James F. Brooks

What makes this book hard to get to grips with is that it's like a surrealist painting where there is no subject, just the surrounding context. All we really know for sure about the massacre of 1700 is that a community had fallen into such a state of chaos that said community's headman called in assistance to eliminate chaos, with extreme prejudice; the authority of the elite clans trumped all other considerations apparently. From there, Brooks goes on a looping look at such topics as the great Pueblo Revolt of the late 17th century, Hopi notions of history, the structural makeup of the Hopi community (or lack thereof), and the Hopi relationship with supernatural forces. The bottom line is that it appears that the real crime of the Awat'ovi community was that they were seen as potential Spanish sympathizers, as they appear to have been practicing a heterodox form of Catholicism. I wound up liking this book but I can see how a lot of readers would bounce off it.… (más)

I was looking forward to reading this book. I wish I could say that I loved it, but I really didn't, not at all. In fact, I had trouble slogging through the pages.

To start with, the subtitle - A History of the Awat'ovi Massacre - implies a narrow focus. That subtitle turns out to be misleading. I was surprised by how little attention the Awat'ovi Massacre received within these pages. This book turns into something more akin to a broad history of the Hopis. The events here span from well before 1300 all the way up through the early 1900s. Much of the content focuses on the 1800s, into the 1900s, when the Awat'ovi Massacre took place all the way back in 1700. The scope of information feels too ambitious, particularly for a book that sits at just 222 pages, discounting the notes and bibliography.

Then there is the timeline, which is anything but linear. We zigzag back and forth, and around and about, spanning centuries, with no cohesion to the storyline.

Finally, the content, for me, felt jumbled and disjointed. We jump from internecine warfare to superstitions to archaeological digs to Christianity and the Franciscans, then back to warfare, and soon we're on to village life, and then back to religion. The whole thing made me dizzy.

The author does offer some interesting detail about Awat'ovi specifically, and the Native American culture in general. For me, though, the structure of the book made this a difficult read.… (más)

Very interesting story of the massacre at Awat'ovi and the circumstances, myths, and legends that surround it. By and large, the narrative was crafted in a very compelling manner, shifting focus not only between the massacre and the events leading up to it, but also moving ahead in time to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as archeologists and anthropologists tried to make sense of what happened to the Awat'ovi village in 1700. The book draws upon a variety of sources, including ethnographies, archeological records, and oral histories, all of which help reveal facets of the society that existed and the scholarly/ anthropological understanding of that society.

My primary gripe with the book was that parts of the argument did not feel fully explored, and many interesting details were mentioned and then dropped.… (más)