President Chester Arthur wasn’t aware of the admirable precision of their language. Like most Americans, he figured the Hopi got along with a limited collection of ancient grunts.
On a crisp day, he signed the executive order shortly before Christmas in 1882.
The ink from Chester Arthur’s pen that established the Hopi Reservation bled like the poison tearing up his kidneys. The President was slowly dying and the Hopi were now boxed in, confined to a reservation within a reservation, entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
Back then, nobody in Washington could begin to imagine the intricacy of a language other than their own, the foul semantics of patronage and greed. They had no idea the Hopi had twenty different names for different stages of life their corn plants passed through.
Far from the men who boxed them in, the Hopi danced and prayed and paid tribute. Their heavens unfolded and they offered thanks to the gods that guided the growth of their crops of corn, their Earth Mother and Sky Father.
President Chester Arthur didn’t know much about what was happening out in the Arizona Territory, out where the Hopi were left to languish.
But he was a charmer. They say he was impossible to dislike. And President Arthur was masterful at concealing the truth of the death he knew was coming.
There were no confidantes. He kept knowledge of the Bright’s Disease he knew was killing him hidden away, hidden like the Hopi banished to their reservation.
