Hopi

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 people describe their presence in the Southwest not as a migration from elsewhere, but as an emergence — a sacred unfolding from one world into another. Through the sipapu, a symbolic portal located in the Grand Canyon and replicated in kiva floors, they entered the Fourth World. This narrative is not simply a myth of beginnings. It serves as a spiritual compass, guiding generations to live in balance with the Earth and the Creator’s instructions. ...

The Hopi people have maintained one of the most enduring cultural traditions in North America, grounded in reverence for the land, cyclical cosmology, and a rich social structure built on continuity and balance. Central to that structure is a deeply embedded understanding of gender — not as identity politics, but as responsibility, relationship, and rhythm. Within this tradition, there is space — space for variation, ambiguity, and what might be called, in a modern framework, gender diversity. That space is neither always overt nor easily categorised, but it exists — in practice, in silence, and sometimes in story. ...