Beyond the Mesas to air locally and via internet

On January 17, 2010January 17, 2010 By Matthew Sakiestewa GilbertIn HCPO, Hopi education, Native films, Phoenix Indian School, Sherman Institute, ShowingsLeave a comment

I am pleased to announce that UI-7, a local television station associated with the College of Media at the University of Illinois, will air Beyond the Mesas this week on the following days and times:

Tuesday, January 19 – 7:30pm and 9:00pm CST
Wednesday, January 20 – 1:00 pm CST
Friday, January 22 – 10:00 pm CST
Saturday, January 23 – 8:00 pm CST

UI-7 can be seen on Channel 7 for local Comcast subscribers.

On the same days/times, Beyond the Mesas will air simultaneously over the internet via a live stream at: http://www.media.illinois.edu/service/ui7live.html

If you are planning on watching the film on-line, remember to account for the different time zones. The above showings are listed in Central Standard Time (CST)

Beyond the Mesas Trailer

About the film:

Directed by Emmy Award winning director, Allan Holzman, and produced by Leigh J. Kuwanwisiwma, Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa, Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert, and Gerald Eichner, Beyond the Mesas is a thirty-six minute documentary film on the removal of Hopis to on and off-reservation boarding schools and their experiences at schools such as Sherman Institute, Phoenix Indian School, Ganado Mission School, and Stewart Indian School. Topics covered in the film include Hopi understandings of education, early U.S. government attempts to assimilate Hopis, the Orayvi Split, Hopi language loss at American schools, and the future of the Hopi people. Produced with the cooperation and involvement of the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office in Kykotsmovi, Arizona, Beyond the Mesas is part I of a series of films on children and American Indian culture titled “Keeping the Culture Alive.”

The first public showing of the film was at the Hotevilla Bacavi Community School on the Hopi Reservation on November 8, 2006. Shortly afterwards, the Applied Indigenous Studies Department at Northern Arizona University and the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office hosted a screening at the Cline Library auditorium. Since November 2006, official screenings have taken place at other universities and schools, including the University of Illinois, University of California, Riverside, Cornell University, and Sherman Indian High School. The film has aired on several regional PBS stations throughout the United States.

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert

Hopi professor earns tenure and promotion

On January 6, 2010September 16, 2012 By Matthew Sakiestewa GilbertIn Hopi education, Hopi news of interest, Hopi scholarship, Hopis and the academy, HTGSP1 Comment

It gives me great pleasure to announce that Hopi professor Angela A. Gonzales from Shungopavi on Second Mesa has received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at Cornell University. This truly is an incredible accomplishment. Gonzales received her undergraduate degree from UC Riverside and her MA, EdM, and PhD in Sociology form Harvard University. Her first academic post was at San Francisco State University where she served as an assistant professor and acting chair of American Indian Studies from 1997 to 2000. In 2002 she joined the faculty in the Department of Development Sociology at Cornell where she also teaches in the American Indian Program. As an assistant professor Gonzales has had a prolific and remarkable career.

In addition to publishing chapters in many books, her articles have appeared in the Social Sciences Journal, the Public Historian, the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, and the International Social Sciences Journal. Alongside her faculty appointments, she was the director of the Hopi Tribe Grants and Scholarship Program on the Hopi Reservation from 1994 to 1995, and from 2005 to 2007 she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado at Denver Health Sciences Center, Native Elder Research Center, and the American Indian and Alaska Native Program.

In 2009 she was awarded the Ford Foundation Diversity Fellowship for her project titled “Racializing American Indians: The Politics of Identity, Displacement, and Dispossession.” Gonzales’ tenure and promotion is a proud moment for Hopi people. She is only one of a few Hopi professors in the academy with indefinite tenure.

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Review of Hopi Summer: Letters from Ethel to Maud (Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2007)

On January 3, 2010April 5, 2011 By Matthew Sakiestewa GilbertIn Book reviews, HCPO, Hopi, Hopi history2 Comments

Carolyn O’Bagy Davis, Hopi Summer: Letters from Ethel to Maud. Tucson: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2007. 160pp. paper, $15.95.

In January 1927, Carey E. Melville, a mathematics professor at Clark University in Worchester, Massachusetts, his wife Maud and their three children, left the comforts of their suburban home for a nine month adventure across the United States. Traveling in a newly purchased Model T Ford, the Melvilles drove south to Florida and then made their journey out West. In the summer of 1927, the Melvilles arrived at the Hopi villages of Sichomovi, Walpi, and Polacca in northeastern Arizona. At Polacca, Maud Melville met several Hopi artists, including a Hopi-Tewa pottery maker named Ethel Salyah Muchvo, her husband, Wilfred, and their children Minerva and Clifford. Unlike other tourist who had visited the Hopi villages in the past, Maud remained in contact with Ethel and her family after the Melvilles returned to their home in New England. In Hopi Summer, historian and biographer Carolyn O’Bagy Davis uses Maud’s journal entries, Ethel’s letters to Maud, letters written by Christian missionaries, and Hopi oral interviews to tell the story of Ethel’s friendship with Maud. However, Hopi Summer is more than a story about a friendship between two very different people. It is a story about survival, death, life, and a Hopi woman’s determination to care for her family and ill husband.

