She is the carrier of water, and since it must be borne on her back from the spring below the village mesa this is a burden indeed.  She is, too, the builder of the house, though men willingly assist in any heavy labor when wanted.  But why on earth should so kindly a people make woman the carrier of water and the mason of her home walls?  Tradition!  “It has always been this way.”

Her leisure is employed in visiting her neighbors, for the Hopi are a conspicuously sociable people, and in the making of baskets or pottery.  One hears a great deal about Hopi pottery, but the pottery center in Hopiland is the village of Hano, on First Mesa, and the people are not Hopi but Tewas, whose origin shall presently be explained.

Not until recent years has pottery been made elsewhere in Hopiland than at Hano.  At present, however, Sichomovi, the Hopi village built so close to Hano that one scarce knows where one ends and the other begins, makes excellent pottery as does the Hopi settlement at the foot of the hill, Polacca.  Undoubtedly this comes from the Tewa influence and in some cases from actual Tewa families who have come to live in the new locality.  For instance, Grace, maker of excellent pottery, now living at Polacca, is a Tewa who lived in Hano twenty years ago, when the writer first knew her, and continued to live there until a couple of years ago.  Nampeo, most famous potter in Hopiland, is an aged Tewa woman still living at Hano, in the first house at the head of the trail.  Her ambitious study of the fragments of the pottery of the ancients, in the ruins of old Sikyatki, made her the master craftsman and developed a new standard for pottery-making in her little world.

Mention was made previously of the women employing their leisure in the making of baskets or pottery.  An interesting emphasis should be placed upon the “or,” for no village does both.  The women of the three villages mentioned at First Mesa as pottery villages make no baskets.  The three villages on Second Mesa make a particular kind of coiled basket found nowhere else save in North Africa, and no pottery nor any other kind of basket.  The villages of Third Mesa make colorful twined or wicker baskets and plaques, just the one kind and no pottery.  They stick as closely to these lines as though their wares were protected by some tribal “patent right.”  Pottery for First Mesa, coiled baskets for Second Mesa, and wicker baskets for Third Mesa.

The writer has known the Hopi a long time, and has asked them many times the reason for this.  The villages are only a few miles apart, so the same raw materials are available to all.  These friends merely laugh good naturedly and answer:  “O, the only reason is, that it is just the way we have always done it.”

Natural conservatives, these Hopi, and yet not one of them but likes a bright new sauce-pan from the store for her cooking, and a good iron stove, for that matter, if she can afford it.  There is no tradition against this, we are told.