Gathering Cloth

15''H x 13''W

Our people are an ancient people and we trace our history back many thousands of years, dating back to prehistoric times. We eventually migrated to Arizona from the south two thousand years ago.

Our ancestry has depended upon an ancient method of dry farming and the cultivation of corn, beans, squash, gourds, and cotton. We are desert dwellers living atop three mesas and believe in a life of peace and goodwill.

They say that the Kachina people long ago brought us the seed of tiny ears of corn in a bundle, the sacred food that nourished us since times unknown. This bundle is known as the "gathering cloth." The gathering cloth is used for a multitude of purposes or when it is necessary to carry any load up and down the mesa walls before the burro was introduced to us by the Spanish. A gathering cloth can aid with the burdens of carrying wood, carrying the harvest to the villages, seed to the fields, or carrying our young babies.

This Hopi woman wears the married hair and is kneeling with her harvested corn. She has no face, which symbolizes the egalitarian society of the Hopi people. She represents a people, not an individual.