And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: provided by Louis Proyect via warriornet list NY Times, Sunday, September 19, 1999 Reggae Rhythms Speak to an Insular Tribe By BRUCE WEBER KYKOTSMOVI, Ariz. -- From the top of Second Mesa, one of three flat-topped mountains here that are the foundation of the remote Hopi reservation, the view of vast high desert, empty to the horizon, is the sort to inspire ruminations on man's existential solitude. And when the cloudburst came late on Friday afternoon, with prongs of lightning blanching the enormous sky, thunderclaps to wake the dead and hailstones dropping like bullets of the gods, it almost seemed as though the natural spirits that are worshiped by the Hopi were reminding the mortal of their mortality. But maybe it was merely Mother Nature's sense of moment. The storm passed, a full rainbow appeared across the western face of the mesa, and at sunset the red rock glowed like an ember, warm and welcoming. And just about then, the visiting reggae bands on the Teva Spirit of Unity Festival tour took the stage at the Hopi Veterans Center, just below the lip of the mountain ledge, and some 2,000 reggae fans went crazy. For six hours, the gymnasium-like auditorium throbbed with life, in spectacular isolation under a thrillingly bright half-moon. The concert -- featuring top-flight bands like Steel Pulse, Third World and Culture, and singers like Maxi Priest and Monifah -- was, in the words of one Hopi, "the biggest nonreligious event of the year on the res." But beyond that, it was the high point of a cross-cultural tradition that has been building here for more than two decades. Reggae -- the Jamaican-born, Rastafarian music characterized by a lilting, insistent syncopation and a defiant live-and-let-live message -- has long provided anthems of anti-oppression for third world peoples around the globe, and it is popular on Indian reservations throughout the western United States. (At the Friday concert, there were Apache, Navajo, Havasupai, Ute and other tribe members, along with a fair number of Pahana -- white people -- who came from three surrounding states and up to 150 miles away.) But it has found a special welcome -- and an unlikely one -- among the insular and secretive Hopi, a farming tribe with a complex and closely held set of spiritual beliefs whose history in this area goes back to the beginning of the millennium and who are known for guarding their ancient culture from outside influences. Children are initiated into the tribal religion as teen-agers; those who are never initiated are never fully in the know. And everyone is discouraged from being too forthright with outsiders. "My uncles say that those who do not know anything will tell you everything, and those who know something will not tell you anything," said Lance Polingyouma, who grew up in Hopiland and now works as a "cultural interpreter" at the Hyatt Regency in Scottsdale, explaining the Hopi to tourists on their way to the reservation. "It's a pretty good axiom for Hopi life." The reservation -- 11 villages on three mesas in the midst of a vast desert highland the size of Rhode Island -- holds between 8,000 and 10,000 people. Entirely surrounded by the much larger Navajo nation, with which the Hopi have an ongoing land dispute, "the res" provides a life that Hopis describe as fiercely clannish, with all the pride and resentment that entails, and with many of the conflicts that go with wanting to get along in the world at large and still maintain a private way of life. The people are poor, but reject the lionization of money. Alcohol is forbidden on the reservation, but alcoholism is a problem. Homicide is rare; suicide is not. Especially for a younger generation of Hopis, reggae is the music that speaks for them and the preciousness of their heritage. It isn't as though dreadlocks are rampant on the reservation -- Hopi longhairs favor ponytails and the occasional braid -- and it isn't hero worship. There are more Michael Jordan jerseys being worn here than Bob Marley T-shirts. But ask Hopis under 50 what draws tribe members to reggae (some older Hopis do view a devotion to the music, particularly because of its association with marijuana, as a diminution of traditional values), and they use words like "relevance" and "identification." "It's mostly the lyrics," said Jennifer Joseph, a painter and graphic artist who grew up in a traditional Hopi family on the reservation. "They sing about the same things we feel. They sing about oppression, and we feel that here. And they sing about peace and unity in the world, which is what our religion teaches us. But it's the beat, too. It has the same feel as our tribal drumming." The relevance and identification go both ways. At Friday's show, Joseph Hill, the lead singer for Culture, a Jamaican band that has been here half a dozen times in the last decade, paused between songs to declare: "Christopher Columbus discovered America -- that's a damn lie." Resplendent in a white suit, his dreads flying, he was speaking indigenous North American to indigenous North American, exploited people to exploited people. The cheers were wild. Indeed, one reason the Hopi accept reggae so easily, said Poulingyama, is that "they're not trying to take anything from us." "They just come to bring us music," he said. In an interview after he came offstage, Hill said of the Hopi: "This culture is quite specific and lonely in its own right. But they are not the only ones. The Rastafarians make two. The black man suffered the same as the Hopi, but until this day we have never brushed against each other. The only thing that has kept us apart is the journey between homes." Hill, asked what made a Hopiland