

government continues to impose its jurisdiction and its way of life, not only will traditional Hopi way of life and a covenant with the Creator be compromised, but mankind’s very survival will be jeopardized. Have we begun the period of the third and final world shattering event, the separation from nature? Indeed, it was the Hopi who warned the world of the “world shaking events” of which WWI and WW2 were the first. Immeasurable wisdom carried on for generations, knowledge of the land that the dominant society needs to turn to in this of unprecedented climate change.

Forced acculturation all over the planet has deprived Native peoples of their land, language and very being. They have been put in jails without trial in Alcatraz, had children kidnapped, and put in American schools, like so many Indigenous tribes around the world. All in clear violation of what would later become the Genocide Convention Implementation Act. In 1906 they were even starved so the “outlaw” traditional would sign a contract with Washington, DC. The Hopi had suffered mercilessly at the hands of the U.S. Thomas raised his arms, as if brandishing an imaginary sword, the potential sword of nuclear annihilation, the nuclear sword of Damocles that hangs over all of civilization and the planet. They would succeed in addressing the General Assembly, but their voice would fall on deaf ears.

The Hopi had been trying to get their message to the United Nations for years.

What unique and immemorial relationship with existence has humanity expunged in the name of progress? The answers are starting to haunt civilization in ways we cannot measure. An indigenous group has disappeared every year since 1900. When I first heard Thomas’ words, I received them mainly as stories, warnings about Western man’s way of life that was out of balance with the Creator’s Law, a law that was once the very basis of our own Declaration of Independence. But before that, we will have to go through the eye of the storm. Thomas shared the vision of the now famous Hopi prophecies that describe this time of Powateoni, of purification, of social and ecological disruption that will eventually bring a time of lasting peace over the world’s people. When they speak about the elemental realities it is on the order of revelation. The Hopi are the preeminent dry farmers on Earth. There is a sense of profound freedom, clear and stark as the distant horizon. To Western eyes, this almost inhospitable land is where one Nation, the Hopi have thrived without warfare for over a thousand years. In 1990, I had the extraordinary opportunity to visit the home of Martin Gashweseoma and Thomas Banyacya, Hopi elders in Hotevilla, the last traditional village on the Hopi Mesas, in the midst of the searingly dry and vast Arizona desert.
