Changed Forever, Volume I

American Indian Boarding-School Literature

Arnold Krupat

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438469140, 9781438469157
• eBook ISBN: 9781438469164
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Biographies de sciences sociales

Changed Forever is the first study to gather a range of texts produced by Native Americans who, voluntarily or through compulsion, attended government-run boarding schools in the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth centuries. Arnold Krupat examines Hopi, Navajo, and Apache boarding-school narratives that detail these students' experiences. The book's analyses are attentive to the topics ( topoi ) and places ( loci ) of the boarding schools. Some of these topics are: (re-)Naming students, imposing on them the regimentation of Clock Time, compulsory religious instruction and practice, and corporal punishment, among others. These topics occur in a variety of places, like the Dormitory, the Dining Room, the Chapel, and the Classroom. Krupat's close readings of these narratives provide cultural and historical context as well as critical commentary. In her study of the Chilocco Indian School, K. Tsianina Lomawaima asked poignantly, "What has become of the thousands of Indian voices who spoke the breath of boarding-school life?" Changed Forever lets us hear some of them.

PART I

HOPI BOARDING-SCHOOL
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES

IN A REVIEW OF EDMUND NEQUATEWA’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Born a Chief: The Nineteenth-Century Hopi Boyhood of Edmund Nequatewa (1993), Peter Whiteley refers to the “canonical corpus” of “Hopi autobiography” (1994, 478), a canon to which he would add Nequatewa’s book. However “canonical” this “corpus” may be, it nonetheless remains a body of work little known to most students of American autobiography. The Hopi autobiographical canon consists of the following texts: Don Talayesva’s Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian (1942), Polingaysi Qoyawayma’s (Elizabeth Q. White’s) No Turning Back: A Hopi Indian Woman’s Struggle to Bridge the Gap between the World of Her People and the World of the White Man (1964), Helen Sekaquaptewa’s Me and Mine: The Life Story of Helen Sekaquaptewa (1969), Fred Kabotie’s Fred Kabotie: Hopi Indian Artist (1977), Albert Yava’s Big Falling Snow: A Tewa-Hopi Indian’s Life and Times and the History and Traditions of His People (1978), and Edmund Nequatewa’s Born a Chief: The Nineteenth-Century Hopi Boyhood of Edmund Nequatewa (1993).1 All the texts of the Hopi autobiographical canon belong to the genre of American Indian boarding-school literature; each subject describes his or her experience of school at some length. This is unusual for the life-history texts of any given Native people, and a major reason for beginning this study with the Hopi canon.

I have arranged the titles of the books making up the Hopi canon according to their dates of publication, although Nequatewa, whose book was published last, was born earlier than the others, in “around 1880” (xv), according to P. David Seaman, his editor. Kabotie, the youngest of these autobiographers, was born in 1900, and the others were born between those two dates. All of the Hopi texts—like most of the others I will consider—are what, many years ago, I called “Indian autobiographies.”2 That is to say they are bicultural composites in which the named Native subject’s story has been transcribed, arranged, edited, or otherwise constructed by a white collaborator or collaborators. In one instance (Talayesva), the editor was a sociologist (Leo Simmons); in another (Yava), the editor was a folklorist, a novelist, and ethnomusicologist (Harold Courlander). Three worked with enthusiasts of the West: Kabotie with Bill Belknap, Qoyawayma with Vada Carlson, and Sekaquaptewa with Louise Udall. Unlike the subjects of a great many earlier Indian autobiographies, all of these Native people spoke and read and wrote English so that each had substantial say as to the final text.

Boarding-school experience played a significant part in the life of each of these Hopi autobiographers, who all went to school at a time when Hopi social and ceremonial life underwent critical change. For the Hopis, as we will see, the central date is 1906.

I’d 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 read an earlier version of this essay, provided a great deal of valuable information, and corrected several errors I had made. Any errors that remain are solely my responsibility. An earlier version of this chapter appeared in a/b: autobiography studies.

