread of the Virus - Hopi Tribe, May-June 2020.

On June 3, 2020, a woman aged 73 years (patient A) with symptoms consistent with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) (1) was evaluated at the emergency department of the Hopi Health Care Center (HHCC, an Indian Health Services facility) and received a positive test result for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. The patient's symptoms commenced on May 27, and a sibling (patient B) of the patient experienced symptom onset the following day. On May 23, both patients had driven together and spent time in a retail store in Flagstaff, Arizona. Because of their similar exposures, symptom onset dates, and overlapping close contacts, these patients are referred to as co-index patients. The co-index patients had a total of 58 primary (i.e., direct) and secondary contacts (i.e., contacts of a primary contact); among these, 27 (47%) received positive SARS-CoV-2 test results. Four (15%) of the 27 contacts who became ill were household members of co-index patient B, 14 (52%) had attended family gatherings, one was a child who might have transmitted SARS-CoV-2 to six contacts, and eight (30%) were community members. Findings from the outbreak investigation prompted the HHCC and Hopi Tribe leadership to strengthen community education through community health representatives, public health nurses, and radio campaigns. In communities with similar extended family interaction, emphasizing safe ways to stay in touch, along with wearing a mask, frequent hand washing, and physical distancing might help limit the spread of disease.

Notes from the Field: Development of an Enhanced Community-Focused COVID-19 Surveillance Program - Hopi Tribe, June‒July 2020.

Notes from the Field: Development of an Enhanced Community-Focused COVID-19 Surveillance Program - Hopi Tribe, June‒July 2020.

Creative Sovereignties: Should Copyright Apply on Tribal Lands?

The federal Copyright Act grants authors the exclusive right to use their original creative expressions in certain ways. At the same time, the Act pre-empts most equivalent rights to creative expressions established by States. However, the Copyright Act is silent as to its applicability on the lands of Native American Tribes and its preemptive effect on rights sovereign Tribal governments accord to creativity. With Tribes and Tribal members increasingly engaged in the global creative economy and in litigation to defend their intellectual properties, the status of the Copyright Act on Tribal lands has become a critical issue that Congress or the courts must now address. The stakes of applying the Copyright Act on Tribal lands may be quite high for Tribes. Drawing on doctrinal research coupled with community-partnered ethnographic research conducted with the Hopi Tribe, I explain how federal copyright law impacts contemporary tribal sovereignty. Copyright clearly supports certain forms of Tribal creativity intended for off-reservation markets. But for locally circulating creativity — including forms of cultural or ceremonial creativity that help maintain Tribal identity, social relations, and traditional sources of authority — applying Copyright may very well disrupt the exercise of Tribal sovereignty and cause substantial harm to Tribal creative economies. Based on this research, I argue that the Copyright Act should apply on Tribal lands, but only to the extent permitted by each Tribe. Where Tribal intellectual property laws, protocols, or customary laws occupy the same field as the Copyright Act, Tribal entitlements and remedies, not federal ones, should govern creativity occurring on Tribal lands, with federal copyright law providing enforcement of Tribal intellectual property rights beyond a Tribe’s borders. Otherwise, the unilateral imposition of the Copyright Act on tribal creativity, to the exclusion of Tribal laws, impermissibly invades Tribal sovereignty as articulated in both current federal policy and the international norms enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The Existence Value of a Distinctive Native American Culture: Survival of the Hopi Reservation

We measure the value placed by the American public on ensuring the continued existence of the traditional Hopi culture and way of life at the Hopi Reservation in Arizona. The Hopi are the oldest living culture in the United States. The continued existence of the Reservation is threatened by depletion of the groundwater resource underlying the reservation. In the future, without a new source of water, the Hopi will run out of water to support the villages and continue their traditional Hopi agricultural practices. Many Hopi will have to move off the Reservation and give up their traditional culture and way of life. The Reservation will no longer serve as a permanent home for the Hopi Tribe. An expensive pipeline would be required to convey a new source of water to the Reservation, for which the Federal government might pay. The question is: would the expenditure by the federal government to convey water that would ensure the continued existence of the traditional Hopi culture at the Hopi Reservation be justified by the existence value of that culture to the American people? This paper describes the results of a study undertaken to measure that existence value. We show that a simple stated preference design, using only a single monetary amount, is sufficient to provide a bound.

Development of Guidelines to Improve the Effectiveness of Community Advisory Boards in Health Research.

