What is it about?
When the conscientious objector and Catholic Worker writer Ammon Hennacy met members of a Hopi political and religious faction after World War II, he convinced himself that they represented a model pacifist anarchist society for the rest of the world. This article documents for the first time his intensive and extensive promotion of the Hopi Traditionalist Movement, a small group active until the 1980s whose rise fueled widespread Native American "traditionalism" and New Age fascination with the Hopi as spiritual prophets.
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Why is it important?
Hennacy's activism on behalf of the Hopi Traditionalists created false narratives about the Hopi people that persist in popular culture to this day.
Perspectives
An updated version (with minor changes) appears as two chapters in my 2024 book, "Hopis and the Counterculture: Traditionalism, Appropriation, and the Birth of a Social Field" (U. of Arizona Press).
Brian D. Haley
State University of New York College at Oneonta
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Ammon Hennacy and the Hopi Traditionalist Movement: Roots of the Counterculture’s Favorite Indians, Journal of the Southwest, January 2016, Project Muse,
DOI: 10.1353/jsw.2016.0000.
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