A story of encounter, misinterpretation, and the difference between creating and commanding
In the year 1540, under a sun so unrelenting it bleached bone and belief alike, the first Spaniards arrived in the high desert lands of what they called Nuevo México. They came armoured, cross-bearing, speaking of one true God and the divine right to plant flags where no one had asked for them.
Their leader, a conquistador with polished ambition and questionable maps, had been told of golden cities. Instead, he found pueblos — villages of mud and memory, built into the very bones of the land. No towers, no thrones, no cathedrals. Just people who seemed to know exactly where they were.
The Hopi — or rather, the people who live in accordance with the world (Ongtupqa) — greeted them with cautious hospitality. After all, strangers were not new. But these strangers were different: their gods had swords, their prayers had rules, and their eyes darted restlessly, as if always measuring.
The Spaniards carried a book. In it, they said, were the secrets of creation: a world built in seven days by an almighty God who lived somewhere above the sky, took a keen interest in sexual propriety, and demanded obedience in return for salvation. They offered this story as truth, absolute and exclusive.
The Hopi listened. Politely. And said very little.
Because for them, the Creator — Tawa — was not a king on a cloud, but the sun itself: a living presence that warmed and awakened, neither male nor female, neither jealous nor vengeful. Not something to worship in fear, but a being to honour through balance and gratitude.
Creation, they understood, is not an act completed once upon a time, but a continual process — something you participate in. You do not obey it. You live it.
But the Spaniards, seeing masked dancers and prayers to the sun, saw only idolatry. They saw the kachinas — sacred spirit-beings who help maintain balance — as demons in disguise. They saw the sipapu — the symbolic doorway through which ancestors emerged — as nonsense. They saw the Hopi as lost souls, badly in need of European correction.
So they built missions. They baptised children. They banned dances, burned ceremonial objects, and declared Spanish to be the language of God. The Hopi, in public, appeared to comply. But underground, in their kivas — the ceremonial chambers beneath the earth — they preserved what the colonists could not comprehend.
Forty years passed. The land was full of crucifixes, and the air of surveillance. Then, in 1680, the Hopi — along with other Pueblo peoples — quietly rose.
It was not a rebellion of rage. It was a restoration. A coordinated revolt that drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico for twelve years — the only successful Indigenous uprising in North America that permanently reshaped colonial power.
They burned the churches. They sent the priests packing. They returned to the old dances and the old ways. And yet something lingered — not defeat, but the residue of misunderstanding.
Because how do you explain to a man with a sword that the sun is not a god, but a relative? That the maize is not sacred because it’s useful, but because it gives itself? That creation is not a hierarchy, but a web?
The Europeans could not hear this. Their cosmology was vertical: God above, man below, woman under them, and nature at the bottom like a collection of tools. The Hopi’s was horizontal: everything connected, responsibility instead of rule.
And so they labelled the Hopi “heathens”. The irony, of course, was that the Hopi believed in everything — stone, breath, ancestor, cloud. In time as a circle, not a line. In living rightly, not in dying forgiven.
Over the centuries, the colonists returned — this time with railways, reservation lines, boarding schools, and eventually, broadband. Some Hopi converted. Some did not. But in the kivas, the old stories are still told.
And Tawa still rises every morning over the mesas. Not to judge, but to witness. Not to punish, but to remind.
We are not above the world. We are within it. The task of being human is not obedience, but relationship.
It was never just a religious misunderstanding. It was a collision between two incompatible worldviews: one that sees the divine as separate and superior, and one that sees it as immanent and interwoven.
The colonists could not imagine a Creator who required no worship, who had no need to be obeyed, who did not rule.
And so, in trying to bring God to the desert, they missed the Creator who had always been there.