The Hopi message to the United Nations

On 10 December 1992, Hopi elders including Thomas Banyacya delivered a message to the United Nations in New York, carrying a prophecy that the Hopi had long held for the whole world. The teaching speaks of multiple worlds, the present Fourth World, and a coming purification that will end it if humans do not change their ways, a story recorded in Frank Waters's Book of the Hopi (1963) from interviews with Hopi elders.

The Hopi frame is not a single cataclysmic date but a choice between roads. The "good red road" of harmony and the "crooked road" of destruction run side by side, and which one the peoples of the world take determines what comes. The emblem the elders carried to the UN was the petroglyph of a ringing kettle, a signal for all nations to gather and remember the original instructions given to the Hopi by Maasaw, the caretaker of the earth.

What makes the 1992 appearance matter here is its situation. A Native American prophecy of world-ending purification, voiced at the UN at the close of the Cold War, is the modern instance of an oral end-of-the-world tradition addressing a global audience directly, asking not for belief in a date but for a turning of conduct. The Hopi purification is cyclical and moral rather than dated: the world ends, or is remade, according to what humans do.

The prophecy delivered is treated under The Hopi Great Purification.

The physical document and its UN submission are described under Hopi Message to the United Nations (1992).

Banyacya's appearance closed a forty-four-year effort. The traditional leaders had first petitioned the young United Nations in 1949; later attempts were blocked in part by the Hopi Tribal Council, which the village leaders regarded as a federal creation without standing to speak for them, making the delivery as much a sovereignty claim as a prophecy. He spoke in Hopi, dressed in the traditional way, after observing the preparation required of a messenger carrying the word abroad.

The session fell in the International Year of the World's Indigenous People, and other indigenous delegates spoke the same day. But the Hopi message was distinctive in the record for what it did not do: it named no date, predicted no mechanism, and asked only for a choice of roads, which is why scholars of millenarianism treat it as the cleanest modern case of conduct-prophecy addressed to the world at large.