Desperate Deadline : Without the stolen altar pieces, the aging Hopi matriarch cannot tell their story. The tribe fears she won’t be able to pass on the secrets before she dies.

Second Mesa was something to see that morning in January, 1979. An overnight snow had fallen on the Hopi Indian village of Mishongnovi and beyond, topping the cliffs and mesas of this remote landscape with a dusting of white. It was like a postcard.

Angeline Williams rose at dawn with no inkling of the nightmare that was about to unfold. She had piki bread to bake.

Following a narrow dirt road that clings to the edge of the mesa, she walked to her piki house, which also serves as a storage area for the most sacred items in Angeline’s life--altar pieces used in the ceremonies of the Mazaw, a highly secretive religious society that some say dates back thousands of years in Hopi history.

As matriarch of the Eagle clan--the family that for centuries has been charged with the responsibility of keeping the altar safe--Angeline’s role is more than custodial. She is the altar’s spiritual guardian as well, a figure of great prestige in the hierarchy of the society. As she approached the hut, Angeline noticed that the padlock had been cut off and the door was off its hinges. Alarmed, but without looking inside, she hurried back up the hill to awaken her son, Harlan Williams.

But before he could head down to investigate, a neighbor arrived to report the discovery of a bag discarded near a water pump below the mesa. It had been ripped, and the contents were visible--ceremonial garb made of hand-woven sheep’s wool that also was used in the society’s rituals.

“I knew what had happened, but I was still hoping,” says Angeline.

Harlan dashed down to the piki house and wiggled inside the storage areas to confirm Angeline’s worst fear--the Mazaw’s cherished altar pieces, including several fetishes, had been stolen.

As traumatic as the event was, no one could have imagined that the pieces would still be missing 13 years later. For the Hopis, and particularly for members of the Mazaw, the stakes are huge.

Because new members cannot be initiated without the altar, the society has existed in a painful limbo, unable to perpetuate itself. If the pieces are not recovered, this important link in Mishongnovi’s religious life will eventually disappear.

Worse than that, the Eagle clan is facing an unknown deadline.

As matriarch, Angeline alone possesses ritual knowledge that she must pass on to Mavis Harris, her daughter and successor in the role of spiritual caretaker. That knowledge, like the initiations, cannot be handed down without the altar pieces.

But Angeline is 79 years old and in declining health. If she dies before the items are found, precious ritual practices will die with her.

“Before, we thought she (Angeline) would always be here to show us what we needed to know,” says Mavis, choking back tears. “But she got sick last December and we almost lost her, and that’s when we knew we couldn’t wait any more for the police.”

In February, Angeline and other clan members met and made the difficult decision to break with tradition and speak openly to outsiders about their loss, hoping the publicity might result in a return of the altar pieces.

It was a painful choice, says Leigh Jenkins, director of the Hopi office of cultural preservation, who has been working with the clan to help locate the missing pieces.

“This is very privileged information,” says Jenkins. “I’m a full-blooded Hopi, but I can’t even look at these altar pieces. You can imagine how important it is to the clan if they’re opening up this way. But it’s a final attempt to save the society.”

The clan’s decision to talk was reached only after years of frustration at the inability of the Hopi police force, operated by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, to crack the case.

Harlan says that at the time of the theft he was assured by police that they would investigate the matter, and the clan spent the first several years waiting for results. But by 1983 police had reached a dead end and had stopped actively pursuing leads.

“I couldn’t believe we were sitting here for four years thinking they were looking into it when they weren’t,” he says. “I’m angry at our police.”

In the ensuing years, family members wrote letters to Hopi leaders requesting police action. But the Hopi police unit’s sole full-time investigator, responsible for cases spanning the entire 1.6-million-acre reservation in northeastern Arizona, said that by that time there was little he could do.

“I handle all sorts of violent crimes on the reservation and they come first,” says Alfonso Sakeva, who didn’t come on the job until 1982. “If someone called in with a lead on the altar pieces, I’d look into it. But I can’t travel to Los Angeles and Santa Fe to look for them. That’s why we asked the FBI to step in.”

That request was made in April, 1990, but the bureau’s Flagstaff office declined. With no information beyond what the Hopi police had learned, and one agent covering a huge area of northern Arizona, the FBI couldn’t justify opening its own case.

In the meantime, the passing of so much time has fanned deep discontent in normally quiet and protected Mishongnovi, where Hopis moved in the 1500s to defend against attacks from marauding Spanish forces.

Village women, eager to see their daughters achieve passage into womanhood through the matriarchy of the Mazaw, pleaded with the Eagle clan to do something so the initiation rites could continue.

“They’re angry with us, but what can we do without the altar?” says Angeline.

Then, last December, Angeline became seriously ill.

“We finally decided that if the police aren’t doing anything, we have no choice but to do it ourselves,” says Mavis. “We even thought of hiring a private investigator, but we couldn’t afford it.”

By now the trail has turned ice cold, something Angeline feared that morning when she awoke Harlan and urged him to pursue the thief while his tracks were still clearly visible in the freshly fallen snow.

Harlan discovered that the thief wore cowboy boots, and that his descent off the north slope of the mesa had been difficult.

Markings in the snow indicated that the trail he took was evidently too slippery to walk, so he slid down on his backside, dragging the two bags with him. Near the water pump on the flat below, Harlan saw the bag of ceremonial clothing.

