The homemade court was just outside one of the several small villages that was set up by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 1960s. These villages of totally climate-inappropriate tract houses were set up in an effort to entice the Hopis off of the mesas. The early BIA agents thought that pulling the Native Americans away from their ancestral living areas would disconnect them from their traditions enough to start the insidious homogenization process. This was the same thing that the Spanish tried 400 years earlier, to similar effect. The Hopi culture is incredibly resilient, and has stayed mostly intact, despite the centuries of outside pressure. In the 1970s, the BIA finally changed its philosophy from one of assimilation to one of cultural support. At that point, the Bureau gave control of the housing authority over to tribal officials, and these ground level villages slowly started to transform themselves into more traditional living arrangements.
But I think that we were talking about volleyball.
The tournament was Friday night and all day on Saturday. It had a decidedly block party-like feel to it, and attracted teams from throughout the Hopi reservation and surrounding villages. It was a fundraiser to send one of the tournament organizer's nieces to the Midwest for club basketball Nationals.
The competition was surprisingly intense. The Hopis are not known for their hight (which was probably why I was invited as a ringer), but they definitely made up for it in strength and tenacity. Their culture has developed around long distance running, since this "moccasin telegraph" was their only method of delivering messages between all of the distant hopi villages. Running is still a big part of daily life here (there are community 5K and 10K runs on most weekends), and although obesity and diabetes are pervasive, there is still a decent percentage of the population that is in very good shape--which I found out. I could barely get out of bed today.
The gameplay went on all day, with the occasional break to chase a rez dog off the field.
Our team is below. We came in third place, and considering the competition, I'm pretty happy about that.
The woman on the far left is my coworker at the health care center. Her name is Samantha, and she runs the Health Promotion and Disease Prevention office. She is also in charge of the summer camp that I helped out with last week, and is directly responsible for the breakfast burrito fiasco. Her husband is right behind her, followed by one of her friends and her cousin. The woman to the right of me is the wife of one of the IHS doctors, and next to her is her niece. They are both originally from the Marshall Islands.
After the tournament, the family of the tournament organizer stuck around to celebrate his birthday. Since Sam is a cousin of his, I was also invited to partake in what could only be described as a feast. The Hopis are famously hospitable, and they also tend to have huge families. Plus, cooking for others is a tribal past time. We ate like royalty, but the nicest part was their family tradition of sharing stories about the person celebrating his birthday. I heard tales about ditching elementary school, selling crafts to tourists on the side of the freeway, and getting shot by an arrow.
[When I heard that last one, I thought, "holy crap, you guys still use those?" But it turned out that the arrow came from a mechanized crossbow that a neighborhood kid was playing with. "Ahh..."]
Another great weekend. I just wish the Hopis had more hot tubs.
