THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
Hopi tradition tells that humanity has lived in a succession of worlds, each abandoned as it fell into corruption. As the Third World failed, the people heard footsteps in the sky above them, planted a reed (in some tellings a spruce), and climbed up through its hollow stem, emerging through an opening in the sky into the present Fourth World. That opening is the Sípàapuni. On emerging, the people made a covenant with Màasaw, the guardian of this world, and received their migration routes, finally settling on the three mesas; this emergence and migration narrative underlies Hopi clan organization and land claims.
The Sípàapuni the Hopi point to is a real place: a tan travertine spring mound deep in the gorge of the Little Colorado River, near its confluence with the Colorado, tens of meters across, with an opening at the crown of its dome and mineral water welling up from below. Together with the Grand Canyon region it is Hopi sacred ground and a station on the traditional salt pilgrimage route; the Hopi ask that visitors not intrude upon it.
The sipapu has been built into Pueblo architecture: kivas, the sunken ceremonial chambers of the Hopi and other Pueblo peoples, carry a small pit in the floor as a symbolic sipapu marking the passage to the world below. Archaeologists find the same feature in great kivas a thousand years old at Chaco Canyon, a measure of the emergence narrative's depth. The Zuni, Acoma, and other Pueblo nations each hold their own traditions of an emergence place.