1

Edmund Nequatewa’s
Born a Chief

EDMUND NEQUATEWA WAS BORN IN THE VILLAGE OF SHIPAULOVI, ON THE Second Mesa of the Hopi reservation, in “around 1880” (Seaman, xv), as I noted. In 1942, he asked Alfred Whiting, an ethnobotanist whom he knew from the Museum of Northern Arizona where both were for a time employed, to write his life story. Nequatewa, Whiting, and Sterling Macintosh, a “local student” (Seaman, xxiv), collaborated during May and June of that year to produce a manuscript that Whiting worked on sporadically for almost twenty years without presenting it for publication. P. David Seaman, an anthropological linguist, came into possession of Whiting’s papers after his death in 1978—Nequatewa had died in 1969—the several typescripts of the autobiography among them, and it was Seaman who produced the final version of Born a Chief (1993).

The Alfred F. Whiting Collection in the Cline Library at Northern Arizona University includes three bound volumes of typed manuscripts in which are to be found several earlier versions of Nequatewa’s autobiography. Each of the volumes is titled I, Edmund: The Hopi Boyhood of Edmund Nequatewa, and all are dated 1961, the last time Whiting and Nequatewa worked together. Despite the 1961 date, volumes 2 and 3 are made up of materials from May and June of 1942, when Whiting and Nequatewa first worked together. Volume 1 contains Whiting’s final collation and revision of all of these texts following his last meeting with Nequatewa. The Cline Library also houses the P. David Seaman collection, volume 8 of which lists among its contents:

I, Edmund: The Story of a Hopi Boyhood
As told by Edmund Nequatewa to Alfred F. Whiting
Carbon copy of original collated by P. David Seaman
24 December, 1977,

a year, that is, before Whiting’s death. That carbon copy, is, unfortunately, missing from the volume, and only the title page testifies to its having existed. The “Contents” page of the 1977 collation is there, however, and, since it reproduces almost exactly the “Contents” page of Whiting’s final 1961 revision, it seems likely that the missing carbon copy would also closely reproduce that final revision. But those “Contents” pages—Whiting’s last one from 1961 and Seaman’s from his 1977 collation—differ from the “Contents” page of the book that was published in 1993 as Born a Chief. Those differences can only be the result of Seaman’s revisions, and I’ll discuss a number of them in what follows.

In 1887, the federal government had established a boarding school at Keam’s Canyon, about thirty-five miles from Nequatewa’s village on the Hopi reservation. The government required all Hopi children to attend. At Orayvi on Third Mesa, the largest and oldest Hopi town, there was general opposition to the schools and many parents hid their children from the government agents and Indian police lest they be taken by force. Some Second Mesa Hopis also opposed the schools, but here the majority favored them and encouraged their children to attend.1 This difference of opinion, blandly to call it that, added to longstanding disagreements among important Hopi leaders, and led to the Orayvi Split of September, 1906, a major development in Hopi history. Whiteley writes, “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”2 (2003, 152).

James Gallagher wrote that he “opened the [Keam’s Canyon] School October 1, 1887 with an attendance of 52 pupils. After … about 2 weeks, there was a general stampede for the mesas” (in Coleman, 166). Those students who did not run off were nonetheless close enough to their home villages to receive visits and food packages from relatives, or even to be whisked away sporadically for various ceremonial occasions—as would be the case with Nequatewa. Thus the Keam’s Canyon School could never quite become the sort of total institution that might threaten Indian identities in the way the off-reservation boarding schools attempted to do.

Nequatewa, as a boy, had been shot in the knee by an arrow (45).3 His family treated the wound by traditional means; it healed, and for a time did not trouble him. Then, when he was about fifteen, he began to feel severe pain in the area of his knee, and developed life-threatening infections that incapacitated him for weeks. Two medicine men were called on to diagnose and treat the problem, the second of whom identified the cause of the illness as the machinations of a female witch, someone who did not want Nequatewa to become chief of the One-Horn Society.4 To help save the sick young man, Nequatewa’s paternal grandfather, a man who will influence his life profoundly, tells the medicine man that “He will never become a chief of this fraternity. From now on he is mine. … I am going to be here from now on to care for him, and if he gets well, nobody shall ever take him away from me. I will teach him and tell him of the course of life that I want him to take” (70). Grandfather announces that although the young man “is my son’s son, … from now on he is my own. From now on I am not going to call him Grandson; I am just going to call him Son” (70). The young man gets well, although there is permanent damage to his leg.

