Oraibi (Old Oraibi)
Hopi Reservation, Arizona, United States
A Hopi village on Third Mesa that Hopi sources describe as the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States, and that is first of all somebody's home.
Oraibi stands on a promontory of Third Mesa, and Hopi sources date its founding to the eleventh or twelfth century and describe it as the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States. Its 1906 split, after a long disagreement between village leaders, sent parts of the community out to found Kykotsmovi and Hotevilla, and Bacavi followed in 1909; Oraibi itself has remained, its stone houses, kivas and ceremonial calendar carrying on.
Oraibi is a village where people live, not a site to visit, and the Hopi Tribe says so directly. Its published etiquette asks visitors not to photograph, video, record, sketch, or take notes in and around villages, to stay away from kivas, to keep to the periphery, and to touch nothing at shrines, and it notes that enforcement exists because past abuses were real. Visits are by permission of the village, and the sanctioned way in is through the tribe's own tour enterprise. If you come to Hopi, you come as a guest of a living community, and what can be shared is what Hopi chooses to share.
Visiting
Book through Experience Hopi (the Hopi-run tour enterprise, at least 24 hours ahead) and read the tribe's own visitor etiquette at hopi.org before you go. There is no walk-in visiting.
Photo: [public domain, via Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oraibi.jpg). Historic Oraibi, Detroit Publishing Co. via the Library of Congress.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories