American Indian Culture and Research Journal

INTRODUCTION In 1946, an elderly and respected member of the Bluebird clan and spokesman for the kikrnongwi (villagechief) of Shungopavi village announced in a meeting that, in the early days of his training and instruction as a religious leader, he was told that when a gourd of ashes fell from the sky, he was to tell certain teachings, traditions, and prophecies that had been previously secret. Leaders of other clans mentioned the same instructions. They agreed that the "gourd of ashes" specified in their oral traditions could be nothing else but the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Other meetings followed this one, in 1947, 1948, and 1949, and a social movement was in the making. The movement's leaders issued a series of manifestos, position statements, and petitions beginning in 1949 and continuing into the late 1980s. Its leaders and participants called themselves "Hopi Traditionalists," or simply "Traditionalists." From 1948 through the 1980s, the Traditionalists functioned as a coalition of Hopi leaders from several villages, plus a varying number of Hopi activists and sympathizers. Although Hopi Traditionalists are still active today, the movement has largely lost its coalition of leaders and is disappearing through institutionalization. The behavior of the movement’s participants and its sociopolitical character have resulted in its being designated a faction and even a party, but I think party and faction are less appropriate than movement. Although the movement’s history reflects strong goal-orientation toward very concrete political issues, there are also some messianic and millennial aspects in the movement’s ideology.