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No Turning Back: A Hopi Indian Woman's Struggle to Live in Two Worlds
This is the story of the Hopi woman who chose in her early youth to live in the white man's world. She became known as Elizabeth Q. White. Born at Old Oraibi, Arizona, she was of the first Hopi children to be educated in white schools. Later she was the first Hopi to become a teacher in those schools. Here her biographer records Qoyowayma's break with the traditions of her people and her struggle to gain acceptance for her radical teaching methods. Throughout her life this remarkable woman has held to the best in Hopi culture and has fought to maintain it in the lives of her students. Her story, rich in information on Hopi legend and ceremony, is a moving introduction to the Hopi way of life.
188 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1977
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About the author
Polingaysi Qoyawayma
4 books1 followerPolingaysi Qöyawayma (1892 – December 6, 1990), also known as Elizabeth Q. White, was a Hopi educator, writer, and potter.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 10, 2015
07/05/10
Oh, for a heart as pure as corn blossoms,
And for a life as sweet as honey gathered from the flowers,
And beautiful as butterflies in sunshine.
May I do good, as Corn has done for my people
Through all the days that were.
Until my task is done and evening falls
Oh, Mighty Spirit, hear my grinding song.
She is young and has, of her own volition, joined the white mans' school in her Hopi village: Oraibi, AZ. Her story focuses on the ostracism she indured from her tribe for taking on the white mans' ways, her development into a teacher and attainment of a pinnacle of achievment.
While accepting Christianity she retains much of her Hopi core values, love of space and balance with nature, but she sees an imperitive in culturally moving forward and that education is key to bringing the Indian living experience out of the stone age. She becomes a teacher.
We all realize uncountable sufferings were endured by the American Indian. That is not her story. Here is a lady, a woman, that does not regret her involvement with anglo influences, no axe to grind, no recriminations.
*** How well she taught, how much her methods were appreciated by those in higher circles in education became apperant when she was chosen from all the Indian Service teachers in the nation to demonstrate her teaching methods at the 1941 summer session in Chemawa, Oregon, before a gathering of supervisors and teachers from the Unided States and Alaska.***
I keep thinking how this ties in with the film Koyaanisqatsi. For those of you whom haven't seen this film, I highly recommend it. Not for the impatient, but rather to be seen uninterrupted, with serene mind, to its conclusion.
Oh, for a heart as pure as corn blossoms,
And for a life as sweet as honey gathered from the flowers,
And beautiful as butterflies in sunshine.
May I do good, as Corn has done for my people
Through all the days that were.
Until my task is done and evening falls
Oh, Mighty Spirit, hear my grinding song.
She is young and has, of her own volition, joined the white mans' school in her Hopi village: Oraibi, AZ. Her story focuses on the ostracism she indured from her tribe for taking on the white mans' ways, her development into a teacher and attainment of a pinnacle of achievment.
While accepting Christianity she retains much of her Hopi core values, love of space and balance with nature, but she sees an imperitive in culturally moving forward and that education is key to bringing the Indian living experience out of the stone age. She becomes a teacher.
We all realize uncountable sufferings were endured by the American Indian. That is not her story. Here is a lady, a woman, that does not regret her involvement with anglo influences, no axe to grind, no recriminations.
*** How well she taught, how much her methods were appreciated by those in higher circles in education became apperant when she was chosen from all the Indian Service teachers in the nation to demonstrate her teaching methods at the 1941 summer session in Chemawa, Oregon, before a gathering of supervisors and teachers from the Unided States and Alaska.***
I keep thinking how this ties in with the film Koyaanisqatsi. For those of you whom haven't seen this film, I highly recommend it. Not for the impatient, but rather to be seen uninterrupted, with serene mind, to its conclusion.
December 1, 2020
Disclaimer: This book is old. It includes outdated terms and recounts a story that doesn't fit with what most people say today regarding Indian residential school experiences, missionaries in Native American communities, etc. In fact for the first half of the book, you get the feeling that this was written by a white person making the argument that white culture saved the savage native. It can be uncomfortable to read. But it pulls together as it goes along. Polingaysi's story is best read in combination with other stories about the situations she goes through because, again, it is rare now to hear people extol the virtues of their times in residential schools. But that's its value I guess; Polingaysi struggles to live in two worlds and spends her whole life learning how to achieve that. Her experience may be unusual, but it's valuable and she is an important figure in the field of indigenous education where she learned that the best way to teach a child is to validate and learn through their culture.