gig special, replied, "Boy, everything." And he spoke of the percussion in Hopi music "that could well blend in with reggae," and of the local landscape. "If you are artistic, you can see tons of pictures in these rocks," he said. "That brings me home." In keeping with both cultures, as the language on both sides indicates, the bond between them seems spiritual, and genuinely felt. "There's something you just feel with this audience that you can't put into words," said Richard Daley, who plays with the band Third World, and was making his second trip to Hopiland. "They look at you with this glow, as if to say, 'Hey, we've been waiting for you."' In a way they have. People here generally credit Bob Marley, the Jamaican singer who died in 1981, and his band, the Wailers, with instilling a love of reggae among the Hopi in the early 1970s. Those were the days of reggae's peak popularity around the country, if not the globe. They were radio days on the reservation, where there was little live music but for the occasional country dance, and where television was not yet ubiquitous. "I remember I first heard it through my cousins, and I just got the groove," said Burt Poley, 36, who is now a wood-carver whose specialty is the kachina dolls that represent Hopi spirits. In the early 1980s, he was one of a group of particularly intense devotees that ended up being the first importers of reggae to the res. For years they had been so hungry for reggae that they took to traveling to Phoenix for concerts by local bands, a four-hour drive each way. "We'd drive down late in the afternoon, go to the show, get back at 4 a.m. and go to work that morning," said Gerry Gordon, a white man who lived and taught elementary school on the reservation for two decades until he began working in a Phoenix school this year. It was partly, if not entirely, out of sheer exhaustion, he said, that they conceived the idea that would bloom into a tradition. "Finally we just thought, 'You know? Maybe it would be easier to bring the reggae to us."' He and his friends, a group of half a dozen, all of whom were Hopi, arranged for a Phoenix band to play in an elementary school gym on the reservation in the fall of 1983. Two hundred people showed up, "and for most of them it was the first time they'd ever heard live reggae," Gordon said. It was a couple of months later that he got a call from a record company in Washington that had somehow got wind of the Hopi interest in reggae, and which offered to send some of its artists out for a show. In 1984, the first Jamaicans to play the reservation, Freddie McGregor, and a band called Michigan & Smiley, arrived. Since then, there have been some 35 shows there, presented under a general billing in mock-Jamaican patois: "Reggae Inna Hopiland." Most of the shows have been produced by Gordon's and Poley's group, which calls itself Culture Connection. Along with a promoter in Phoenix, Artist Resources, they arranged for the Spirit of Unity tour to stop in Hopiland between dates in Santa Fe and Phoenix. The bands were eager. Indeed, to make the stop in Hopiland, they agreed to play for about a fourth of their usual rate and did without a lot of the perks -- dressing rooms, specially ordered food -- that are frequently negotiated as performers' rights. "They're basically doing the Hopiland show for free," said Terri Larsen, the president of Artist Resources, who also produced the show in Phoenix on Saturday night. "Basically they're just charging us for sound and light and transportation. It's costing us $12,500." A third of the profits will go toward building a playground in the Hopi village of Polacca. Curiously, the Hopi have yet to produce much reggae music of their own, though one young singer and songwriter, Casper Lomayesva, has produced a first CD and has been performing in Arizona and in neighboring western states. Lomayesva, 30, grew up largely on the reservation, listening to reggae on the radio and helping his grandfather tend the cornfields. The CD is on his own label, Third Mesa Records, which is based in Phoenix, where he now lives; it is called "Original Landlord," a reference to the Hopi claim on its land. (The Hopi have lost land over the centuries, but unlike many Native American tribes, they have never been relocated by the federal government.) The title song, a kind of melodic rap, sad and angry, with local subject matter but some locutions borrowed from the Caribbean, goes this way, in part: Our Hopi reservation no stretch far and wide It gives us sense of purpose, me say sense of pride Religion and our culture help keep us strong I'm proud of these people, that's why me sing this song Just check the history books, it is not what I say The government, the policies they take my land away Standing in the family field, fingering the cornstalks, impossibly healthy in the sandy soil, Lomayesva pointed to a distant tree. "I've written songs right in this field," he said. "I wrote 'Original Landlord' sitting under that tree." So are Hopi who love reggae made. Reggae musicians who love Hopiland are made with a visit. "It's an ancient place, a very spiritual place, that's how it looks to me," said David Kirton, a singer from Barbados, shortly after he arrived in Hopiland for the first time. "I'm one for picking up vibes. And the vibes are very good, too." Reprinted under the Fair Use http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html doctrine of international copyright law. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Unenh onhwa' Awayaton http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/ UPDATES: CAMP JUSTICE http://shell.webbernet.net/~ishgooda/oglala/ &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&
