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The Hopi


Growing Up Hopi



Young Hopi children enjoy special attention as they are prized treasures of the tribe. They are carefully taught the ways of their people, encouraged to maintain the traditions that date from centuries before, and live close to their parents and family as they grow up.

The tribe holds many mysteries and these are slowly revealed to the children at specific points in their childhood and young adulthood.

As the young Hopi girls and boys become young women and men, they take their place in the annual ceremonies and dances that carry on the Hopi religious cycles, protecting the People, and providing them with food and well being. And eventually they grow up to take an important place in the every day as well as the sacred dimension of the Hopi world.

The young girls wear traditional clothes as their mother's mothers have, learn the traditional dances,



learn to weave baskets as their grandmother have when they were also young ….



All part of a lineage of Basketmakers carrying on an ancient tradition.



They may help care for Hopi children



Or become a famous potter working with clay and fire much as their ancestors have ….



A respected jewelry maker, a farmer, a teacher, a community leader, or a Kachina carver … and in any of these paths they carry on the ways of their ancestors. Or they may teach fellow Hopi how to use the Internet !

When the Hopi marry in the traditional way, the husband-to-be courts the desired wife, sometimes with ethereal or yearning flute music, and before the wedding, he weaves her a blanket that is trimmed with embroidered prehistoric designs.



The bride will wear this mantle on her wedding day as they prepare to begin their life together. The wedding day is the last time the maiden will wear the young girl's dramatic hair style of whorls wrapped round a wooden core.