No Turning Back : A Hopi Indian Woman's Struggle to Live in Two Worlds

346 Pages·1977·1.39 MB·English

by  Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Elizabeth Q. White

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Page i
No Turning Back
Page ii
Polingaysi shaping pottery at Flagstaff in 1957
Page iii
No Turning Back
A True Account Of A Hopi Indian Girl's Struggle
To Bridge The Gap Between The World Of Her People
And The World Of The White Man
by Polingaysi Qoyawayma
(Elizabeth Q. White)
as told to Vada F. Carlson
THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS
ALBUQUERQUE
Page iv
© 1964, © 1992 by the University of New Mexico Press
All rights reserved.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 64-7652
International Standard Book Number 0-8263-0439-7
Tenth paperbound printing, 1999
Page v
Foreword
Visiting writers, anthropologists, archeologists, and other friends have
insisted for years that it was my duty as an articulate Hopi to tell the
world something of my cultural background and my long struggle to
span the great and terrifying chasm between my Hopi world and the
world of the white man.
Not until the publication a few years ago of a book that defamed the
character of the Hopis as a nation, however, was I jolted out of my
complacency and into full realization of my responsibility.
Hopi people are exceedingly sensitive to ridicule, and I am no
exception to this rule. It has been a ball and chain, preventing me from
expressing myself, especially along the line of my painful experiences
as a pioneer in Indian education, both as a student and as a teacher.
Now I realize that white people cannot know the truth of the situation
unless someone makes it known to them. I also know that a great deal
of misinformation that one sees in print is as much the fault of the
Hopi informant as of the white writer. In my own experience I have
had three different answers to the same question from three different
Hopis. This is not to say that each was not convinced that he was
telling the truth. It was merely that they were of different ages and
from different villages, where rituals varied.
Page vi
I accept the reasoning of my white friends. They say that I am a good
example of what takes place when a person is uprooted and forced to
adjust to a new way of life, because I was an ordinary Hopi child at
the time education was brought to us through the white man's schools,
and because I had only limited experience with white people. (As a
family we had known the white Voth family, who came to our village
of Oraibi in 1893, when according to my officially determined
birthdate I was only one year old.)
Also, they point out, my experience was typical of Indian children of
my era and, to a less drastic degree, of Indian children of today. They
also argue that because I continued in the educational field, facing
problems of bringing Indian beginners into conventional school
procedures, I should be more than ordinarily capable of understanding
their problems.
It has been painful to recall my long-drawn-out struggle in living.
Many of the episodes, buried deeply, emerged slowly. However, now
that the effort has been made, I am grateful to my good friends who
insisted that this account be written. I am especially grateful to Miss
Marion Bowen, and to my biographer, Mrs. Vada F. Carlson, who has
had the patience and skill to weld my reminiscences into manuscript
form.
My grandmother, prophetic woman that she was, used to say: "It is to
members of Coyote Clan that Bahana [white man] will come, within
your day, Polingaysi, or within the day of your seed, and you of
Coyote Clan will be a bond between the Bahana and the Hopi
people." I am Indian enough at heart to believe that her prophecy has
been fulfilled.
POLINGAYSI QOYAWAYMA
Page 1
One
The small, brown-skinned woman in the red dress stopped her car in
the desert valley and, getting out into the hot sunshine of early
autumn, lifted black eyes to the ruins of the ancient village of old
Oraibi, once many-storied and proud, a stronghold of the Hopi Indian
nation.
Her face, broad and strong-featured and remarkably unlined in spite of
the fullness of her years, gave no hint of the emotion welling up in
her. Only a sudden glint of tears and the lifting of one hand to her
constricted throat told her heartache, her indecision and confusion.
"That is my home."
She murmured the words lovingly, her gaze noting the uneven line the
falling stone houses made against the blue sky. "Yes," she thought, "in
that place of ruins is the evidence of my beginning. My roots are
there. A part of me is there still, in the old home of my parents, in the
hill house of my grandmother, in the very dust that whispers in the
streets where I played so long ago. Is that where I belong, now?"
As though stirred into action by the intensity of her thought, a
whirlwind formed lazily in the sand dunes bordering the valley road.
Carrying its load of dust, it spun upward and came swirling and
dipping toward her.
Page 2
She held out her hands to it.
"Yes ? Tell me, tell me," she said.
But the eddy disintegrated, the dust returned to the desert floor. A
fringe of the whirlwind lifted her black bangs, square-cut in Hopi
fashion across her forehead. Her skirt fluttered around her legs. But if
a spirit of her ancestors moved in the whirlwind, as Hopis believe they
do, it had no answer for her.
With a sigh she got back into the car and drove on toward the new
village that had grown like a shoot from the ruins above it.
When she was a child the village on the mesa had teemed with
activity. During days like this she and the other little ones would have
been roaming the talus slopes below the sandstone cliffs, looking for
potsherds or hunting rabbits. Now the children of the old village were
down here, attending school with those who lived in the newer
settlement.
They were in the schoolyard when she passedblack-haired, brown-
skinned, bright-eyed. She drove on through the village and headed the
car uphill.
An excitement grew in her as she reached the mesa and turned off the
highway into the dirt road that led to the ancient village. She was at
once eager and reluctant to revisit her childhood home. When she
stopped in the gray clay street which was bordered by gray stone
buildings that were still occupied despite their age, she made no move
to leave the car, but sat waiting.
On one of the nearby housetops an old man, aroused from his nap by
the sound of her car's motor, sat up, looked down, then rose stiffly and
came down the stone steps and across the plaza toward her. He had a
look of great age. His dark skin was weathered and wrinkled. His