Hopi Boarding-School Narratives: Edmund Nequatewa's Born a Chief

ABSTRACT

Although reference has been made to the “canonical corpus” of “Hopi autobiography,” it is a canon little known to students of American autobiography. This essay studies Edmund Nequatewa's life story, Born a Chief (1993), focusing on its representation of Nequatewa's experiences of government boarding school both on and off the Hopi Reservation.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Peter Runge and the Special Collections staff at the Cline Library of Northern Arizona University for their generous help. Dr. Peter Whiteley of the American Museum of Natural History kindly read an earlier version of this essay, providing much valuable information and correcting several errors. Any errors that remain are solely my responsibility.

Notes

1. I have arranged these titles according to the dates of their publication, although Nequatewa, whose book was published last, was born earlier than the others, according to his editor, “around 1880” (Seaman xv). This is my estimate of the Hopi autobiographical canon. Whiteley specifies only two of the “better-known examples” (“Review” 478), those by Talayesva and Qoyawayma. Adams (“Schooling”) provides excellent background for all of the autobiographical texts I have listed.

2. Three volumes in the Alfred Whiting Collection at the Cline Library of Northern Arizona University contain a version of the autobiography, each titled “I, Edmund: The Story of a Hopi Boyhood,” but with different dates: for example, volume 1, dated 1961, is marked as the “final revision,” with volume 3 containing the heavily marked first version from 1942, and volume 2 containing an intermediate version. All three volumes were “compiled and edited by P. David Seaman” in June of 1988, ten years after Whiting's death and only five years before Seaman's version was published. In volume 2, there is a letter to Whiting from the superintendent of the Department of the Interior, dated 9 January 1962, stating that “The official Hopi Census Roll … lists Mr. Nequatewa as having been born in 1877” (n.p.), and Seaman would have seen this letter. Peter Whiteley (Personal) informs me that Nequatewa's birthdate is recorded differently on a number of other census rolls, and I cannot say whether Seaman was aware of these or not. His estimate of “about 1880” (xxi) is, all things considered, fairly accurate.

3. See Krupat, For Those Who Come After.

4. Berry, in a fine study that is not often cited, puts the choice as one between “coercion” and “persuasion” (23), noting that “Formal education has been regarded as the most effective means of bringing about assimilation” (22). Shillinger's estimate is that the boarding schools’ “results were closer to an integration of both cultural systems [Indian and white] than … to assimilation into Euro-American society” (115).

5. Colton, who worked with Nequatewa in 1936 to produce his book Truth of a Hopi (see below), noted that Nequatewa's maternal grandfather “would take him out to the rocks and hide him” (136n40) from the Indian police or federal troops sent to bring the children of resisting families to school. As we will see, Nequatewa's paternal grandfather, probably the most important person in his life, very much favored schooling.

6. The best brief description is Whiteley's: “In 1906, Orayvi, the largest and longest-occupied Hopi settlement, divided roughly in half: the ‘Hostile’ faction led by the Spider and Fire clans, was forced out by the ‘Friendlies,’ led by the Bear clan. … The Hostiles founded two new villages, Hotvela and Paaqavi, six miles to the northwest” (“Leslie White's Hopi Ethnography” 152). For a fuller account see Whiteley (Deliberate 106–10), and, again briefly but definitively, Whiteley (Orayvi 4–6). The best Hopi account I know—there are many—and one preceding Whiteley's, is that of Emory Sekaquaptewa, Jr., “Preserving the Good Things of Hopi Life.”

7. All three of Whiting's unpublished versions of the autobiography indicate that this incident, called “Calamity,” occurred when Nequatewa was nine or ten, something one would have to guess from Seaman's account. Seaman's editing removed a great number of age approximations that Whiting had provided.

8. Nequatewa had been “born a chief in that his clan birthrights entailed the inheritance of a leadership role in the One Horn Society” (Ferguson 569), one of the four major priesthood societies. Also called Kwan or Agave, One Horn Society members were concerned “with the dead and supernatural protection of the village” (Whiteley, Deliberate 57).

9. Kachina is the name by which important Hopi supernaturals are called—more on this below—although it certainly could serve as a proper name for someone of the katsina clan.

10. The celebrated Carlisle Indian School's football team, with its star, Jim Thorpe, was for the most part made up of college-age men, and Carlisle competed against—and beat—some of the best American college teams. But Carlisle was not a college, providing no more than an eighth-grade education.

11. For example, Shillinger, in regard to former boarding-school students she interviewed at St. Joseph's School: “A theme that runs through the students’ remembrances is physical abuse” (14). Shaw describes a matron at the Phoenix Indian School who “was strict and frequently used her strap” (134) on the girls, in particular “strapping” them while they “were still on [their] hands and knees” (136) scrubbing floors. Shaw's sense of her education at Phoenix, however, is strongly positive. Riney remarks on the violent abuse of students by several women teachers at the Rapid City Indian School (147–48), and other boarding-school autobiographers have reported acts of sadism (e.g. Kabotie: Mr. Buchanan's “razor strop—it was leather, with a metal hook on the end” (12)) and demented savagery (e.g. Peter Razor's kneecap was broken by a female teacher wielding a hammer (62)).

12. “A Hopi kiva is a rectangular ceremonial chamber, generally thought of as ‘owned’ or taken care of by a particular clan, clan segment, or clan member” (Whiteley, Deliberate 61–62). It is “built underground … oriented approximately north and south” and “entered through a hatchway in the roof, by means of a stout ladder” (Titiev 103).

