Novel Excerpt

    Oddly enough, or maybe not, this part of the story begins in New York City, in the early 1960s, in a high rise boardroom, blinded with morning sunlight. At the head of a table stood a tall philanthropist clothed in late fashion brought back from her recent trip to Europe. Around the table were lawyer types, and in the corner on a couch, was a lanky, chain-smoking, ethnologist. Of course a philanthropist is someone who donates funds to causes, and an ethnologist is someone who studies cosmologies—or what a people believes about themselves and where they came from—their origins. For instance, the Judeo-Christian-Muslim cosmology is about a god who created the Sun and Earth, a garden, and humans.

    The ethnologist is sitting there, looking down on the East River, listening to the American philanthropist explain her fascination and love for Native American culture—the indians as they called natives back then—and she’s concerned that the culture of the pueblo tribes—those that dwelled near the Four Corners area—where Utah/Colorado/New Mexico/Arizona meet—would be lost unless she paid someone to go out there, live with them, and record it all.

    The ethnologist sitting on the couch was Phillip Stonefield, he took the job offered by the philanthropist’s foundation, goes out to the oldest rock apartments known, atop three giant mesas in the center of the American south west, and tries to get in with the tribe. The name of the tribe is the Hopi, and all the other tribes acknowledge that the Hopi were there first, supposedly descended from an even earlier tribe which had broken up and disappeared south.

   The Hopi mesas look like massive stone tabletops rising a thousand feet above the vast desert floor, and then on top of them, are the rock apartments. The ethnologist gets there and rents a little rock room from a Hopi who had married an Irish wife, and who rent the room to passers-by. Stonefield ends up living with the Hopi for three years with ups and downs, where he achieved access to the inner circle of elders, and then lost it, and then regained it. So he barely gets the book because of a lot of argument within the Hopi tribe, based on what had happened to them in the past.

    The Hopi had been there for thousands of years, and when the Navajo came along, the Hopi gave up some of their land to maintain peace. In fact that’s what their name means—People of Peace. The Hopi and Navajo co-existed for awhile and then the Spanish and missionaries showed up. Shortly thereafter came a moment in the history of the Hopi where tribe members from two of the mesas went and killed members on the other mesa because they had started working with the missionaries. The missionaries were trying to destroy the Hopi teachings and prophecies.