Community advisory boards (CABs) are a common community engagement strategy. Tools for developing CABs that are accessible to academic-community partnerships are limited. This article describes the process and partnership with the Hopi Tribe to develop CAB guidelines as a tool for research funded by the Center for Indigenous Environmental Health Research (CIEHR) and nonaffiliated projects. The CAB guidelines consist of three sections: formation, operation, and sustainability and evaluation. Each section includes best practices and interactive worksheets. The CAB guidelines were piloted with the Hopi Tribe to determine feasibility and relevance. The CAB guidelines were well-received by the tribal CAB. Some of the worksheets were difficult to complete because they did not represent their perspectives or introduced potential tension in CAB interactions. Revisions were made accordingly. Future evaluation and broad dissemination of the CAB guidelines will promote the use and effectiveness of CABs in health research.

Environmental Risk Perceptions and Community Health: Arsenic, Air Pollution, and Threats to Traditional Values of the Hopi Tribe.

American Indian and Alaska Native populations experience chronic disparities in a wide range of health outcomes, many of which are associated with disproportionate exposures to environmental health hazards. In the American Southwest, many indigenous tribes experience challenges in securing access to sustainable and safe sources of drinking water, limiting air pollution emissions on and off tribal lands, and cleaning up hazardous contaminants left over from a legacy of natural resource extraction. To better understand how households perceive the risk of exposure to potential environmental health risks, we conducted six focus groups organized by age and geographic location on the Hopi reservation. Focus group participants (n = 41) were asked to reflect on changes in their natural and manmade environment and how their health might be influenced by any potential changes. By investigating these environmental risk perceptions, we were able to identify arsenic in drinking water and indoor air quality as significant exposures of concern. These risk perceptions were frequently anchored in personal and familial experiences with health problems such as cancer and asthma. Older focus group participants identified ongoing shifts away from tradition and cultural practices as increasing environmental health risks. Similar to other communities economically dependent on the extraction of natural resources, focus group participants described the need for behavioral modifications regarding environmental health risks rather than eliminating the sources of potential health risks entirely. Our results suggest the need for including traditional values and practices in future interventions to reduce environmental health risks.

Characterizing Drought Effects on Vegetation Productivity in the Four Corners Region of the US Southwest

The droughts striking the Colorado Plateau, where the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation Native American reservation lands are located, and their impacts have appeared slowly and relatively unnoticed in conventional national drought monitoring efforts like the National Drought Monitor. To understand the effect of drought-based drivers on vegetation productivity in the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation reservation lands, an assessment approach was developed integrating climate, land cover types, and topographical data with annual geospatially explicit normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)-related productivity from 1989 to 2014 derived from 15-day composite multi-sensor NDVI time series data. We studied vegetation–environment relationships by conducting multiple linear regression analysis to explain the driver of vegetation productivity changes. Our results suggest that the interannual change of vegetation productivity showed high variability in middle elevations where needleleaf forest is the dominant vegetation cover type. Our analysis also shows that the spatial variation in interannual variability of vegetation productivity was more driven by climate drivers than by topography ones. Specifically, the interannual variability in spring precipitation and fall temperature seems to be the most significant factor that correlated with the interannual variability in vegetation productivity during the last two and a half decades.

Does Hopi Religious Harvest of Eaglets Affect Golden Eagle Territory Occupancy and Reproduction on the Navajo Nation?

The Golden Eagle (Aquila chrysaetos) has great religious importance to many indigenous North American peoples, including the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation of the southwestern United States. Hopi oral traditions indicate their ancestors harvested nestling Golden Eagles prior to the arrival of Europeans to the region, and this religious practice continues today. Despite contemporary conservation concern for Golden Eagles, no studies have evaluated potential negative effects of religious harvest on populations of this species. We conducted aerial and ground searches for Golden Eagle nesting territories on the Navajo Nation from 1996–2005, and monitored occupancy and reproductive rates of territories in three study areas: one area where Hopi annually harvested eaglets, and two areas without harvest. We analyzed 9 yr of data (1997–2005) using multi-season occupancy models and generalized linear mixed models to test for differences among study areas in occupancy dynamics, and production of early-season and fledging-age nestlings. We found no significant differences in probabilities of occupancy, persistence, or colonization of territories between study areas. Territories in harvest and control areas produced similar numbers of nestlings early in the season; however, significantly fewer (53%) reached fledging age in the harvested area, suggesting collection of nestlings led to locally depressed fledgling production. Given possible declining trends of Golden Eagle populations in the southwestern U.S., we recommend continued monitoring and more intensive demographic studies to better understand the effects of religious harvest on the population of Golden Eagles nesting on the Navajo Nation.