13. A Hopi ten years Nequatewa's junior, Talayesva, working with the Yale sociologist Leo Simmons, had published his widely noticed autobiography, Sun Chief, in 1942, the year Nequatewa approached Whiting to work with him on his own life story. It is possible that Talayesva's title may have influenced Nequatewa's decision to call his own story Born a Chief, a decision that would indeed seem to have been his, not his collaborator's preference. In a letter dated 12 June 1942, soon after taking down Nequatewa's account, Whiting wrote to Sterling Macintosh, “I am inclined to think that ‘Born a Chief’ sort of falls short” (2: n.p.) as a title. Talayesva, encouraged by Simmons, provided a great many sexual details, and Nequatewa, a Christian (see below), may have decided to do otherwise.

14. Trennert refers to the “new school discipline of ‘domestic science’” as “a modern homemaking technique, developed as a means to bring stability and scientific management to the American family” in late nineteenth-century America, “and provide skills to the increasing number of women entering the work force” (“Educating” 273). Like much else, it was introduced into the Indian boarding schools without much awareness of the specific social circumstances of Native American women.

15. Nequatewa spells this bahana, a spelling widely found in the literature. More recent work (e.g. Geertz, Whiteley, Clemmer) uses pahaana, after Malotki, who also contributed to the Hopi Dictionary Project's authoritative dictionary. I have used some of what are now the “official” spellings, like pahaana and katsina, but adopted Whiteley's practice of not attempting to follow any “single orthographic usage … for several reasons” (Deliberate 317). For anyone interested in Hopi prophecy regarding pahaana, Geertz provides almost eleven pages of “Hopi Prophecies” concerning “THE WHITE BROTHER” from 1858 to 1961 (422–32).

16. Nequatewa's grandfather interestingly says that the true pahaana “might be a dark bahana” (96), cultural traits perhaps more important than actual skin color. Whiteley notes that contemporary Hopi people refer to whites as pahaanam while in general agreement that Anglos are not “the true Pahaana” (Deliberate 329n8; see also 270–72).

17. A detailed description of a Hopi katsina initiation appears in a text by Voth in 1901. As Whiteley has noted, “ritual knowledge is guarded with great secrecy” (Deliberate 84) by Hopi people because its dissemination “either orally to unentitled parties or … in published accounts, violates ritual sanctity and effectiveness, and may damage the spiritual health of the community” (Rethinking 176). Voth's papers, revealing many Hopi “secrets,” have been available for over a hundred years and have been cited by more researchers than I can name. Nonetheless, in consultation with the editors of this journal I have adopted the following procedure. On the one hand, I will note where Voth and others have published on ritual matters that Nequatewa himself chose to mention. It does not make much sense to pretend that those papers do not exist. On the other, I will not quote anything from Voth or others that describes “ritual knowledge,” nor will I give specific references to these works. This is, to be sure, a strictly symbolic act; anyone wishing to find the texts mentioned but not referenced will have no trouble doing so. Nonetheless, it seemed to us better to proceed in this manner rather than to adhere to usual scholarly practice and further disseminate information that should not have been made public in the first place.

18. Eggan quotes an “informant” who (in English) notes of her own “disenchantment” that she “cried and cried into [her] sheepskin that night … hated [her] parents, … [and] was afraid to tell the others the truth for they might whip me to death” (372). Talayesva was also considerably more shaken by what he had learned than was Nequatewa. I will give references for Eggan's work and Talayesva's because they involve materials that Hopis themselves offered.

19. It should be said that Nequatewa's new name was not something he chose to keep secret. In an earlier version of the autobiography, he had said that the man who wielded the corn and washed his hair told him, “From now on your name is Nasingpu which means ‘a snake got rid of its old skin’” (2: 224). Nequatewa's original Hopi name was Kokyanghoya, “Little Spider” (1: 266). Many boarding-school students got one (or more) American names on their arrival at school. This seems not to have been the case with Nequatewa, and how he got the name Edmund is not to be found in any of the versions.

20. Whiteley's review of Born a Chief observed that Nequatewa was already “a seasoned ethnographic interpreter, well-versed in relativizing his cultural identity … as well as simply a Hopi man of his generation” (“Review” 479) when he dictated his autobiography.

21. The “outing” program was an important feature of Richard Henry Pratt's Carlisle Indian school in Pennsylvania, the flagship government boarding school. The theory was to give Native students an experience outside the school, living and working among whites, while in practice it served mostly as training in subservience. In Phoenix, Arizona, although local white families were happy enough to have cheap Indian labor, they were less willing to have Indians living in their homes than were families in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

22. The first telephone service in Arizona began in 1881.

23. This is Paul Wiki, from Walpi, as the typescripts make clear. He is described as being an “office boy” for the school, although his age is not given. Seaman represents him as a good deal more wimpy—ineffectual, whiny, at one point bursting into tears—than do the typescripts.

24. Let me note for any younger readers that the comedian Bob Hope and the singer-actor Bing Crosby made seven “road” films between 1940 and 1962, the first of which was The Road to Singapore and the last The Road to Hong Kong. Often spoofing popular film conventions of the time, the films were full of pratfalls and occasions for Hope's jokes, with the action stopping every now and again so that Crosby might sing. Bud Abbott and Lou Costello were comedians of roughly the same period, beginning in radio, making films, and appearing on television. The shorter, heavier Costello was generally the fall guy and often the butt of Abbott's jokes. Their best-known routine, “Who's on First?” can be seen on YouTube, and I recommend it highly.

25. Cf. Whiteley: “Sootuknangw in current orthography. Variously translated as ‘heart of the sky’ or, my preference, ‘star cumulus-cloud,’ a principal deity of the above” (Personal).

26. See Krupat, Ethnocriticism.