My life as a Hopi Indian

By:Jada Carter

My name is Catori, which means spirit.

I am a Hopi Indian and I am apart of the Hopi tribe.

I live with my family in the Southwest Region.

This is my story…

About Me

Journal Entry 1:Summer Today, I'm waking up to go pick crops. I hate that I live on a mesa and have to climb down. Whenever I have to pick crops, I don’t feel like walking. The house I have to climb out of is called a pueblo. It sort of looks like a modern apartment, that you probably live in. I wish I lived in those.Anyway,the hill that my house sits on is called a mesa. When my mother, Pocahontas and I leave to go pick crops, she is always the one up first. Can't you see why I don’t I don’t want to wake up? It is fun having a house made up of clay where you can just pull it off the wall and play with it, but sometimes it is sort of boring.

Journal Entry 1:Summer When my mother and I go to honor the gods once a week, we go in our most traditional clothing. I don't like it much because it is so itchy and I wear it for three hours. We go once a week with my cousin, Yahoo, who is 11,and she is the daughter of Powhatan,the chief. My traditional clothing is a dress with flowers and a feather band I put on my head. Some of my mother’s traditional clothes are made out of plant fiber and animal hair and hides. Her clothes are beautiful. She wears her hair out because it’s so long and dark brown. I wish my hair was like that. My hair is short and light brown and gets itchy a lot.

Journal Entry 1:SummerI am so hungry I could eat a boar. I like to eat and the food we Hopi Indians eat is delicious. When my mother and I pick crops in the morning, we pick corn,melons,and beans. We also have a farm where we raise sheep and hunt rabbits and bison who try to eat our crops. My father used to do all the hunting but he died a couple of months ago in a hunting accident. Now my mom has to scare them away with her gun. Farming in the summer is hard because we have little rainfall, so we use dry farming, and studied how the water flowed after a rainstorm. If we do get water, we get some from the river, or the water we have to clean from the cacti. When we get cacti water, it is brownish.

Journal Entry 1:SummerOur tribe is very unique. We do things that

other tribes don’t do. When my dad was still alive, he and the other men from the tribe would hunt and my dad would help my mom and I harvest crops. My dad was a skilled hunter and was the leader of a secret society, and they met in these underground rooms called kivas.Only the most important tribal men were there. There were only a couple of societies. Now the women, they did something a little different. When your parents got married did your dad make your mom’s dress,robe,belt,and her shoes? Well that’s what my dad and Powhatan did when my parents got married. I was only 2,and I am 11 now, so I don’t remember much, but I hear stories that my mom looked beautiful. When my dad was still alive, my parents would get all mushy when they told the story.

Journal Entry 2: SummerOh my goodness, It is sooooo hot here in Arizona. There are so many deserts, I can’t even go to the beach.See,you’re lucky. You have water, and water animals, and surfers. Do you know what I have? Coyotes and cacti!!!There is no sight of water miles from here. Tons of trees, though. WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO WITH TREES???!!!!!THEY DO NOTHING!!!!!!!!NO THING!!!!!!!!Sorry I got mad. It just angers me how we have little to any water. Water is fun. You can do tons of thing with it. Plateaus are useless as much as trees. What do you do, roll down them? I mean that's an idea but its boring. Sometimes I watch the common animals like the sheep and the tortoises. When I want to go into nature, I go into the open land in the back of our pueblo and try to find lizards and snakes, but they're easy to find. Don't you just love nature? There are flowers like white ball acacias,fernbushes,and catlaw acacias.

Journal Entry 3:SummerYYYAAAWWWNNN!!!It’s so hot here it will make you tired, like me. It is bone dry with the only water that comes is from the cacti and the little rainfall we get. The days are so long but then the weather wants to be mid temperature at night! I mean I go to bed early and do not have time to go outside. Because my mom is so old fashioned, she won’t let us get a fan like the other families in the tribe. We have a stupid hole in our rooms that lets in the air, but it’s hot air. When I go outside with Yahoo we take our knives and drink water from the cacti.Hey,it’s water. When there is no water found, we have to drink the blood we get from the animals we hunted, or we squeeze our fruits and make fruit juices. It is sometimes hard to do because when we are gone, animals like to eat our crops, especially our fruit.

Reflection1Well, this is my story. I hope you liked it. In my future I see Yahoo and I becoming pretty popular girls in the tribe. We are going to share our smart ways to find water and food resources. Once we share, we’ll be appreciated in the tribe. My mother always says that I need to be myself to make real friends, and not become somebody else to fit in. It was great advice to use, and I think it will work.

In the next couple of years or so, and my mom and I will still try to keep the animals away, as much as we can. Since my dad died, the men haven’t been doing much hunting. Yahoo told me that Powhatan will take over hunting, even though he knows that he is not as good as my dad was. My mom and I aren’t the only ones missing my dad.

Reflection 2I think that the project went well but I think I could’ve gotten more information about characteristics of my tribe and got just gender roles. I think that I could’ve gotten more research on the government, if there is one, and added it in. What I enjoyed was that I could be a character and talk as a person. First-person reports are more interesting and can be more interesting than regular reports. What I didn’t enjoy was that I was sometimes behind on what I was supposed to be on and had to do more work than other people. Because of that, I had to work twice as hard as other people to be finished. I would give myself a 95 out of 100 because even though I had a good presentation, I could’ve had more information in some areas. It is something that I will focus on in the future.

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Thank you for reading!!

That’s The Show!