Comparing Maize Paleoproduction Models with Experimental Data

In agrarian societies, such as the ancestral Pueblo of the Four Corners region of the US Southwest (c. AD 600–1300), the resilience of crops in the face of climate challenges was of paramount concern. Consequently, students of these societies have invested much effort in modeling the response of traditional crops to ancient weather patterns. Less effort has been made to evaluate the quality of those reconstructions with experimental studies. Here, we report on results from the Pueblo Farming Project (PFP), a long-term collaboration between the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center and the Hopi tribe. From 2009 through 2015, PFP researchers and members of the Hopi tribe planted four experimental gardens of Hopi maize (Zea mays) on Crow Canyon's campus in southwestern Colorado using traditional methods. PFP researchers recorded growth progress over the growing season, harvested the corn, measured characteristics of the resulting crop, and derived yield estimates. We present the results of the garden experiments and we compare experimental yields with computational estimates of potential maize yield developed by the Village Ecodynamics Project (VEP). We find that Hopi maize flourishes in this part of the Hopi ancestral land and that PFP experimental yields are highly correlated with VEP yield estimates. We suggest that these PFP data may be used to refine existing maize paleoproductivity estimates, and we propose future directions for farming experiments in the Four Corners.

Indigenous Tewa language regimes across time: Persistence and transformation

AbstractThis article attempts to trace and understand the historical development and transformation of the regimes of language Indigenous to the Village of Tewa (northeastern Arizona). It examines the social institutions and cultural practices that first cultivated a particular set of language ideologies and linguistic practices in the precolonial period. It also tracks more recent transformations involving contemporary Tewa adaptations to inclusion in the federally recognized Hopi Tribe and to the hegemony of the larger nation-state. Critical to my argument is the role of theocratic institutions and Indigenous social organization (e.g., clans and moieties) in providing a foundation for ideological production and elaboration. This account provides a better analysis of Tewa linguistic resistance to Spanish colonization than that of Edward Dozier, who attributed language contact outcomes to the historical circumstances of Spanish colonial oppression rather than to the expression of Indigenous language ideologies, including their regimes of temporalization and the crossing of temporal borders in subjective history.

Rain Gauges to Range Conditions: Collaborative Development of a Drought Information System to Support Local Decision-Making

Abstract Drought monitoring and drought planning are complex endeavors. Measures of precipitation or streamflow provide little context for understanding how social and environmental systems impacted by drought are responding. Here the authors report on collaborative work with the Hopi Tribe—a Native American community in the U.S. Southwest—to develop a drought information system that is responsive to local needs. A strategy is presented for developing a system that is based on an assessment of how drought is experienced by Hopi citizens and resource managers, that can incorporate local observations of drought impacts as well as conventional indicators, and that brings together local expertise with conventional science-based observations. The system described here is meant to harness as much available information as possible to inform tribal resource managers, political leaders, and citizens about drought conditions and to also engage these local drought stakeholders in observing, thinking about, and helping to guide planning for drought.

Libertt, galitt, Fraternitt: The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Fails to Protect Hopi Katsinam from the Auction Block in France

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) compels member states to take action in order to protect the rights of the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples, including the right to their cultural property. Notwithstanding the UNDRIP’s robust set of protections, its status as a nonbinding piece of international law remains its ultimate and most fatal flaw. France was an enthusiastic supporter of the UNDRIP at ratification, but has effectively abandoned their position. French auction houses and courts have allowed for sales of Native American sacred property to proceed despite the objections of the Hopi Tribe. In spite of international protest, a French court ruled that Native Americans and all other indigenous peoples lacked the requisite standing to bring cultural claims in France. Subsequently, numerous sales of sacred masks known as “Katsinam” have continued without any legal restitution for the Hopi Tribe. This Note argues thatwhile the UNDRIP sets out basic parameters affording indigenous peoples a means of protection, without the ability to enforce its provisions, the Hopi and indigenous peoples throughout the world will remain incapable of using the UNDRIP as a means of empowerment. France has set a dangerous precedent for countries to continue disobeying the principles of the UNDRIP without consequence for noncompliance. Indigenous peoples will remain powerless to protect their sacramentals unless the UNDRIP is transformed into a multilateral treaty and adopted into the domestic law of member states.