“The course of life” the grandfather wants his “son” to take involves going to school, and at several places in the book grandfather elaborates the reasons for his commitment to the white man’s education. Grandfather had already sent his biological son, Kachina,5 to the boarding school at Keam’s Canyon, and Nequatewa refers to him as “uncle” (85). But a father’s brother would not be called “uncle” by Hopis, who reserve that title for a mother’s brother, an authority figure with whom one would not anticipate having “fun.”6 It is likely that Whiting, Seaman, or both referred to him as “uncle” rather than “father” so as not to confuse a non-Hopi audience.

Nequatewa is about fifteen years old when he begins school, and his uncle, as Whiting’s typescripts indicate, is only a little older.7 This should remind us that while the boarding schools most certainly enrolled young children, it was also common for them to have teenagers and even older men and women in, say, the first to third or fourth grades. In response to grandfather’s decree, Nequatewa says he thought “it would be great fun to go away with my uncle, and I would always be looking forward to that day when we will leave home for school” (85). Here, as in other places, Nequatewa’s diction diverges slightly from standard English, because, as Seaman states, in order “to follow Whiting’s wishes” (xxv), “The Hopi narrative style used by Edmund has been left largely unedited” (xxiv). I’d question whether Nequatewa’s (only slightly) nonstandard English has anything to do with “Hopi narrative style.” (I will also question the practice of anthropologists or amanuenses who refer to their consultants by first name only.)

When the great day comes, Nequatewa, his grandfather, and his uncle make the long ride to school on burros. Soon after their arrival, he participates in several of the initiation scenes at specific initiatory loci of boarding-school literature, for example, “The Dining Room,” “The Clean-Up,” and “The Dormitory,” and engages with a number of the topoi of boarding-school literature, e.g., “Clock Time,” “Food” (which I will refer to sometimes as “the Mush”), “Sex,” “Religion,” “Resistance,” “Outing Labor,” “Running Away,” and “Identity.” Most of these scenes and topics appear throughout the Hopi autobiographical canon as well as in a great many other boarding-school autobiographies.

Nequatewa first encounters the Dining Room. “That evening,” he says, “we went to dinner with the rest of the boys and grandfather went with us” (87). Here he is served what I will call the Mush. This is to say that in view of the large quantity of oatmeal of widely varying quality and preparation they were served, some of the students gave the generic name “Mush” to all the strange and often unpleasant foods they encountered8 (12). Nequatewa and his grandfather are served “light bread” rather than piki, the thin corn bread he is used to, along with tea into which “they had poured some milk or cream” (86–87). The tea is warm, and he “never had drank anything warm before” (87). “All the supper didn’t taste very good to me,” Nequatewa says, “and what I had took down all wanted to come up” (87). When his grandfather gets up to leave, he follows him, and, “as soon as [he] got out of the door” (87) he threw up.

He then asks his grandfather for some familiar food and is given watermelon and piki. Soon “somebody came along, one of the school boys, and said that it was time for us to go to bed” (87–88). He is now initiated into the Dormitory. Here, he encounters “some strange looking things,” which his uncle Kachina tells him “were the beds on which we have to sleep” (88). He shares a bed with his uncle, and, after finally getting to sleep, falls off and lands on the floor: “Then I just can’t go back to sleep again for fear I might fall off” (88). I have earlier mentioned Basil Johnston’s account of smaller boys being sexually abused by bigger boys in the dormitory, Johnston and Highway’s accounts of boys being molested by priests, Sarah Shillinger’s discovery of girls abused by nuns at Catholic boarding schools, and accounts of lay teachers’ inappropriate behavior elsewhere. Edmund Nequatewa’s narrative, however, has no mention whatever of sexual abuse by fellow students, faculty, or staff. It may be that Nequatewa and Whiting chose not to record such matters. But of course it also may be that such matters are not recorded because nothing of this sort occurred.

