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Journey home
by Lowell Wyse
No sign welcomes you to the Hopi reservation.
As you drive northwest down the slight grade from Flagstaff to Leupp, Ariz., you cross a cattle guard and a green and white sign marks the Navajo Nation (“Diné” is sprayed recklessly across the sign, reminding people that “Navajo” is an English word). But there is no such entrance to Hopiland. After crossing the dry wash just past Leupp, you turn left and a sign states “Kykotsmovi – 48.” Somewhere in those 48 miles you enter the land of the Hopi. (Navajo Nation encases the Hopi reservation and the borders are constantly disputed.) Sometimes the time even changes at this unidentified boundary. But perhaps no welcome sign is needed. One does not get to Hopi by accident.
Near the end of the road, a few trailer houses appear and suddenly you are at the edge of a village in the shadow of Third Mesa. Here Arizona Highway 264 cuts through the sand and crosses Oraibi Wash, which strings together the three mesas of the reservation, connecting the small communities of native people. Although the highway winds through the whole Hopi territory, it doesn’t go through villages. The majority of these mud and sandstone pueblos are perched atop the mesas. They are mostly away from the highway and camouflaged to untrained eyes. What looks like ruins near the top of Third Mesa is actually Old Oraibi, home to Hopis these 800 years and reputedly the longest continuously inhabited village in the United States. Down below is New Oraibi, or Kykotsmovi Village.
Before you have traveled one half mile west on 264, you notice an unassuming intersection marked “Hopi Mission School Road.” Predictably, the sand road leads you to the entrance of a school building, tan and brown with bright blue front doors – “home of the Li’l Bruins.” For the 2001-02 school year, it also became my home.
I first made that trip in early August 2001, crammed into my family’s minivan, helping to move my sister and brother-in-law to Hopi Mission School for the year. The air was hot and dry. It felt good in my lungs and on my face and arms. I never intended to stay.
The school had been operating without a maintenance director or physical education instructor for almost a year. So just before boarding the van for home (and quite on a whim), I inquired about a position.
I felt every bump of the 2,000 miles home, my stomach heavy with giardia (the nasty effect of some untreated mountain water) and my mind heavy with deliberation. Waiting in the mail at home was the paperwork for Goshen (Ind.) College and the freshly printed paperwork for MVS and Hopi Mission School, sent express. I decided to stick with my original plan and finish my degree – I had a stubborn desire for my original decision to be the correct one.
I changed my mind.
Four weeks later, I was on a train to Hutchinson for MVS orientation at Camp Mennoscah. There were 50 of us there that week, young and idealistic, ready to serve humanity. We watched in disbelief as the World Trade Center fell and processed those events together as we prepared ourselves for the various challenges of our service assignments.
It was mainly my availability that qualified me for the job at Hopi Mission School. I mostly had to learn as I went along. Of course, the learning curve is not that steep when it comes to mopping floors and collecting tumbleweed from playground fences. But nobody told me how to be a PE teacher or how to build a storm window. A lot of the time, I just had to give things a shot. (In maintenance realm, my individual efforts were met with mixed results.)
Much of what I learned I owe to the older volunteers – in the nine months I was there, we had at least one temporary volunteer at the school every week but one. The arrangement was essentially this: As maintenance director, I would organize the work and then the older guys would show me how to do it. With all this help, I was involved in replacing all the school’s toilets and windows, replacing school doors, roofing a house and many other projects.
As a school staff member, I became more familiar with how elementary kids operate. I didn’t learn to be an educator, but I think I learned to act like one. I honed my “glare of disappointment” to perfection, disciplining when I had to and trying to be a consistent presence for the kids. It was clear that they needed people to look up to and it felt good to try and assume that role for them.
Hopi Mission School is a small place (there were approximately 45 students enrolled there in 2001-02) but it takes a great deal of energy to operate. Although I wasn’t often in the classroom, I felt deeply involved in the educational process. Staff members live on school grounds, so the environment had a way of absorbing us entirely. Being so wholly devoted to the school itself, I sometimes felt very distant from the Hopi culture we were living in. At times, it felt like being on an Anglo-Mennonite island surrounded by the larger Native community. Fortunately, in my various daily errands I was able to get off of school property with some regularity, thereby increasing my interaction with Hopi people over four feet tall.
