What the Hopi Have Asked Researchers Not to Publish

Hopi religious life is carried by clans and by religious societies whose ceremonies follow the agricultural and solar year across the mesas of northern Arizona, and initiated members of those societies hold knowledge that is closed to outsiders and to uninitiated Hopi alike. This article does not set out what the societies teach. Its public history is, in part, a history of that closure being tested. Across the twentieth century a number of outside researchers and visitors published or photographed ceremonial material the Hopi consider restricted, and the anthropologist Peter Whiteley, writing on the ethics of Hopi ethnography, has documented the Hopi's sustained and public objection to that publication, an objection that has since shaped how scholars work with Hopi communities.

What remains public, and is not in dispute, is that Hopi religion is a living tradition organized around named societies and a structured ceremonial year, practiced today on First, Second and Third Mesa much as it has been for generations. The Hopi Tribe's own insistence on control over its ceremonial knowledge is itself part of the modern history of Indigenous religious rights in the United States, a case cited well beyond Hopi country in debates about who has the right to publish another people's religion.