No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession ed. by Tressa Berman (review)

Reviewed by: No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession ed. by Tressa Berman Carter Jones Meyer No Deal! Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession. Edited by Tressa Berman. Santa Fe: School of Advanced Research Press, 2012. xx + 261 pp. Notes, photographs, illustrations, tables, references, index. $34.95 paper. In April 2013, despite protest from the Hopi tribe and its supporters, 1.2 million dollars’ worth of Hopi “Friends,” masklike sacred objects, were sold at auction in Paris, France. The Hopi argued that they embodied living spirits, that they had been stolen from tribal lands in Arizona, and that they should be returned. A municipal court judge determined that the objects could not be considered beings; they were more akin to works of art, whose ownership could not be verified, and therefore could legally be sold. The Hopi wondered if they would ever have possession of their Friends again. The controversy surrounding the sale of these sacred items elucidates a pressing question facing Indigenous cultures today: who “owns” culture? What do “possession” and “ownership” mean for Native peoples seeking to recover their cultures, and the objects that express them, after centuries of subjugation, or appropriation, by the dominant culture? No Deal! is a cross-disciplinary essay collection, written by artists, museum curators, anthropologists, and art historians from Australia and North America, that examines these questions, both from Indigenous and western perspectives. The essays provide fresh, thought-provoking insights into the politics of contemporary Native art as they investigate creative ways by which Native artists engage the global art world in their efforts to repossess their art and their heritage. The collection is arranged thematically, enabling readers to easily see connections across topics and to understand that concerns raised in North America regarding contemporary Indigenous art have been raised in Australia as well. Such a cross-cultural approach makes the book especially valuable. The essays in “Aesthetics and Meanings” address the shifting meanings and values of works of art as they move from the locality where they were made to places of display, in museums, magazines, and mainstream media. The essays in “Possession and Identity” examine specific cases whereby Indigenous groups have sought to control rights to their art and its interpretation, and therefore protect their identity from legal and cultural infringements. “Public Reception” presents essays on Indigenous art in the public sphere, where institutions and artists struggle over ownership of objects and ideas. Although the dense, jargon-laden writing style of many of the essays will ensure an audience mainly of scholars, No Deal! nevertheless offers new, important avenues of inquiry into the politics of contemporary Indigenous art that will surely spark further research into controversies such as that of the Hopi in Paris. [End Page 391] Carter Jones Meyer Salameno School of American and International Studies Ramapo College of New Jersey Copyright © 2015 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Co-Creation of Knowledge by the Hopi Tribe and Archaeologists

AbstractFor two decades, the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office has worked with archaeologists to co-create knowledge about the past and document contemporary values associated with heritage sites. Much of this work has been accomplished within the framework of research mandated by the National Historic Preservation Act and National Environmental Policy Act. Here we describe a case study that illustrates the processes of this community-based participatory research, including research design, implementation of fieldwork, peer review of research findings, and reporting. The case study is a project conducted in 2014 by the Hopi Tribe in partnership with Anthropological Research, LLC, to investigate traditional cultural properties associated with an Arizona Public Service Company transmission line. The Hopi Tribe’s collaborative research with archaeologists provides intellectual benefits for the management of archaeological resources and the humanistic and scientific understanding of the past.

Using a Community-Based Participatory Research Approach to Collect Hopi Breast Cancer Survivors' Stories

The Hopi Tribe’s reservation is located in northern Arizona, spreading over four thousand square miles (fig. 1).1 The Hopi live in twelve villages located on three separate mesas known as First, Second, and Third Mesas. Most of the villages are located between five to thirty minutes of one another. The nearest city off-reservation is Flagstaff, which is a one-and-a-half to two-hour drive for most Hopi reservation residents. According to the Hopi Women’s Health Program (HWHP), the Hopi Tribe has 12,442 enrolled members, with 5,143 of those members living off the reservation. Approximately one thousand nonHopis live on tribal lands; they work on the reservation and/or are married into the tribe.2 The HWHP is the primary source of cancer information for the Hopi. The HWHP, in collaboration with Indian Health Service (IHS), provides education, information, and

