The Hopi villages sit on and below three mesas in northeastern Arizona, and Orayvi, on Third Mesa, is among the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America. The Hopi Reservation lies entirely within the much larger Navajo Reservation, an arrangement that has generated boundary and land disputes running through the whole of the twentieth century.
Hopi has an unusually large ethnographic literature and an unusually strong argument against it. Peter Whiteley's work states the problem directly: anthropologists published ceremonial material that the villages holding it had not agreed to release, and some of the best known books on Hopi religion were assembled from people speaking outside their authority to speak. Frank Waters's Book of the Hopi, widely read since 1963 and the source of most popular knowledge of Hopi prophecy, is the standard example, and the atlas records it as contested rather than citing it as testimony.
The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office now operates a research permit system and has intervened repeatedly in the international art market, notably against auctions of ceremonial objects in Paris. Hopi representatives also joined Navajo, Apache and Tohono O'odham leaders in the 1940 proclamation renouncing the swastika, an ornament their weavers and silversmiths had used, because of what it had come to mean in Europe. Both actions are the same act: a people deciding what leaves its hands.