From Public Spectacle to Closed Ceremony

For much of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Snake Dance was, unusually among Hopi religious practices, open to outside spectators, and it became one of the most heavily photographed and written about Native American ceremonies in the United States, drawing tourists, photographers, journalists and anthropologists to the Hopi mesas in numbers that grew steadily as rail travel and later automobile tourism made northern Arizona more accessible. That outside attention was never straightforwardly welcomed by the Hopi communities who held the ceremony, and the historical record of the period documents recurring tension between visitors treating the rite as an exotic curiosity or entertainment and the Hopi understanding of it as a serious religious undertaking with real consequences for rain and harvest, a mismatch scholars of Hopi ethnography have written about at length as a case study in the costs of unregulated religious tourism.

Hopi leadership's decision in the later twentieth century to close the ceremony to non Hopi observers entirely followed decades of this friction and reflects a broader pattern seen across many indigenous communities worldwide, reclaiming control over how, and by whom, sacred practice is witnessed after a long period in which that control had been effectively ceded to outside visitors.