May 5, 2008
I really found this book to be profound in that it helps the reader understand the challenges individuals face when they are the first to do something, or to go against the traditions of family, culture, etc. Polingaysi details her transiiton from a traditional Hopi Nation girl to willingly receiving the "white man's education" at boarding schools, and the struggles to fit in with her family and the Hopi people and also within the White society. Very well done.
December 12, 2016
What an amazing memoir of a wonderful woman who changed many lives and succeeded despite the judgements of everyone else during hard times. This book taught me so much about early Native American life as well as the merging of the cultures between the white man and the Hopi/Navajos. I loved how she chose her own path.
February 22, 2023
Finished reading "No Turning Back": A Hopi Indian Woman's Struggle to Live in Two Worlds by Polingaysi Qoyawayma. We gave her another name, which she often used in her life outside of the Hopi people; but I won't use it. It's foreign to us, but not hard to pronounce: Coy-away-ma, with the emphasis on Coy.
Probably born in 1892, she didn't remember when we first came. Her father worked with the Mennonite missionary who was trying to start a school near her village on the mesa.
They meant well. Our own self-images are rarely villainous when our intentions are good.
Polingaysi was always curious and never afraid. She became a bridge for the two worlds that were colliding, and she took our best intentions, and became one of the most successful teachers at the native boarding schools. She was able to develop a curriculum that taught our ways of thinking and knowledge with their culture and stories. How hard would it be to learn to count in a foreign language if you were also required to count things you didn't recognize, didn't understand, and would never need to count?
How many are oranges do I have?
What's an orange?
A fruit like an apple.
oh. Enough that we won't go hungry today.
But how many do I have?
What do you mean? We'd like to eat them please.
What do I have if I take one away?
Hunger for today, perhaps for tomorrow too.
This example is juvenile, and maybe (accidentally) a little racist. But it illustrates the point. There was such cultural differences that the basic foundation that we don't even understand how to explain was a stumbling to the way we were trying to teach them. Mostly because we weren't trying to teach them. We were trying to Christianize them to make them acceptable to us and so that our God wouldn't send them to Hell.
But this book isn't really about that. It's about Polingaysi's life and her experiences in learning in our schools, and then teaching in them. It's about her struggle to get us to change so that we could teach them, so that they could teach themselves in ways that they could understand. She demanded that we not whip them into knowledge because they couldn't speak English and she demanded that we not think them too stupid to understand difficult subjects because their pride caused us to think they were unteachable.
She was a woman of two worlds, and she asked us to understand that there is much good in both of them. "Too much time has been spent in trying to teach them to cast aside the Indian in them, which is equivalent to asking them to cease being. An Indian can no more be a white man than a white man can be an Indian. And why try? There is infinite good in the Indian cultural pattern. Let's look at this thing objectively, understanding each other with charity; not disparaging the differences between us, but being gratefully aware of the good qualities we may adopt, one from another."
Nearly four generations later, we may acknowledge the wisdom of this advice, but we still struggle to give it more than acknowledgement. And yet we continue to demand that groups different from ourselves become very much like us. While the ideals of acceptance are broadly accepted on racial and ethnic gourds, we are generally loathe to accept them on sexual, religious, or political grounds.
If we can learn that demanding cultural conformity is harmfully destructive and learn to accept others as themselves, without pressing our desired changes upon them, our lives will become much brighter and much better.
Probably born in 1892, she didn't remember when we first came. Her father worked with the Mennonite missionary who was trying to start a school near her village on the mesa.
They meant well. Our own self-images are rarely villainous when our intentions are good.
Polingaysi was always curious and never afraid. She became a bridge for the two worlds that were colliding, and she took our best intentions, and became one of the most successful teachers at the native boarding schools. She was able to develop a curriculum that taught our ways of thinking and knowledge with their culture and stories. How hard would it be to learn to count in a foreign language if you were also required to count things you didn't recognize, didn't understand, and would never need to count?
