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Fake Natives and a radio show spread misconceptions about Hopi spirituality for decades

Brian D. Haley, author of “Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field”
Brian D. Haley, University of Arizona Press
Brian D. Haley, author of “Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field”

How much do you know about the religion of the Hopi? Unless you yourself are Hopi, the answer is: probably not as much as you think.

All over the world, and particularly in the Southwest, the Hopi people have come to symbolize a deep spirituality. Many see them as prophets of impending doom — keepers of sacred truths that have the power to cast out evil and remake the world.

The problem is that this version of the Hopi religion was largely popularized by non-Hopi people. In the 1930s and '40s, a faction of the Hopi split off from the rest of the community and declared themselves to be the keepers of the “true” Hopi tradition. Before long, these so-called “traditionalists” attracted the attention of disaffected white people searching for meaning.

According to Brian D. Haley, a cultural anthropologist, says this is where the problem started. In his new book “Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field,” Haley tells the story of the seekers who latched on to the traditionalist faction of the Hopi — including people like Craig Carpenter.

Full conversation

BRIAN HALEY: He was a young man who had left his home in Michigan in the 1940s and come out to California seeking an answer to the question of “Is civilization right or wrong?” Very spiritually oriented, very metaphysical kind of guy who was into a variety of different religious forms that at the time were referred to sort of collectively as the occult, but really are the forerunners of modern spirituality, which sometimes is glossed as the New Age.

He met with and joined this Hopi faction in 1955 and also transformed himself into a Mohawk Indian through this same process of working with these people.

SAM DINGMAN: So he adopted a story for himself of having such ancestry, even though he did not actually have it.

HALEY: He’s one of a number of people who joined in this movement, who had this exact same characteristic of neo-Indianism.

DINGMAN: At this point in the story, though, folks like Carpenter have found their way to this group of so-called traditionalists amongst the Hopi, and they’re very interested in the ways that it rhymes with their own ideas. But there comes a point in the ’60s where these notions start to rhyme with the sort of bubbling, countercultural energy of the early Vietnam era. How did that happen?

HALEY: It’s interesting because Carpenter took this minority view that civilization was messed up and that so-called primitive societies offered something better. By the mid-60s, that idea had gained a lot of headway and was becoming much more popular in the emerging counterculture that became the hippies. And there was another individual who was important here. That’s the Southwest writer Frank Waters, who had also reinvented himself as an Indian to give his work greater authority.

He had joined with Oswald White Bear Fredericks on the Hopi Reservation to write “Book of the Hopi,” which initially essentially was going to tell the traditionalist faction’s version of Hopi tradition. Waters didn’t understand the politics there at all. It was published in the early ’60s and became available and widely available. It’s now available in like seven languages.

DINGMAN: Yeah, and if I’m not mistaken, it sort of became a fixture of bookshelves in those new-age spiritual communities that were popping up at this time.

HALEY: Vey much so. The direct link into the hippie movement occurs in Los Angeles in late 1966, where you have a radio show on KPFK Public Radio in Los Angeles …

DINGMAN: This is my favorite part of the story.

HALEY: Yeah, this is your favorite part of the story, of course. Radio Free Oz was a late-night call-in talk radio show that was just exclusively counterculture.

Well, one evening they were chatting on the air about the “Book of the Hopi. A Friends of Craig Carpenter’s heard this. He was living in Los Angeles at the time, and they brought him to the studio and introduced them all and so forth. And the Radio Free Oz broadcast then started doing a number of radio documentaries that gave the Hopi traditionalist faction’s view of things without any real significant critique of what was actually going on there.

DINGMAN: So if I’m hearing you right, this is a moment in the story where this version of Hopi religion that has been transformed by a faction of of the Hopi community and some self-interested parties from outside the community, basically receives this giant media megaphone at a time when there’s a great hunger in broader American culture for ideas like this. And if I understand the implications of the book correctly, that has resulted in a broad misunderstanding of the true breadth of Hopi spirituality that persists kind of to this day, right?

HALEY: Yes. And of native politics as well. The Hopi people have been kind of plagued by their popularity among these spiritual seekers who come and want answers to very cosmological questions. They come away sometimes.

DINGMAN: Is society bad?

HALEY: Right. They come and interfere in ceremonies sometimes. They have damaged shrine sites. They have established shrine sites of their own on the reservation. The popularity of Frank Waters’ “Book of the Hopi,” for instance, was so great that the bookstore on the Hopi Reservation at the Cultural Center had to stock it, because so many people asked for it all the time. They needed the money. And this contributed to a generation of Hopi youth growing up thinking the book was accurate.

DINGMAN: And we should say that you’re sort of breaking news here, right?To quote from the book, you actually say, “No chronicler has recognized the neo-Indian presence in the Hopi traditionalist faction’s network or its implications for what is perceived as American Indian. ‘tradition’ in various Native and non-Native communities.”

HALEY: Yeah, and I think that’s a really important part of the book. Where did this huge fascination with Native Americans suddenly become a movement of non-Native people claiming Native identity? What I’ve done here in this book is discover one of the major pathways to the popularization of Native American identity among people who really don’t have that background.

DINGMAN: And before we move off the radio element of this conversation, my fellow radio nerds may or may not be aware that Radio Free Oz ended up becoming the Firesign Theatre, which people may know a little bit better.

HALEY: Yes. And the interesting thing about their involvement: As they were developing their recordings, they began to see the appropriation that was taking place by the counterculture, the appropriation of Native American ideas and culture. And they backed away. And they are the only major figures in the book who made that breakthrough. And it is much to their credit.

DINGMAN: Well, if folks listening want to find out more about all of this, they should read Professor Haley’s book, “Hopis and the Counterculture.” And Professor Haley is a professor of cultural anthropology at SUNY Oneonta. Thank you so much for this conversation.

HALEY: Thank you, Sam.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Sam Dingman is a reporter and host for KJZZ’s The Show. Prior to KJZZ, Dingman was the creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Family Ghosts.
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