From the Archive/ Indigenous Peoples of the Southwest / Peter Whiteley
SCENE 1: THE RITUAL
It is August in the dusty pueblo plaza. Two lines of ritually men emerge from underground kivas and make their way The “Antelopes,” white-kilted and with white zigzags painted gray ground down their torsos, march past the arbor, plank-drum, and line up in front of it. The “Snakes,” painted kilted, march behind the Antelopes, stamping on the drum, to face them. A short song and dance follows. Then each goes to the arbor and procures a live snake. He places the neck between his teeth and dances the snake around the conclusion, the Snake men set all the snakes down into a cornmeal where they are sprinkled with cornmeal by Snake women; pick up the snakes again and race them out of the plaza.
You thought I was talking about the Hopi Snake right? Pay qa pam ‘i’ ‘That’s not it,” as a Hopi clown introduces his tawi or pun-story, whose words depend on sometimes obscene or perverse meanings for existing verbal representations. No, I’m talking about the Smoki Snake Dance, an ersatz performance, which coins new meaning, probably obscene, certainly perverse, for Hopi ritual representations. In the Smoki Snake Dance, the performers are white, the “pueblo” is plywood, the snakes are all bull (rattlers are the key snakes for Hopis) – in short, the ritual is a racist parody.
Founded in 1921 by Prescott businessmen to burlesque Indian ceremonies, the Smokis soon became more earnest, initiating a fraternal order, founding a museum with Indian artifacts and ethnographic books, and claiming to preserve Native American culture; the (racist) joke turned serious. The group has typically included men of influence in white Arizona. (Barry Goldwater was a member who performed three times; Arizona Republic August 5, 1990:2.)
The dance itself is a mishmash. Elements are close to the Hopi original. The kilts, for example, were probably purchased from Hopis in the past, the body paint and arbor setup are roughly accurate, some of the dance movements mimic the real thing – and my description might in- deed have been of the Hopi ceremony. But I was selective. I neglected to mention that the painted backdrop was illuminated by floodlights. (It was night; the Hopi ritual occurs in daylight.) The participants – divided into “warriors,” “braves,” and “squaws” under the leadership of “Chief Hairlip” (sic) – wore red bandannas over black long-haired wigs. There were drummers (there are none at Hopi) dressed like Hollywood Navajos, who pounded out a Western-movie-Indian, heavy-on-the-first- beat rhythm in four-four time; the rattles were painted coffee cans; and the “songs” (Oh! ah! oh! ah! oh! ah!) and dance movements seemed choreographed by the same characters who do “tribal” dances in Tarzan movies. […]
