Hopi Dictionary: Hopìikwa Lavàytutuveni: A Hopi Dictionary of the Third Mesa Dialect with an English-Hopi Finder List and ìikwaLavàa Sketch of Hopi Grammar is an English-Hopi (Hopi: Hopílavayi) reference book published by the Dictionary Project at the Bureau of Applied Anthropology, the University of Arizona.
Some of the Hopi community tried to prevent it from being published because they did not want non-Hopis to have access to the Hopi language, which they held to be the specific cultural heritage of their community. After a period of discussions and legal proceedings, the dictionary was published in 1998.
Contents
The dictionary has an introduction with bibliography, a guide to dictionary entries, a list of abbreviations, a 797-page Hopi-English section, a 161-page English-Hopi finder list and a 30-page grammatical sketch of the Hopi language including an explanation of the orthography used. The dictionary has 29,394 entries of which 23,994 are main entries and the rest cross-references.
Compilation
No comprehensive dictionary of the Hopi language had been published when the Hopi Dictionary Project was instigated at the University of Arizona in 1985, as only wordlists, texts and smaller grammar sketches had been published by linguists. Hopi was then not a literary language and speaker numbers were in decline. The dictionary was envisioned both as a scholarly reference work and as a tool to revitalizing the Hopi language. Kenneth C. Hill, a linguist specialising in Uto-Aztecan languages, was made the director of the project and was in charge of procuring funding for it and making basic preparations. The project achieved funding from 1986. Editors included the Hopi native speaker and teacher Emory Sekaquaptewa, Mary E. Black, and the native speakers and language consultants Michael and Lorena Lomatuway'ma.
The editors tried to ensure that the dictionary entries did not infringe on the Hopis' sense of religious propriety: for example, they did not give detailed translations of the meanings of the names of different Kachinas. They also carefully considered the format in which the linguistic data should be represented, in order to best facilitate its use among both native speakers and scholars. To assure community support and involvement, Sekaquaptewa set up a board of Hopi elders who volunteered to take part in the dictionary compilation process in order to help the survival of the Hopi language. While the copyright was retained for the University of Arizona, it was arranged so that all royalties from the book were to go to the Hopi Foundation, a charitable foundation devoted to improve Hopi education. A preliminary presentation of the Project in 1991 also received a favorable response from parts of the Hopi community. The compilation of the dictionary took 10 years and in May 1996 Hill sent a camera-ready copy to the University of Arizona Press.
Publication controversies
In the early 1990s, the beginnings of a controversy were brewing. In Arizona, high schools students must learn a foreign language but the only languages offered at that time were Spanish and Navajo. Some Hopi parents wanted Hopi lessons to be offered to ethnic Hopi, but local legislation forbids ethnic restrictions for any classes, so Navajo- and English-speaking students would have been able to study Hopi, something that was not acceptable to some Hopi parents.
In the mid-1990s, the implementation by the Hopi tribal organization of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act caused further tension and discussion about Hopi communal ownership of their language. The Hopi tribe requested that all collections of data pertaining to Hopi cultural heritage be closed to the public, and free access to individuals be given only under written authorization of the Hopi tribal council.
In 1997, Hill received a letter from Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, Director of the Hopi Tribe's Cultural Preservation Office expressing concerns that the dictionary project had not sought joint copyrights with the Hopi tribe, that the linguistic consultants who had contributed to the project had not given sufficiently informed consent to the free accessibility of information provided for non-Hopis, and finally that royalties should also be given to the CPO and the Hopi Health Department. He also found the list price of $85 excessive. He requested that the printing of the dictionary be held off until the issues had been addressed. While the dictionary had already been printed it was not yet cut and bound and the press suspended production.