In the Autumn of 2000, my partner and I were driving around the deserts of the American Southwest. It was a holiday, really, but I was also trying to research the area, and the culture of native peoples specifically, for a novel I was writing. It was hard to find out much about the Hopi, and all but impossible to read anything about their clowning tradition, which was what I really wanted to know about. I’d been a stand-up comedian for 12 years and I was sick of it. I had some kind of romantic notion that I needed to go back to the source. But due to a serious sense of humour failure by American government officials in the early 20th century, the Hopi clowns now clouded their performances in secrecy. Bizarrely, Henry Winkler, aka The Fonz, has a videotape of a Hopi clown gig, but he won’t show it to anyone. The clowns recognised The Fonz as a fellow funny-man and allowed Winkler to film them as part of a sacred bond of trust. Not even the University of Arizona can match Fonzie’s influence. He is cool.

The Hopi occupy an increasingly encroached plateau, east of Flagstaff, north of Winslow, surrounded on most sides by the lands of the Navajo. The Navajo saw the writing on the wall a lot sooner than the Hopi. Monument Valley has been ceded back to them, and they control tourist access. There’s no shortage of Navajo symbols on baseball caps and shoulder bags. They’re probably the most media friendly of the native American peoples, and, like good capitalists, have ultimately come to view the ongoing occupation of their country as a business opportunity. Good luck to them. The Hopi, however, have seen it all before. They survived Spanish invasion by ambitious conquistadors, and later fought off Navajo attacks from their fortress citadels of their high mesa villages. Hopi holy stories say they will inherit the earth. They have no reason to believe that the white man’s presence, like that of all their other enemies, is anything but transitory. And indeed, when you stand in the ancient cliff-top village of Walpi, surveying the vast empty desert from the roof of a low pueblo house, the rest of the world does seem very far away.

The Hopi’s approach to tourists couldn’t be more different to the Navajo’s. There’s only one place to stay in Hopi Land, and that’s at the Hopi Cultural Centre. It’s clean, efficient and has excellent blue corn tacos, but you feel you’re there mainly to stop you getting in people’s way and nosing about too much. In Walpi you ask at a little office and a somewhat reserved old woman will accompany you on a walk around the village, the oldest continuously inhabited human settlement in the United States, not that the white officials in the tourist information centre at Holbrook, half an hour South, have ever even heard of it. The two Swedes who took the same tour as us asked her questions about The Sacred Rock in the main plaza. The questions remained unanswered, and the Viking fools tampered with a clearly significant clump of feathers nestled in one of its fissures. I imagine that later on they were visited in dreams by vengeful Katsina spirits. As we left Walpi, another old lady showed me some hand carved sculptures of traditional Hopi figures. In Flagstaff and Tucson the souvenir shops were full of plasticised knock-offs, but here was a nine inch wooden replica of a Hopi Mudhead clown carrying a rattle and an ear of golden corn, at a price I could afford.

My Mudhead figure was the closest I came to meeting a Hopi clown and I treasure it. Maybe if I’d stuck around, like the writer Frank Waters, who stayed in Hopi land the best part of a decade to write a story, I’d have made some inroads. But this was the strangest, most alien place I’d ever visited. And I felt that, just by being there, I was causing some indefinable offence. So the next day we drove West away from Walpi.

After a couple of miles we picked up a hitch-hiker. He was a young Hopi boy, in his late teens, wearing jeans and a work-shirt. It was mid-day, and he was walking maybe 20km from Walpi to see his girlfriend in one of the outlying Hopi settlements, I forget which one. He said there was some kind of ceremonial dance later in the week, but it was difficult to ascertain exactly what it entailed. After a while the three of us ran out of things to say. This is always what happens on the few occasions I’ve picked up hitch-hikers. Stifled conversation followed by a tense, embarrassing silence. But this was worse than usual. In my mind, the Hopi were clown-mystics, utterly unrelated to my own culture, mysterious, far away and removed. What did I have to say to them, or they to me. In the wordless gulf, Electric Ladyland was bubbling at low volume in the car CD player. As we let the young man out he said, “Hey, did you know Hendrix was half-Indian?” “Yes,” I said, “yes, yes he was, wasn’t he….”.