Book of the Hopi

Frank Waters's Book of the Hopi, published by Viking Press in 1963, compiled by a non-Hopi author from interviews with a small number of Hopi collaborators, is the most widely circulated printed source for Hopi prophecy material in general circulation. Its strength is exactly that wide circulation and its role as the most accessible printed account many readers first encounter. Its limit needs to be stated plainly: Hopi scholarship, Peter Whiteley's Rethinking Hopi Ethnography and other specialist work among it, has directly questioned whether a handful of individual collaborators' accounts, filtered through a non-Hopi compiler working outside any process the Hopi community as a whole recognised as authoritative, can represent Hopi religious authority as a whole; the Hopi Tribe has itself never endorsed the book. It is cited for the material it records, not as evidence that the material speaks for Hopi religion generally.