The Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation, in northwestern California, is 144 miles square, bisected by the Trinity River. The Hoopa Valley, surrounded by mountains timbered with pine, fir, and hardwoods, is the center of the Hupa world. (In Natinook, Hupa means "The Place Where the Trails Return.")
In small villages along the river, the Hupas built cedar-plank houses over oblong pits, with central hearths, earthen shelves along the walls, small round doorways at one corner, and stone-paved porches. Several of these houses are still standing, and continue to be used for ceremonies. In addition to family homes, where the women and children slept, each village had at least one sweat house, used by the males for daily sweating, as a "lodge" for teaching, storytelling, singing, and brotherhood, and as sleeping quarters for men and older boys. Each village also had a larger sacred house for gatherings and ceremonies such as the Brush Dance, a healing ceremony that is still practiced. The fire pit at one of these sacred houses has been radiocarbon-dated as being over seven thousand years old, indicating the maintenance of a building on this site "always," as legend holds.
Food resources were varied and abundant for the Hupas, although salmon, deer, and acorns provided the bulk of their diet. The generally mild climate made heavy clothing unnecessary, but ceremonial garb was lavishly fashioned of a wide range of natural materials. Women's bowl-shaped hats are just one type of the intricately woven basketry items still produced by Hupa women, who have long been recognized for this skill. Men excelled in woodworking, among many crafts. By redwood canoe and overland, the Hupas visited and traded with distant villages, necessitating proficiency in languages other than their own Athabaskan tongue.
Religious beliefs and practices were a crucial part of everyday life. The most significant segment of their religion encompassed two ceremonials, one serving to revitalize the world for the coming year, the other to ward off famine, disease, and other disasters. These were called, respectively, the White Deerskin Dance and the Jump Dance; they are still held biannually in September.
The Hupas remained undisturbed until the 1850s, when the discovery of gold brought hordes of would-be miners swarming into the area, wreaking havoc on the Hupas' villages, disrupting their subsistence cycles, and causing serious conflict. Treaties made with California's native people remained unratified and unfulfilled by the federal government. This neglect allowed depredations against the Hupas to proceed unchecked, even though Fort Gaston was established at Hoopa in 1858 "for their protection." The Interior Department established the Hoopa Valley Reservation in 1864 and a boarding school in 1893. The community established a business council in 1933 and created a constitution for its government and legal affairs. That same year a public school opened on the reservation.
Today the Hoopa Reservation is California's largest and most populous reservation. It is home to more than two thousand members and maintains the largest accumulation of tribal funds in the state. Much of its current prosperity is due to the post-World War II lumber boom, which created an abundance of well-paid jobs and profitable small businesses. In 1988 the tribe was selected by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to participate in the Tribal Self-Governance Demonstration Project and today is a model for other tribes in self-governance, economic development, natural-resource management, social services, and cultural preservation. Tribal enterprises include a market, a motel, a restaurant, a museum, a post office, a radio station, a bingo hall, a clinic, a hospital project, a senior center, fisheries, a forestry corporation, and law-enforcement and tribal court systems. Tribal members, many with college degrees, hold most administrative and managerial positions for tribal operations, working as tribal-council members, college administrators, professors, lawyers, doctors, teachers, engineers, and foresters and in other degreed professions.
Pliney Earle Goddard, Life and Culture of the Hupa UCPAAE, vol. 1, no. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1903); Nelson Byron, Jr., Our Home Forever: A Hupa Tribal History (Hoopa, Calif.: Hoopa Tribe, 1978); Wallace William, Jr. and David Risling, Handbook of North American Indians "Hupa, Chilula, and Whilkut," ed. William C. Sturtevant, vol. 8, California, ed. Robert F. Heizer (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1978).
Leslie Campbell
Hupa
Hoopa, California
