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to purchaseThe Fourth World of the Hopis : The Epic Story of the Hopi Indians As Preserved in Their Legends and Traditions **
Accounts collected by Harold CourlanderUniversity of New Mexico Press: New Mexico: 1971
(pp. 239)
The noted folklorist recites the traditional accounts of the Hopi journey into the Fourth World. These accounts reveal the life of the Hopi clans and villages from legendary to historical times. The adventures described in this important book stand as the epic story of how the Hopi came to reside in what is now the Southwest part of the United States surrounded by the Dené Nation (Navajo). The story told here in the carefully chosen words of Harold Courlander (1908 - 1996) are the words of Hopi informants who chose to share their experience and ancient knowledge. Hopi people tell of the wanderings of the different clans, their search for a final living place, and their search for a common identity.
It is from these stories that the term "Fourth World" originally found its current meaning among indigenous peoples. It is the Hopi legend that informed Chief George Manuel (1929 - 1989) when he wrote his influential book The Fourth World in 1974. Readers of Courlander’s book will not only find an informative account of the Hopi, one of the Grandfather peoples of North America, but the close connections between Hopi, the Nahuatl speakers of central and west Mexico as well as the Maya and Olmec of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and El Salvador.