Description

Emory Sekaquaptewa dedicated most of his life to promoting Hopi literacy and creating written materials to strengthen the language and lifeway of his people. He understood how intimately cultural ideas are embedded in language, and by transcribing and translating early recordings of katsina songs he helped strengthen the continuity of Hopi religious thought and cultural practices. Sekaquaptewa believed that the advice contained in the katsina songs, some of which were recorded over a century ago, could be used by future generations as guideposts for navigating contemporary life. Hopi Katsina Songs contains Hopi transcriptions, English translations, and detailed commentaries of 150 katsina songs, recorded throughout the twentieth century from all three Hopi mesas, as well as twenty-five recorded by Sekaquaptewa himself. To further continue the creative process of the Hopi legacy, Sekaquaptewa included song fragments with the hope that readers would remember the songs and complete them. These features make his collection an invaluable resource for preserving and teaching Hopi language and culture. Emory Sekaquaptewa (1928-2007) was a Hopi educator, Hopi Court judge, artist, and research anthropologist at the University of Arizona, as well as the first American Indian to attend West Point. Kenneth C. Hill, now retired, is a former research associate at the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology and the Department of Linguistics at the University of Arizona and is the coauthor of Hopi Dictionary/Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni: A Hopi-English Dictionary of the Third Mesa Dialect. Dorothy K. Washburn is a consulting scholar for the University Museum at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the coauthor of Symmetries of Culture: Theory and Practice of Plane Pattern Analysis.

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