Croaking Frogs and Scratching Bears

 During one Spring Break Patti and I spent a week on the Hopi mesas. We ate traditional Hopi food, visited private homes where the women displayed their pots and weaving and learned some of the traditional stories from some of the men. My favorite (and unexpected) part however, was when we stopped at a gas station below the mesa on our way home. As I was paying for our gas the man taking the payment had a recording of a recent dance ceremony that took place on top of one of the mesas. He couldn't stand still but was moving along with the rhythms of the recording. I was captivated, I started asking questions about the music and found out that he had led that particular ceremony. He spent the next 30 minutes talking about the importance of water for his people and the need to implore for spring rains for the coming crops.

The important instrument for this ceremony is a wooden rasp placed on top of a gourd. Painted with a frog on one side and the symbol for rain on the other, the sound of the rasp would be amplified by the gourd producing the sound of a 'croaking' frog. Yes, he had one for sale and yes, I bought it.

Hopi gourd and rasp

The frog has been a symbol for water for many people from the Olmecs in the Yucatan and into the American Southwest, because after a rain frogs will set up a chorus of sound all night. I can attest to this because during a backpacking trip in Grand Gulch in Utah we were caught in a flash flood. Our camp was high enough up on an embankment safe from the rising water, but we spent a sleepless night in our tent because of frogs hopping around and tripping over the guylines, and their croaking was either an apology for their clumsiness or a sign of dissatisfaction for our invasion of their territory.

Grand Gulch after a flash flood

A similar instrument is used for the Bear Dance ceremony by the Utes (and others). The wooden rasp in this case is much longer and the gourd is replaced by a wooden boxlike structure. These boxes can be as small as a coffee table for 3 or 4 drummers or longer ones that would have 6 or more performers. The sound is not to imitate a 'growling bear' but goes back to a story of a female bear just coming out of hibernation and finding a tree, scratches her back. I don't own one of these............yet.