universal woman's task of bearing and rearing children and providing
meals and home comforts accounting for most of her day.

She is the carrier of water, and since it must be borne on her back from
the spring below the village mesa this is a burden indeed. She is, too,
the builder of the house, though men willingly assist in any heavy
labor when wanted. But why on earth should so kindly a people make woman
the carrier of water and the mason of her home walls? Tradition! "It has
always been this way."

Her leisure is employed in visiting her neighbors, for the Hopi are a
conspicuously sociable people, and in the making of baskets or pottery.
One hears a great deal about Hopi pottery, but the pottery center in
Hopiland is the village of Hano, on First Mesa, and the people are not
Hopi but Tewas, whose origin shall presently be explained.

Not until recent years has pottery been made elsewhere in Hopiland than
at Hano. At present, however, Sichomovi, the Hopi village built so close
to Hano that one scarce knows where one ends and the other begins, makes
excellent pottery as does the Hopi settlement at the foot of the hill,
Polacca. Undoubtedly this comes from the Tewa influence and in some
cases from actual Tewa families who have come to live in the new
locality. For instance, Grace, maker of excellent pottery, now living at
Polacca, is a Tewa who lived in Hano twenty years ago, when the writer
first knew her, and continued to live there until a couple of years ago.
Nampeo, most famous potter in Hopiland, is an aged Tewa woman still
living at Hano, in the first house at the head of the trail. Her
ambitious study of the fragments of the pottery of the ancients, in the
ruins of old Sikyatki, made her the master craftsman and developed a new
standard for pottery-making in her little world.

Mention was made previously of the women employing their leisure in the
making of baskets or pottery. An interesting emphasis should be placed
upon the "or," for no village does both. The women of the three villages
mentioned at First Mesa as pottery villages make no baskets. The three
villages on Second Mesa make a particular kind of coiled basket found
nowhere else save in North Africa, and no pottery nor any other kind of
basket. The villages of Third Mesa make colorful twined or wicker
baskets and plaques, just the one kind and no pottery. They stick as
closely to these lines as though their wares were protected by some
tribal "p