Some of the highlights of a traditional wedding include the weaving of the wedding robes by the uncles of the groom’s family in the kiva. The bride remains in her in-laws’ home until the robes are completed, and she will wear them on her journey home. During this time, the bride grinds corn and prepares meals for the groom’s family. Then, people gather at the groom’s home and a grand mud fight takes place. The groom’s female relatives tease and taunt the bride and the literal mudslinging begins. They eventually go after other relatives who are permitting the groom to be married off. After everyone has cleaned up, the bride’s family travels to the groom’s home with food and gifts – with trucks full of cornmeal, flour, bread, pies, and piki bread. In the Honanie and Honanveama wedding there were nearly 30 trucks filled with food and gifts, including 68 cardboard boxes full of piki. These gifts are then distributed to the many people who helped prepare for the wedding. This is followed by a meal with family and all those who have helped. Before the sun rises on the fifth day, the mothers of the bride and groom, and their female relatives, wash the couple’s hair together. Female family members line up one by one to add water to the basin and wash the couple’s hair and bless the marriage. After the bride and groom’s hair is washed and intertwined together, the bride’s mother takes them outside to meet the rising sun. They sprinkle white cornmeal to bless the marriage, ending the wedding ceremony itself. On the final day, the bride returns to her home wearing her robes and everyone gathers for another feast. A Hopi traditional wedding is a huge inter-clan and inter-village collaborative effort.
While every Hopi wedding differs somewhat, given family traditions and who is being married to whom, certain aspects of the traditions serve as scaffolding for the health and sustainability of both the marriage and the family, especially the rearing of children. Hopi families and societies are structured around matrilineal clans. One is born into one’s mother’s clan. Historically, and in many meaningful ways today, a man join’s his wife’s household, but he also brings to the marriage his mother’s family. These two extended families will work together to support the nuclear family, providing other “mothers,” “aunties,” “fathers,” godparents, and mentors to the children. A Hopi wedding locks in “the village” that will help raise the children of the marriage. A Hopi wedding is also a recognition of, and the acceptance of, the bride or groom, by each respective extended family. The wedding initiates a life-long set of reciprocal obligations both in family life and in the annual ceremonial life the village. A traditional Hopi marriage is binding across the bride, groom, and their extended families for life. There is no divorce.
All of this said, many Hopis who might be considered “married” under the western common law, or who may have had a “western” wedding, have not had the benefit of a traditional Hopi wedding. Also, many Hopis have married non-Hopis and have only one set of extended family members who might support them in Hopi family and ceremonial life. A particularly unlucky circumstance is where someone is only Hopi on their father’s side, leaving them without a clan. If this person marries a non-Hopi or someone in a similar circumstance, there will be no maternal extended family support for them and their family in the village. Many unmarried couples living on the reservation also have multiple children together. When these couples separate or seek a divorce, there are a host of issues that are in addition to, and different from, the issues that might arise in a typical off-reservation divorce. When we see these cases in the Hopi Tribal Court, they appear as actions to determine paternity, child custody, child support, visitation, and/or for divorce, particularly in cases where there was a western marriage. The parties may also make custom law arguments such as that, under Hopi custom and tradition, it is the husband’s responsibility to build a house for his wife (e.g., in determining his financial obligations with respect to her ongoing mobile home payments) or that when he leaves the relationship, he takes only his personal belongings (which conflicts with any type of community property regime).
Prior to 2007, people living on the Hopi Reservation had little recourse but to litigate their issues before the Hopi Tribal Court. However, in 2006, the nonprofit Nakwatsvewat Institute (TNI), received an ANA-SEDS grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Administration for Native Americans to establish a Hopi community mediation program – Hopi Dispute Resolution Services (HDRS). HDRS was originally spearheaded by the Hopi Appellate Court, with guidance and support from attorney Forrest Mosten of Mosten Mediation in California, to assist the village’s governments in developing their capacity to handle village disputes locally through mediation, particularly property disputes.
The Hopi Appellate Court had witnessed the churning of probate and other property cases in the Hopi Tribal Court system, given the need for multiple, lengthy, custom law finding hearings, where the burden for paying attorney’s fees often fell on elderly and more traditional parties. The Hopi Tribal Council had not then, nor as of today, adopted a probate code. Nor has it adopted any laws governing marriage or divorce. It seemed that mediation was in order. Between 2006 and 2008, TNI and HDRS launched a series of trainings to recruit and train people from the Hopi and Tewa Villages to become mediators. Once trained, these mediators then went on to conduct live mediations in property cases. In 2009, HDRS received a second grant to train local mediators to handle family disputes. As part of this change in focus, TNI leadership explored multiple mediation models and decided to shift from a facilitative to a transformative mediation model, with the guidance and support of Louise Phipps-Senft with Baltimore Mediation in Baltimore, MD. Initially, this shift was prompted by the observation that even the property disputes at Hopi are essentially extended family disputes. Also, even with the assistance of some very talented outside mediators, Hopi community members reported that they experienced aggressive, directive, fast-paced processes driving parties to reach narrow agreements. The focus of the transformative mediation model is to build or repair relationships, or as they say in transformative mediation circles, “to get the parties back into going relationships.” This seemed both a necessary pre-requisite to, and a higher priority outcome than, merely reaching agreement on a narrow set of issue that could be enforced in court (or by a Village Board) – which, in any case, would be a byproduct of the transformative mediation process. Transformative mediation was also billed as “marital mediation,” meaning that couples could come to mediate how they might stay together, not only how they would separate.