The most widely read printed account, Frank Waters' 1963 Book of the Hopi, was compiled by a non-Hopi author working with a small number of Hopi collaborators, chief among them the translator Oswald "White Bear" Fredericks. Hopi religious knowledge is not held by a single central authority; it is distributed across clans and ceremonial societies, each keeping its own portion, much of it not meant to circulate outside its own membership or even to other Hopi outside it. Anthropologist Peter Whiteley's scholarship on Hopi ethnography has questioned how representative the handful of voices behind Waters' book were of that wider, deliberately uncentralised structure, and some Hopi people have distanced themselves from both the book and from the free-standing, ceremonially stripped version of "the prophecy" that circulates in popular and New Age sources.
This entry describes only material that named Hopi messengers, principally Banyacya, chose to release for outside audiences, and does not attempt to reconstruct any restricted clan or ceremonial content that was not offered for publication. Even the released material passed through selection and translation for an outside audience; the fuller context in which it sits remains inside Hopi religious life and is not represented here.
Sources Book of the HopiFrank Waters, with Oswald "White Bear" Fredericks with Rethinking Hopi EthnographyPeter M. Whiteley