In the late 1920s and 1930s, diseases killed many Hopis on the reservation. Ethel’s husband, Wilfred, suffered from tuberculosis and his illness had a devastating effect on their children. Having experienced the pain and sorrow of losing eleven children to the disease, Ethel reached out to her pahaana (“white person”) friend, Maud, for comfort and compassion, while Maud responded with charitable acts and words of kindness. On several occasions Ethel wrote and asked Maud if she would send her extra clothes, winter coats, and blankets. In return Ethel sent Maud her pottery, Wilfred’s katsina dolls, and other pieces of Hopi craftmanship as gifts. After the Melvilles returned home Maud gave several lectures about the Hopis, and sold Wilfred’s art to people she had met at various speaking events. Maud sent the earnings from the sales to Ethel and Wilfred and the family used the money to purchase food and needed supplies. Ethel’s friendship with Maud had a business element to it that reflected Ethel’s commitment to provide for her family.

Although other women have written about the Hopi people during this period, including the Christian missionary Abigail E. Johnson and the Christian biographer, Florence Crannell Means, Davis masterfully highlights the Hopi “voice” and provides the reader with a deep sense of Hopi ways and customs. Davis’s’ ability to write about the Hopi people, while at the same time not lead the reader into the “kiva” (metaphorically speaking), stands as a testimony to her sensitivity to certain aspects of Hopi religious culture. Davis’s research methodology is highly commendable, and serves as an example for individuals who desire to conduct research with an indigenous community. In this regard, Davis follows in the footsteps of Hopi scholars Sheilah E. Nicholas, Angela A. Gonzales, Patricia Sekaquaptewa, Lomayumtewa C. Ishii, and anthropologists Peter M. Whiteley and Wesley Bernardini. Each of these individuals have conducted extensive research on the Hopi Reservation and did so with the involvement and cooperation of the Hopi Tribe. Furthermore, Hopi Summer supports the understanding that Hopi intellectual property belongs with the Hopi people. In addition to sharing letters and pictures with Ethel’s family, including Ethel’s daughter, Vivian, Davis provided the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office with copies of her research and sought the assistance of Hopi scholars Hartman Lomawaima, former director of the Arizona State Museum, and Emory Sekaquaptewa.

Hopi Summer is beautifully written and illustrated with several previously unpublished photographs, maps, and letters. Scholars, students, and people who are interested in Native American history, the history of the West, women’s history, cultural history, and American Indian Studies, will certainly gain from Davis’s work on the Hopi people. While readers could have benefited from a deeper interaction with the literature on Hopis during this era, Hopi Summer remains a fascinating account of a “bygone time in Hopi history.”

Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Portions of this review originally appeared in American Indian Quarterly (Winter 2009, vol. 33:1, pp. 163-64)

Remembering Polingaysi Qoyawayma

On December 7, 2009March 22, 2013 By Matthew Sakiestewa GilbertIn Hopi authors, Polingaysi Qoyawayma, Sherman Institute23 Comments

Nineteen years ago on December 6, 1990, Polingaysi Qoyawayma (Elizabeth Q. White), passed away with family at her side in Phoenix, Arizona. Born in 1892, Polingaysi was from the village of Orayvi on Third Mesa, and she is perhaps best known for her book (as told to Vada Carlson) No Turning Back: A Hopi Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds. I never had the honor of meeting Polingaysi, but her story is often told among our people. In November 1906, shortly after an internal dispute in her village, Polingaysi left by wagon with a group of Hopi children to the small town of Winslow, Arizona. From there she boarded a Santa Fe train to San Bernardino, California, then traveled south to Sherman Institute in Riverside. She experienced a different life in the “land of oranges,” and she wrote at length about her time at Sherman in No Turning Back. After spending almost three years at the school, Polingaysi returned to Orayvi and found it difficult to acclimate to reservation life. She eventually became the first Hopi to teach at a Hopi day school, and she encouraged her students to take the best of Hopi and American culture to succeed as a people. Although Polingaysi is often associated with No Turning Back, she also wrote a second book in 1941 titled The Sun Girl, which was illustrated by Hopi artist Komoki. In this children’s book, Polingaysi retells a story of a young girl named Dawamana (“Sun Maiden” or “Sun Girl”) from Orayvi who learns the Butterfly Dance at the village of Moencopi. In the foreword to the book’s 1978 edition, Robert Breunig of the Museum of Northern Arizona notes that “Mrs. Qoyawayma told this story many times to her school children. They became so enthralled with it that they asked that it be repeated again and again, and they learned it almost word for word, correcting deviations from one telling to the next. Finally, Mrs. Qoyawayma wrote the story down in the hope that all children would enjoy it.” Nineteen years after her passing, Polingaysi’s life and work are still remembered. She is one of the most revered teachers and writers in Hopi history, and her example and words continue to have great meaning and relevance for those in the present.