Mapping the Hopi Landscape for Cultural Preservation

For the Hopi people, named places on the landscape localize, commemorate, and transmit traditional knowledge within a spatial context used to reference and explain Hopi history and culture—geographic information the Hopi Tribe seeks to preserve. This paper discusses the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office's use of geospatial technologies during recent collaborative efforts to document important places and associated cultural information. It considers how GIS and other geospatial technologies have been used to produce maps and digital imagery in a manner guided by traditional landscape perspectives and native epistemologies. Mapping Hopi lands provides many benefits, foremost being the preservation of place-related knowledge for future generations of Hopis. Geospatial technologies also facilitate Hopi efforts of heritage management by providing a medium that effectively demonstrates use of traditional landscapes to non-Hopi audiences.

Genetic testing and native peoples: the call for community-based participatory research.

Genetic testing and genetic research in general are especially powerful in population studies. Genetic research can assess human genetic variation within and between populations, as well as potentially identify specific genetic determinants of disease. In the United States, isolated indigenous communities are genetically unique compared with an ever-growing homogenous population (Santos, 2008). The current dialogue surrounding population studies continues to develop among both researchers and the communities that are highly sought after for such studies, which include Native American Indian (AI) and Alaska Native (AN) tribes. In efforts to further engage in the conversation regarding the intersection of native peoples and genetic research, the National Congress of American Indians, in collaboration with the National Human Genome Research Institute and the National Museum of the American Indian, hosted a symposium in June 2014. The symposium, titled ‘‘A Spectrum of Perspectives: Native Peoples and Genetic Research,’’ was held at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Although native people’s perspectives with regard to genetic research are by no means uniform, many tribes approach genetic research with hesitancy and fear attributable to a legacy of western exploitation and ethical misconduct. Many research studies in the past have limited the input of native people and disregarded their traditions, thus causing many tribes to feel like ‘‘guinea pigs’’ participating in studies that didn’t benefit them (Fong et al., 2003). Accordingly, as reflected at the symposium, many new questions have been raised across the United States among the AI and AN people as a way to address the concerns of their tribes and to demand greater collaboration in genetics research. One of the main concerns among native people is a lack of clarity about the motivations behind genetic research and the question of direct benefits to their tribe. These concerns heightened in the early 1990s when the Havasupai, an AI tribe, teamed with Arizona State University to participate in a research project that was intended to help explain the high rates of type 2 diabetes in their community (Santos, 2008). In accordance with the study, the Havasupai provided blood samples and fingerprints. By the end of the decade, the Havasupai had received little to no information regarding the study and were told their samples were damaged because of a freezer failure. However, not all the blood samples were destroyed, and instead of receiving permission from the Havasupai, the research team sent the blood samples to other universities. Genetic research continued, and the Havasupai were neither consented for the sample sharing nor informed about the findings of these new studies. As a result, the community filed lawsuits against Arizona State University for the violation of their civil rights (Santos, 2008). As demonstrated by this example, the Euro-American tradition of research traditionally involves the extraction of data from a population using experts, which is then analyzed and processed elsewhere. This tradition of research is rather undesirable because it lacks an overall feedback component. However, many natives people do support research that is reciprocal and benefits the health of their community. Rather than relying on researchers to shift their framework away from the Euro-American tradition, many tribes have begun to demand greater control in the scientific process. The Kahnewake Mohawk community in Canada reflects an increasing initiative taken by tribes to engage in research through their development of a diabetes intervention program, which includes both a dietary and a physical component (Bowekaty and Davis, 2003). In addition, many AI and AN tribes are apprehensive about the handling and treatment of individuals’ biospecimens. Although each tribe has different values and spiritual beliefs, biospecimens carry a great deal of value. Dr. Frank Dukepoo (Hopi tribe), a geneticist at Northern Arizona University, demonstrated this value in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: ‘‘To us, any part of ourselves is sacred. Scientists say its just DNA. For an Indian, it is not just DNA, it’s part of a person, it is sacred, with deep religious significance. It is part of the essence of a person’’ (Petit, 1998). When researchers approach native people, they follow a framework that is distinct to that community’s cultural, historical, political, and spiritual identities. These various cultural nuances and specific spiritual traditions must be regarded in scientific research because their significance bears a heavy weight for the population under study. Native people also face anxiety over postulating how genetic research could harm the tribe. Some studies have the potential to question cosmologic views or migration patterns, which could ultimately challenge traditional beliefs, such as