Talking Back to Colonial Institutions: Hopi and Non-Native Scholars

Many of you come from social origins that the academy deems suspect, backgrounds that you are supposed to grow out of, or, at least, leave at the gate. Be that as it may, you are there, defining the legitimate areas of your study and concern. And you must decide if you are going to lend your minds as well as your bodies to reproducing the hierarchies and inherited privilege that shore up colonialism's power.

(Russell 1981, 107)

White and Hopi antiracist scholars and activists from working-class backgrounds, we write from a common heritage of claiming social origins the academy deems suspect. Refusing to abandon our social origins at the gate of the ivory tower, we name the colonial foundations of the academy and seek a new naming through our action-reflection. Our reflections here are interspersed with quotes from scholars whose work sustains us.

I come from people who have not had privilege. This is because of our histories. Those who are privileged would like for us to believe that we are in some way defective, that we are not smart enough, not good enough. In fact, it may seem that way because we speak separate languages and live a separate way of life. Some of us learn their language, the voice and ways of the educated, and we are then bilingual or trilingual and able to enter their country in order to earn a better living. But seldom do any of them understand out language, and our language goes deeper than words. It goes all the way to meaning and heart.

(Hogan 1987, 237)

Our social origins inform our activism and our scholarship. Learning to name and claim our origins has been crucial to our scholarly success.

Each time I have attempted to do theoretical work it has been on the basis of elements from my experience—always in relations I saw taking place around me. It is in fact because I thought I recognized something cracked, dully jarring or dysfunctioning in the things I saw, in the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, that I undertook a particular piece of work, several fragments of autobiography.

(Michel Foucault, quoted in Rajchman 1988, 89)

All of our scholarship is informed by our social origins, by the particular lenses our personal experiences contribute to our seeing of the institutions with which we deal. We see these institutions as founded upon and sustained by institutional racism. As explained by Knowles and Prewitt (1969), institutional racism occurs without the presence of conscious bigotry: "It is perpetuated nonetheless, sometimes by good citizens merely carrying on 'business as usual' and sometimes by well-intentioned but naïve reformers" (6). Racism maintains a tenacious grip on our cultural imagination through the beliefs of society's most enlightened and prestigious scholars (see Horseman 1981). In fact, it is only because the dominant class of intellectuals have fostered and supported racism through legal and institutional mechanisms that it has survived so well. This is the land of "warranted desperation" where we choose to work.

There are many kinds of hope . . . one bad kind of hope is manic hope in the unjustifiable. While it is more immediately energizing than desperation, warranted desperation can lead to a form of hope realistically matched to the level of sacrifice needed to actually realize it. Warranted desperation is, in fact, righteously dangerous if it springs from an education about the abrogation of justice, fairness, and opportunities for legitimate life chances.

(Senese 1995, 85)

We co-direct the Hopi Teachers for Hopi Schools project that prepares culturally responsive Native teachers. We (and the student participants) face the dilemma Robert Allen Warrior (1995) describes as a "death dance of dependence between, on the one hand, abandoning ourselves to the intellectual strategies and categories of white European thought and, on the other hand, declaring...