How many are oranges do I have?
What's an orange?
A fruit like an apple.
oh. Enough that we won't go hungry today.
But how many do I have?
What do you mean? We'd like to eat them please.
What do I have if I take one away?
Hunger for today, perhaps for tomorrow too.
This example is juvenile, and maybe (accidentally) a little racist. But it illustrates the point. There was such cultural differences that the basic foundation that we don't even understand how to explain was a stumbling to the way we were trying to teach them. Mostly because we weren't trying to teach them. We were trying to Christianize them to make them acceptable to us and so that our God wouldn't send them to Hell.
But this book isn't really about that. It's about Polingaysi's life and her experiences in learning in our schools, and then teaching in them. It's about her struggle to get us to change so that we could teach them, so that they could teach themselves in ways that they could understand. She demanded that we not whip them into knowledge because they couldn't speak English and she demanded that we not think them too stupid to understand difficult subjects because their pride caused us to think they were unteachable.
She was a woman of two worlds, and she asked us to understand that there is much good in both of them. "Too much time has been spent in trying to teach them to cast aside the Indian in them, which is equivalent to asking them to cease being. An Indian can no more be a white man than a white man can be an Indian. And why try? There is infinite good in the Indian cultural pattern. Let's look at this thing objectively, understanding each other with charity; not disparaging the differences between us, but being gratefully aware of the good qualities we may adopt, one from another."
Nearly four generations later, we may acknowledge the wisdom of this advice, but we still struggle to give it more than acknowledgement. And yet we continue to demand that groups different from ourselves become very much like us. While the ideals of acceptance are broadly accepted on racial and ethnic gourds, we are generally loathe to accept them on sexual, religious, or political grounds.
If we can learn that demanding cultural conformity is harmfully destructive and learn to accept others as themselves, without pressing our desired changes upon them, our lives will become much brighter and much better.
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November 28, 2024fascinating as an artifact; would be very interested to know what contemporary indigenous scholars thought of it. the author’s journey of assimilation into white society does not follow the arc I was expecting at all — although she vacillates (or tries to walk a middle path) between clinging to her heritage and the opportunities provided by greater acculturation, and suffers from being caught between (and often rejected by), both Hopi and white society, her embrace of Christianity, Western education, and American cultural norms is ultimately pretty wholehearted. “Not to conform was to be thrown off balance,” she writes late in the book, apparently enthusiastically. “The old days were gone forever. One must face the new.” her belief that adapting to the “best” parts of American culture, and ditching the most “backward” or “superstitious” elements of traditional Hopi life will allow the Hopis to find recognition, development, and equality is a familiar line of thinking, but one that the dislocations of 20th century native history have not been entirely kind to. Qoyawayma writes from a place of genuine passion and desire to uplift her people, but what ends up being most striking about her book is its depiction of how even the best intentions can lead to very muddled places.
March 21, 2022
It initially feels a little off, because although I was expecting an autobiography, it was done in collaboration with another writer, so told in the second person. I found the story compelling though, as the culture clash and the pull would be real. Qoyawayma's blend of experiences gives an interesting perspective, not just to the history, but also to education.
It does make you wonder what things could have been like if the settlers did not have such contempt for native beliefs, but also, it is the first thing I have read that has had anything good to say about Henry Voth.
It does make you wonder what things could have been like if the settlers did not have such contempt for native beliefs, but also, it is the first thing I have read that has had anything good to say about Henry Voth.
December 13, 2017
Excellent book
February 20, 2017
GOOD BOOK
Want to read
January 5, 2010saw at GC bookstore
Want to read
June 9, 2010Picked this up at the Grand Canyon book store -- so far, interesting and relevant -- as a teacher, she has straddled two cultures -- I have just begun to read her book.
October 4, 2010
I absolutely recommend this. It is poignant and perspective broadening. It is a quick read.
November 3, 2011
A good, well-written personal account of a woman who felt torn between her traditional Hopi culture and the white world.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews