Page 8 PoLAR: Vol. 31, No. 1 Justin B. Richland University of California Sovereign Time, Storied Moments: The Temporalities of Law, Tradition, and Ethnography in Hopi Tribal Court This article analyzes the temporalities that emerge in interactions before the tribal court of the Hopi Indian Nation. Particular attention will be paid to the interdiscur- sive strategies employed by courtroom interlocutors negotiating between adherence to Anglo-legal notions of fact and norm, and the narratives of Hopi tradition reg- ularly raised by litigants in property dispute hearings. It will be argued that such negotiations are at once central to the “sovereign time” that contemporary Hopi law instantiates for the Hopi Nation, but also stand in a complex relationship to the temporalities generated by the “storied moments” of Hopi litigants’ tradition discourses. The effect is that these traditions get legally framed as sometimes near to, sometimes far from, the lives and times of Hopi people today. In conclusion, it will be suggested that similar tensions of norm and fact resound in certain critical assessments of anthropology in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly those that focus on the implicit orientations to time and temporality that rest at the heart of ethnog- raphy’s representational practices and the authority they generate. [time; tradition; law; interdiscursivity; Hopi] In November 1999, the Hopi Appellate Court, the highest court with jurisdiction to resolve civil disputes on the Hopi Indian Reservation, heard arguments in a case involving a conflict between a woman and her sister’s daughters over a plot of farm- ing land in one of its nine mesa-top villages. In the original trial, the woman had argued that her father had properly given her the land before he passed away in the 1950s. Her nieces argued that even if this was true, because the woman had married outside the tribe and resided off the reservation for the last 40 years, she had lost rights to that land because she had not been present to maintain it and par- ticipate in the other familial responsibilities that go along with rights to use land. Among the issues the Appellate Court was to address was whether or not the Hopi judge who originally heard the case acted properly in allowing the parties to call elder witnesses to testify at a special hearing about their village’s traditions concern- ing property rights, and the responsibilities surrounding the maintenance of those rights. In coming to its decision, the court found itself in a difficult position. On the one hand, it wanted to recognize that the trial judge had acted admirably in the steps he took to allow testimonial evidence on issues of village tradition. This is particularly true in light of the fact that while Hopi tribal legislation mandated the court to treat PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Vol. 31, Numbers 1, pps. 8–27. ISSN 1081- 6976, electronic ISSN 1555-2934. C  2008 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1555-2934.2008.00004.x.