Hopi for America

Brian Volck shares lessons from his having "worked or lived in places – rural Central America and the Navajo Reservation, for example – where material conditions are far worse, yet these lacked the pervasive despair and communal disintegration of inner city America" — Hospitality and the Hopis: Piki.

The reason is that "the Navajo and Hopi have a culture and sense of community, with traditional practices, however attenuated, to ground them." He says, "To the extent... that the Hopi live within natural and traditional limits, there is much for an Unsettled America to learn." Our task is not to become "member[s] of the wannabe tribe," but "to discover the cognates of their hospitable life in [our] own tradition, hidden beneath modern illusions of autonomy."