What Kind of Shelters Do Hopi Indians Traditionally Live In?
The Native American tribe the Hopi traditionally lived in pueblos, which are also known as adobe houses. Pueblos are modular, multi-story houses made of adobe or of large stones cemented together with adobe. Adobe is clay and straw baked into hard bricks. Each adobe unit was home to one family, and the whole structure was often home to an entire extended clan.
Pueblos were permanent homes, because the Hopi tribe was not nomadic. The Hopi were a farming tribe, who had no need to move their village to a new location each season. Adobe homes are good to build in warm, dry climates, such as the area of north-western Arizona that the Hopi are native to, because the adobe can be easily mixed and dried there. Ladders were used to reach the upper levels of adobe houses. Traditional Hopi houses are still used by some people today, unlike most traditional Native American shelters. The Hopi tribe currently have a reservation in northwestern Arizona that is entirely surrounded by the larger Navajo Reservation. As of the 2010 census, there were 18,327 Hopi living in the United States. The Hopi tribe has its own language, which is one of the 30 languages in the Uto-Aztecan language family.
