Nicholas Longworth, speaker of the House from 1925 to 1931. Hopi tribesmen perform sacred dances at U.S. Capitol, May 15, 1926

On this date in 1926, Hopi Indians from northeastern Arizona performed a series of sacred dances for government officials on the East Front of the U.S. Capitol. The public was also invited to attend. The Hopi tribesmen, adorned in their traditional feathered costumes, awed the crowd, especially when one performer kissed a poisonous snake without being bitten.

Some critics had been seeking federal intervention to ban this ceremony — a series of four dances performed on a biennial basis — as being too dangerous because it involved stepping among and handling poisonous snakes.


The Hopi sought to use the public performance to demonstrate that the dances were a safe and important cultural practice. The dances portray “a solemn religious ritual of the tribe,” Sen. Ralph Cameron (R-Ariz.) reminded his colleagues, describing his constituents as those “who seek by this demonstration before the Congress ... to show its sincerity and religious character and thus allay what they deem the unfair effort on the part of some people to deprive them the right to conduct this religious ceremony.”

In attendance among the crowd of nearly 5,000 onlookers were Vice President Charles Dawes, three U.S. Supreme Court justices, House Speaker Nicholas Longworth (R-Ohio) as well as his wife, Alice Roosevelt Longworth, daughter of the late President Theodore Roosevelt, and other members of Congress. Cameron lost his Senate seat in November to Democrat Carl Hayden.

Two years earlier, Congress had declared all Native Americans to be U.S citizens. About a year after the ceremony on Capitol Hill, the Bureau of Indian Affairs sought to ban the dance. But it quickly relented after being criticized for potentially interfering with a sacred religious practice, deferring to the cultural nature of the ceremony.

The Hopi snake dance is normally observed on the tribal reservation for 16 days in August or the early part of September and is held every two years. The ceremony is intended to worship Hopi ancestors and to help bring rain. It does not worship snakes.

SOURCE: OFFICE OF HISTORY AND PRESERVATION, CLERK OF THE U.S. HOUSE