The boys are awakened by a bell. Many boarding-school students have commented on how strange they found the strict regimentation of each day, marked either by the sound of a bell or, on the military model, a bugle. Clock Time, the Western rationalization of the life-world, so that one eats at a certain time, whether one is hungry or not, performs certain tasks at certain times whether they are necessary then or not, is one of the consistent topoi of boarding-school literature. Before going to breakfast, however, Nequatewa finds that he must accompany the other boys to wash up. He notes that “There was only three towels on a roller, on which everybody wiped their hands and faces” (88). Something like this was the situation at the boarding schools generally and it led to widespread epidemics of trachoma, tuberculosis, smallpox, and other diseases. (Although, as we will see, an outbreak of smallpox on the Hopi reservation did not reach the school.)

Breakfast consists of “oatmeal, coffee, bread, and fried potatoes” (89) that “don’t look like food to me” (89), Nequatewa remarks. But before sitting down to this unappealing meal, he observes that “everybody stood at the table behind their chairs. On the first bell, everybody bowed their heads, and I don’t know what they said. It must be the grace that they had repeated”(88). The observance of various Christian practices, Religion, is another of the topoi of boarding-school literature. Here, in that “everybody” said “the grace” according to Nequatewa’s observation, one would think that all the students could speak English. But whether they could, or how well they could is very much in question. Thus, Fred Kabotie has remarked, in regard to required hymn singing at boarding school, “[W]e’d sing Hopi words to ‘Jesus loves me, this I know’ that sounded like the English but had funny meanings. Miss Beaman [the visiting religionist] never caught on” (11). Polingaysi Qoyawayma illustrates this when she describes her classmates singing, “Deso lasmi, desi no.” English translation: “Jesus loves me, this I know.” Hopi translation: “The San Juan people are bringing burros”9 (No Turning Back, 14).

Breakfast is followed by something more than a casual wash. I have called it the Cleanup, an initiatory scene that every boarding-school student endured. An important part of the Cleanup was the cutting of the Indian boy or girl’s long hair. This was done for two reasons: it was intended to prevent the spread of lice, and it was intended as a de-Indianizing gesture, one that would differentiate the newly shorn child from his or her age-mates who had avoided or escaped the schools. For many Native peoples, long hair would be roughly cut short as a sign of mourning. For Hopi males, the cutting of the hair was emasculating “because long hair was highly valued as a ritual mark of manhood entitled by Wuwtsim initiation” (Whiteley 1988, 94–95), the tribal initiation that almost all males underwent sometime between adolescence and marriage. (See below.) Indeed, Charles Burton, who had arrived at Keam’s Canyon School as superintendent and reservation agent in 1899, as I noted, used hair-cutting as punishment for antigovernment behavior on the part of adult Hopi males, “a matter,” as Whiteley writes, “of great and long remembered resentment”10 (1988b, 94).

This does not, however, seem to be the case with Edmund Nequatewa. He remembers that a man came with “a pair of scissors, and I remember a pair of clippers, too. He sat me on a chair and he went to work and cut my hair off, just like taking my scalp. Took it all off, down to the skin!” (89). Hopis were strongly opposed to killing, but in the past Hopis had indeed taken the scalps of vanquished foes. Although Nequatewa compares what was done to him to the “taking of his scalp,” a horrible experience, he does not comment further. Next in the Cleanup is a bath with heated water and “hard brown laundry soap” instead of “toilet soap” (89), as Nequatewa makes the distinction. After this, he and his uncle dress in “a new outfit of clothes” (89). (But uncle Kachina must have been through all this before.)

A further aspect of the Dormitory at Keam’s Canyon School, that the windows are barred and the boys locked in at night with no toilet facilities available, leads to acts of Resistance, another topos of boarding-school literature. To protest the situation, a number of the bigger boys (and Nequatewa is himself at least fifteen) “decided that they will just crap all over the floor, which they did” (91). Confronted by the disciplinarian—every boarding school had one or more disciplinarians—who demands to know who is responsible for the mess, a number of “big husky boys” step forward and announce that unless the padlock is removed, the school staff “will find the mess every morning” (91). The disciplinarian makes the point that the padlock can’t be removed “because you boys get ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Hopi Boarding-School Autobiographies
• Part II Navajo Boarding-School Autobiographies
• Appendix A The Orayvi Split
• Appendix B The Navajo Autobiographical Canon
• Appendix C Apache Boarding-School Autobiographies
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover