Plus it was based on a complete misunderstanding of how the Hopi language works. He basically declared that they don’t have the concept of time, which later linguists pretty succinctly debunked with some basic experimenting.

What that showed out was that speakers of a language will rarely lack a concept altogether that would affect their way of understanding the world around them, but they will have different linguistic tools that reframe their understanding of that concept specifically, so for example a lot of languages that don’t distinguish blue from green or see other groups of colors under the same word, will have those basic color words, but then also have some differentiation via modifying the word for specificity. So it’s not that they don’t understand the difference, they just don’t see the difference as significant enough to warrant them being labelled distinctly.

Orange as a distinct color is relatively new for example, they’re called red heads because at that time orange was seen as just a shade of red.