the light of all that surrounds it, no one can say, but in
all human probability it is making its last gallant stand.

These Pueblo Indians are very unlike the nomadic tribes around them.
They are a sedentary, peaceful people living in permanent villages and
presenting today a significant transitional phase in the advance of a
people from savagery toward civilization and affording a valuable study
in the science of man.

Naturally they are changing, for easy transportation has brought the
outside world to their once isolated home. It is therefore highly
important that they be studied first-hand now for they will not long
stay as they are.

III. HOPI SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

* * * * *

=Government=

In government, the village is the unit, and a genuinely democratic
government it is. There is a house chief, a Kiva chief, a war chief, the
speaker chief or town crier, and the chiefs of the clans who are
likewise chiefs of the fraternities; all these making up a council which
rules the pueblo, the crier publishing its decisions. Laws are
traditional and unwritten. Hough[5] says infractions are so few that it
would be hard to say what the penalties are, probably ridicule and
ostracism. Theft is almost unheard of, and the taking of life by force
or law is unknown.

[Footnote 5: Hough, Walter, The Hopi: Torch Press, Cedar Rapids, 1915.]

To a visitor encamped at bedtime below the mesa, the experience of
hearing the speaker chief or town crier for the first time is something
long to be remembered. Out of the stillness of the desert night comes a
voice from the house tops, and such a voice! From the heights above, it
resounds in a sonorous long-drawn chant. Everyone listens breathlessly
to the important message and it goes on and on.

The writer recalls that when first she heard it, twenty years ago, she
sat up in bed and rousing the camp, with stage whispers (afraid to speak
aloud), demanded: "Do you hear that? What on earth can it mean? Surely
something awful has happened!" On and on it went endlessly. (She has
since been told that it is all repeated three times.) And not until
morning was it learned that the long speech had been merely the
announcement of a rabbit hunt for the next day. The oldest traditions of
the Hopi tell of this speaker chief and his important utterances. He is
a vocal bulletin board and the local newspaper, but his news is
principally of a religious nature, such