It apparently had ripped on the bumpy trek down the trail, and instead of struggling farther with it, the thief simply dropped it, holding on to the more precious altar pieces.

Harlan followed the footsteps north through the snow to a dirt road, and there he picked up tire tracks. They were overlaid with footprints, leading Harlan to suspect that the driver made a pass to pick up his accomplice, but missed him on the first try.

Farther down the road, Harlan saw double tire tracks, and the end of the footprints. It was there, he reasoned, that the truck driver turned around to pick up his accomplice, and the thieves made their getaway.

A lead in the case came two weeks after the theft when police stopped a car in Mishongnovi with two white men inside.

Cultural preservation officer Jenkins said one of them is believed to have been the middleman in the 1979 theft of a 150-year-old ceremonial shield from the Hopi village of Oraibi.

In that incident, Jenkins said two Hopi men stole the shield from a ceremonial clan house in the village. For $50 apiece, they then turned it over to the middleman, who quickly found a buyer willing to pay a cool $16,000.

In 1981, the buyer donated the shield to the prestigious Heard Museum in Phoenix. Nine years later, Jenkins was leafing through an inventory of the Museum’s Hopi collection when he spotted a listing for a shield.

Believing that it might be the long-lost article, he traveled to Phoenix to photograph it. When villagers from Oraibi later positively identified the pictures, the shield was quietly repatriated.

In another recent case, involving the same middleman, Jenkins was in on the seizure of a Kachina mask that was on display in a gallery show held in a waterfront warehouse in Manhattan. The man in possession of the mask had paid $75,000 for it.

But in the Mazaw case, police have been unable to find any firm leads implicating the middleman, and the evidence against him remains circumstantial.

Even if he is the culprit, Jenkins and others believe that he did not act alone. Given the location of the altar pieces, hidden deep in the piki house, this means he probably worked with a Hopi insider.

For a time, members of the Eagle clan held vague suspicions about a fellow villager, who, they say, grew strangely quiet when the subject of the theft arose.

But the man died several years ago of natural causes. When Harlan got word of his passing, he headed for the man’s house to conduct a thorough search. He found nothing.

Although no evidence has turned up linking the villager to the crime, Melvina Johnson, Mavis’ daughter, believes that the manner of the man’s death strongly suggests that he was involved.

“He died horribly,” says Melvina. “He had sores on his face, his eyes were swollen shut, and his legs were amputated. The altar pieces have the power to do these things.”

Mavis agrees, saying that the pieces have been blessed, and that the power they possess can turn on anyone who desecrates them.

“I used to pray for good things to happen to all people,” she says. “But now when I pray, I have no choice but to pray that the pieces use their power to come back to us, even if it means serious consequences to whoever took them.”

Jenkins has done considerable investigation on his own into the disappearance of the Mazaw pieces. But he has uncovered no further clues, and his docket is clogged with 50 additional incidents of stolen antiquities.

One police source, who asked not to be identified, says solving such theft cases is extremely difficult because at any given time, particularly in the summer, the reservation is flooded with outsiders.

And with a population of about 8,500 and an unemployment rate that hovers at 50%, there are Hopis on the reservation who are willing to trade on their own culture for quick money.

“The tribe is being looted and pillaged left and right,” the police source says.

Fear of further thefts grew so great in Mishongnovi that village leaders have built a separate warehouse to store its sacred items. The interior of the squat stone building is divided into separate rooms for each clan, each accessible only to the clan leader holding the key.

“The market for antiquities is huge, and it’s worldwide,” says Jenkins. “We still have pot hunters on the reservation who can get $15,000 on the black market for a nicely decorated pot. This is big money.”

Jenkins says the problem has been ongoing since at least the turn of the century. Then the intruders, as he calls them, weren’t thieves seeking profit, but anthropologists gathering data and artifacts for scholarly papers and books.

They routinely collected ceremonial items, often taking pots, baskets and prayer sticks left by Hopis as gifts on the graves of relatives. Ritual shrines that guard virtually every village on the reservation were also plundered.

It is a strange irony that one of the most useful tools Jenkins has in tracking down missing artifacts are ethnographic reports written by the same researchers who did the plundering.

He also works the phones to develop leads, faxes photos and sketches of missing pieces to curators, and shows up at galleries in places like Santa Fe, N.M., to hunt for lost antiquities. If he spots anything belonging to the Hopi, he produces a police report to prove that the article is under official investigation.

Confrontations occasionally ensue. “There are people in Santa Fe who don’t like me,” says Jenkins.

He says the Mazaw pieces could be anywhere--on display in any museum or gallery, or they could be adorning the living room of a private art collector in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo or Rio de Janiero.

“I get so mad thinking about how many items sacred to the Hopi are out there being traded and bought. And it’s all done in cash. People are making filthy bucks off these things. I have dreams about it. I can’t accept it.”

Neither can Angeline Williams. She still keeps the broken padlock from her piki house as a reminder of what has been taken from her.

But her anger is dwarfed by her desire to get the sacred altar pieces back, thus preventing the ancient rituals of the Mazaw from dying at the hands of a thief in cowboy boots.

She promises no names, no questions, no prosecution.

“I pray every day that someone will contact us,” Angeline says, staring out over the long silence of Second Mesa. “I never imagined something like this would happen.”