Education beyond the Mesas: Hopi Students at Sherman Institute, 1902-1929

4. Elder in Residence

InNovember1906,twomonthsaftertheOrayviSplit,government officials took advantage of the turmoil on Third Mesa and sent nearly seventy Hopis from Orayvi to Sherman Institute. Wearing tattered clothes, “cheap shoes, homemade flour sack shirts” and worn out pants, the “wild-looking band from the mesas” reflected an image and people the U.S. government intended to change.1 And change they did. Under the umbrella and protection of Indian education, the young Hopis from Orayvi entered a school that altered the way they saw themselves, their people, and the world in which they lived. But unlike the first Hopi who came to Sherman Institute in 1902, the students who traveled by wagon to Winslow, Arizona, and then boarded a Santa Fe train to Southern California in 1906 did not endure the academic and cultural challenges alone. Accompanied by their kikmongwi, Tawaquaptewa, his wife, Nasumgoens, their daughter, Mina, and other Hopi leaders, the pupils had the stability, encouragement , and influence needed for their survival and success.2 With the headline “Mokis at Last in School,” the Los Angeles Times reported that Tawaquaptewa had “adopted the Sherman uniform in place of the richly embroidered blanket, buckskin leggings and moccasins which he wore upon his arrival at the school.” To create room for the Hopi students, Superintendent Hall sent “fifty boys and girls of mixed Indian blood” back to 4. Elder in Residence Elder in Residence 72 their reservations. Possessing at least one-fourth “Indian blood,” these students could legally attend a federal off-reservation Indian boarding school, but schooling the Hopis had become a major priority for the U.S. government. The newspaper account stated that the “experiment of educating the Moki Indians at the school is being watched with particular interest, as they are one of the most primitive tribes in the United States, clinging to the same modes of living they are believed to have followed a thousand years ago.” The reporter described the Hopi students as “primitive,” but the pupils would prove their intelligence and abilities and demonstrate agency at the school with their kikmongwi present to help them navigate and excel in this new environment.3 The Hopi pupils composed a large tribal representation at the school of six hundred, second only to the so-called California Mission Indians.4 For many of the Hopi students, Sherman Institute became synonymous with the “land of oranges,” a term used by Hopi pupils to describe the abundant orange groves in Southern California. In the early twentieth century, Hopis circulated stories on the reservation about the oranges at the school, and how the exotic fruit “existed by the wagon load.”5 Hopi student Polingaysi Qoyawayma from Orayvi recalled that teachers at the Oraibi Day School showed a group of Hopi youth pictures of orange trees that stood “heavy with fruit.” Teachers told the children that oranges in Riverside looked like “peaches on the Hopi peach trees, only much larger.”6 With an estimated five hundred people in Orayvi after the split, hardships on families and the community resulted when the pupils left for school. Primarily an agricultural society , the people of Orayvi relied on the annual harvest of corn, beans, various types of squash, and wheat for their survival. Elder in Residence 73 Families on the reservation needed every available hand to plant and harvest their crops. In the social world of the Hopis, boys worked alongside their fathers in the fields; once the boys left for school, their fathers no longer had their seasonal help. Hopi mothers lost their daughters’ help to the school’s Outing Program . Apart from the physical hardships resulting from their children’s absence, parents prophesied and worried that their children would be overtaken by the white man’s culture and want nothing to do with the Hopi way. For some, this worry came true, but most Hopi students returned home to contribute to their family and village community. In 1906, Indian education in the United States focused heavily on industrial training. Influenced by policies drafted by Superintendent of Indian Schools Estelle Reel, the Office of Indian Affairs urged school superintendents and teachers to “eliminate from the curriculum everything of an unpractical nature” and to modify “instruction to local conditions and immediate and practical needs of the pupils.”7 Indian boarding schools did not exist to create Indian scholars, medical doctors, professors, lawyers , or future business leaders. Instead, U.S. government policy...