Thomas Mails's compilation of Hopi elder teachings, prophecy, and warnings — including the centrality of water, the dangers of living beyond the land's limits, and the moral stakes embedded in the Colorado Plateau's future. A difficult, earnest transmission of Hopi cosmological thought that gives human and spiritual weight to the canyon country DM operates in.
Thomas Mails assembled this book from interviews and material provided by a group of Hopi traditional elders in the 1980s and 1990s. It is a compilation, not a single-author work, and its status as a document is complicated. The elders who participated wanted the material widely read because they believed the prophecies it contained were time-sensitive. Mails was the editor they trusted to produce a version for a general American audience. The book has been controversial within and outside the Hopi community ever since, and any reader approaching it should know that.
That said. The material itself is specific, serious, and worth engaging with. The core content is a collection of Hopi prophecies about the contemporary moment — water scarcity, ecological collapse, the breakdown of a specific relationship between modern American society and the land it is using. The prophecies are not metaphor. The elders describe them as literal warnings, with specific markers that can be checked against observed conditions. Many of the markers have, in the thirty-plus years since the book's publication, become uncomfortably legible in the news.
I bring this book up on the river only in specific conversations — with people who are already asking the questions the book addresses, and who are ready to take an Indigenous source seriously as something other than cultural color. The book is not for browsing. It is for people who have decided they want to know what a specific traditional Hopi voice has to say about the ecological crisis of the Colorado River basin, and who are willing to read that voice on its own terms.
The material on water is the part I reread most often. The elders describe water as sacred rather than as commodity, and the distinction is not abstract — they spell out, in practical terms, what a sacred relationship to water would require of a society that genuinely held one. The contrast with the actual Bureau of Reclamation framework governing the Colorado is, to put it mildly, severe. Reading the Hopi material next to a modern water-rights brief is a specific kind of education about whose frame has governed the river for the last hundred years, and at what cost.
Read it with care. Read it knowing the book has been criticized by some contemporary Hopi voices as unrepresentative, and take that criticism seriously alongside the material. But also read it. The prophecies are specific enough that dismissing them as generic mysticism is intellectually unserious, and the moral weight of the elders' warnings about water in particular is, if you care about the rivers of the Southwest, a weight worth sitting under.
