Customer Reviews

Pumpkin Seed Point: Being Within The Hopi

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Frank Waters' book on the Hopi is perhaps the best account of their rich traditions and history. You would be well served to read that but as equally interesting is this account of his living with the Hopi while working on that book. This is written in a straight forward style so it is an easy read. Water wisely leaves the complication of the Hopi for his more scholarly work. This book explains the characters that he met and the conditions of their lives. This book will break your heart. The Book of Hopi will liberate your soul.

If you're interested in reading Frank Waters you should read this first. If you're only going to read one book of his this would be the one. It recounts his life on the Hopi mesas while working with Hopi to get the Book of the Hopi into print. His experiences were really a microcosm of the larger problems between the cultures that were here at the time of European immigration and those incoming cultures. His understanding of the spiritual issues involved and the possibilities for integrating different world views into a new coherent whole is phenomenal and worth reading at the source. This is a great book.

Frank Waters wrote some of the best books we have about the culture and life of the American Southwest. His "Book of the Hopi" is the classic study of Hopi mythology and history, a labor of love described more personally in "Pumpkin Seed Point," about the three years he spent collecting stories for "Book of the Hopi."

"Pumpkin Seed Point" is both personal and universal. Referring to his research he writes:

"It wa a difficult winter for the two Bears and me. The kachina night dances were being held in the kivas of every village, and indomitably we went to everyone. Gorgeous as they were, each was an ordeal."

Referring to dreams, he writes:

"These 'voices of prophecy' were ancient gods, archetypal symbols and images speaking from the lowest level of unconsciousness."

For Waters, the poetic and mythical shared spacetime with nature and the pragmatic concerns of everyday life. Who would want to deny that the Hopi had insights into something more profound than we usually imagine within our modern materialistic obsessions? Who could deny that the Hopi suffered from modern obsessions?

Although writing in the 1960s, Waters' insights into the disappearance of the Anasazi remain as profound as any research that's followed him. His descriptions of Hopi life mirror what many of us imagine Anasazi life might have been like when we visit the great Anasazi ruins of Chaco, Aztec, Hovenweep, and Mesa Verde. I reread this classic recently at Chaco while working on my own novel, Ophelia's Ghost, about the disappearance of the Anasazi.