Anyone who says this has seen little and thought less. The Hopi women
make up extra supplies of baskets and pottery to offer for sale at the
time of the Snake Dance because they know many tourists are coming to
buy them, otherwise they get no revenue from the occasion. No admission
is charged, and the snake priests themselves seriously object to having
Hopi citizens charge anything for the use of improvised seats of boxes,
etc., on the near-by house tops.

The writer has seen tourists so crowd the roofs of the Hopi homes
surrounding the dance plaza that she feared the roofs would give way,
and has also observed that the resident family was sometimes crowded out
of all "ring-side" seats. No wonder the small brown man of the house has
in some cases charged for the seats. What white man would not? Yet the
practice is considered unethical by the Hopi themselves and is being
discontinued.

We know that this weird, pagan Snake Dance was performed with deadly
earnestness when white men first penetrated the forbidding wastelands
that surround the Hopi. And we have every reason to believe that it has
gone on for centuries, always as a prayer to the gods of the underworld
and of nature for rain and the germination of their crops.

The writer has observed these ceremonies in the various Hopi villages
for the past twenty years, some with hundreds of spectators from all
over the world, others in more remote villages, with but a mere handful
of outsiders present. She is personally convinced that the Snake Dance
is no show for tourists but a deeply significant religious ceremony
performed definitely for the faithful fulfillment of traditional magic
rites that have, all down the centuries, been depended upon to bring