Couple Celebrates Heritage With Hopi Wedding

POLACCA, Ariz. - The bride walked up the hill, barefoot in the dusty driveway, wearing a manta, the black one-shoulder dress of the Hopi maiden. Her eyes downcast, Delight was beautiful, dignified, somber; a modern woman following an ancient tradition.

She carried a basket of blue cornmeal tied in a cloth. With her were her two daughters, Mariah, 3, and Miranda, 5, and her female relatives.

Delight Dalton and Frank Poocha grew up on the Hopi reservation. She is from the most traditional area, Third Mesa, and speaks the Hopi language. Frank's mother is Pima, and his father is Hopi.

"I have three brothers, and for a long time my dad wanted us to have Hopi weddings, to keep the tradition alive," Frank said.

When Frank's father died, he left each son a cow for their weddings. But there were to be no Hopi weddings for Frank's brothers; they all married Navajos and didn't have the ceremony. When Frank and Dee were joined in a civil marriage at Phoenix City Hall a year ago, Frank's mom gave them a dinner. Dee's family arrived with multiple truckloads of food, in the traditional way.

And the two families began planning the wedding Frank's late father wanted.

Delight, 35, and Frank, 34, live in central Phoenix and have been together for six years.

So why a Hopi wedding?

"It's good for us," said Frank, a Native-American musician. "We are in that era where our culture is the connecting link. Either we learn and continue the religion, or it's gone." The realization makes him feel almost desperate, he added.

Just in their parents' generation, Frank said, many of the traditions have been lost. He said the next two generations are crucial.

"We grew up on the reservation doing all the things little Hopi boys and girls do. But now we have to teach our little kids how to be as Hopi as they can, trying to teach them a way of life."

Frank and Delight's wedding was part of the teaching, and it involved many family members. Once the couple agreed to the wedding, they had little say in it. Almost every weekend for a year, they made the five-hour trip from Phoenix to Hopiland, helping get ready.

The work seems endless.

"We more or less have to prove that our family is worthy of having him," Delight said of the massive food exchanges that are central to Hopi weddings. "In Hopi tradition, when the man gets married, he belongs to me."

Series of events

By tradition, during the opening part of the wedding, the bride grinds corn at her mother-in-law's home while the men weave her wedding robes in the kiva. Corn is sacred to the Hopis.

The ceremonial parts of a Hopi wedding usually last at least a week. This one was compressed into three days over a long weekend.

On Friday afternoon, the arrival of the bride at the home of the groom's mother was the first major event of the Hopi wedding.

In procession behind the bride were a line of 20 pickup trucks stretching down the highway. The bride and daughters entered her mother-in-law's home and were seated to one side.

The house, a double-wide mobile home in the shadow of First Mesa, had been cleared of almost all furnishings in anticipation of the arrival of the bride's family from Hotevilla, on Third Mesa.

Delight's family was ready to pay for Frank.

Her family paid two years' worth of corn harvest to Frank's family, and there is more to come to pay off the debt of her robes.

"We think it'll take three years," said Delight's sister, Lynn Nuvamsa, who was one of the family members who kept track of donations. "We're shooting for a year and a half."

Thus do Hopi weddings stretch backward and forward in time, forming a complex web of obligatory preparation and payback.

Unloaded from the trucks were piki bread, the traditional tissue-like bread of the Hopis, ten 30-gallon barrels of blue cornmeal and white flour.

With each item that came into the house, the men said, "Kwa kwai," and the women said, "Askwali." Both expressions mean "thank you."

Last were the baked goods, a boggling array of cakes, pies, yeast breads, cookies, doughnuts, brownies, quick breads.

The food was Delight's dowry, donated by her immediate family and clan family members. It would be divided up among Frank's family members who helped with the wedding.

Delight was now me-we, the in-law. She had been accepted by Frank's family.

Quite the wedding banquet

In a Hopi wedding, the bride's family brings the hearth-oriented goods, showing their prowess as homemakers with huge amounts of flour, cornmeal, baked goods. The groom's family takes back to her village the supplies a hunter would bring: meat, firewood, clothing, groceries.

At least 12 sheep died for this wedding, plus a cow left by Frank's dad.

After the unloading and stacking the first evening, Friday, the big meals commenced.

Behind the house, 20 feet of cooking fires and a windbreak had been set up. A fire pit was dug, and an outdoor kitchen constructed.

On Saturday morning, Frank and Delight and the girls knelt in the living room over tubs of warm water to have their hair symbolically washed.

The water was saved to take back to Hotevilla, where Delight's mom used it to mop the floors, a symbolic marking of the space. Frank had a brief, chilly ritual bath on the front porch in a washtub, and after it, Delight's mom gave him a blanket.

Accompanied by their mothers, Delight and Frank walked toward the sunrise and tossed cornmeal, an offering with a prayer to the sun.

Delight and her daughters had a final ceremonial hair washing Sunday morning.

Then, sheets were spread on the floor for the dressing of the bride. Delight wore her black dress. Over their little-girl clothes, Mandy and Mariah were dressed in long-sleeved dresses made for the occasion.

Over the dresses the girls wore their own black mantas, one-shoulder maiden dresses secured with a red, woven belt that had to be wrapped and tucked a certain way.

Then it was time to don the ovah, the white wool blankets, with tassels on the corners to represent corn and fertility. Prayer feathers had been attached in the kiva.

Delight explained before the wedding that the robes were "my ticket to heaven." They have a dual purpose: The robes that the Hopi bride wears at her wedding will someday serve as her shroud.

When Delight and the girls were dressed, they were seated with Frank in a row of chairs.

Delight then made a thank-you speech, her poise cracking for the first time. "Askwali," she started. Then she said in Hopi, "I want to thank everyone who has labored very hard in order for this to happen, and because of that, we are very happy. We are finishing beautifully."