In spite of the perceived distance from the larger Hopi community, I often felt a profound sense of purpose in my absorption at the school – not so much akin to personal satisfaction or holy “calling,” but something more derived from the community. I always felt welcome on the reservation, partly because of how the Mission School is viewed – as a good place for kids to go for a strong, disciplined education. If people were cautious around me at first, I could see their faces relax when I mentioned where I worked.
I was fascinated by Hopi culture and wanted to learn more about it. However, part of my respect for their culture meant being conscious of their boundaries. While the Hopi tribe never experienced the forced migration or genocide that other Native groups experienced at the hands of Anglo-Americans, they have suffered the injury of exploitation. As a consequence, photography or drawing is no longer allowed in any Hopi village. There is a measure of caution in their hospitality. Perhaps it was this caution I most wanted to respect. I didn’t go to many traditional dances and I never asked many questions. Although I was sincerely interested, I didn’t want to impose. I saw them as my hosts and I tried to conduct myself as a guest in their culture.
While I felt nothing in the way of discrimination that year, I was sometimes keenly aware of my own whiteness. They were Hopi; I was bahana. I felt the weight of history more than ever as I came to realize how my background – or perhaps my skin color – implicates me in the Native American story. At the same time, I began to wrestle more with my own genetic conflict – the way the Wisconsin Chippewa, French Catholics, and Swiss Mennonites swim together through my bloodstream. I often wonder what it means that I am part of both sides of the tragedy – oppressor and oppressed.
The issues in Hopiland are no different from other places. There is poverty, although it’s difficult to measure the extent of it. There is crime – one of our fifth graders talked of the pressure he felt to join a local gang; he didn’t expect to live through his 20s. In a culture that fosters an appreciation for family and “clan,” there are broken homes everywhere. Children live with some combination of parents, grandparents, a current boyfriend or girlfriend, siblings and half-siblings. Sometimes alcoholism contributes to the family split. Since the Hopi reservation is “dry,” a drinking conviction often results in jail time. In our small school, many of our students had a parent in jail. I even experienced the court system first-hand, testifying before a Hopi court as a “witness” to an assault. (I didn’t actually see anything.) What I did witness was the pain of two girls whose mother and grandmother were going to jail, an experience which, in a way, brought me closer to the struggles of so many people in the community.
If a student was having a difficult day, there was often a significant reason related to their home situation. While I hope the school was a safe enough environment for them, my job was not to pry into their personal lives. Rather, my goal was to help them get away from things for a while. This was especially important in Phys Ed class, where the primary objective was having a good time. The best was when one of my activities really got everyone excited and involved, especially when I knew what was going on for some kids behind the scenes. I believed in the school as a safe place and to some extent a get-away. I hope the kids were able – for a few hours each day – to come to the “island” of Hopi Mission School and experience home.
While much of Hopi culture seems “Americanized” (in the sense that many things are no different from the rest of Arizona), there is an undercurrent of ethnic pride somehow unavailable to the general population. The Hopi people share a single common story. It is something they cling to. It manifests itself in small ways, such as in the statewide dominance of the high school cross-country teams, the product of generations of runners. It is in the pattern of a basket made by hand, the short stalks yielding blue and purple corn, the track of a snake through sand, the prominence of a mesa. It is even in the mangy stray dogs or the pickles dipped in Kool-Aid.
All of these things explain the subtle smiles of the Hopi people – a common understanding that they occupy a special place in America, both geographically and culturally. In a short time, I found a home in this place high in the Arizona desert. Although I cannot claim the Hopi heritage, I have come to share their sense of pride.
Lowell Wyse, a Bethel admissions counselor, is a graduate of Hesston College and Bluffton (Ohio) University. He wrote a longer version of this essay for cross-cultural credit at Bluffton, that was also printed in the spring 2006 issue of the Georgetown Review.
In early September, Lowell Wyse delivered a check for $1,179.57 to Hopi Mission School in Kykotsmovi Village, Ariz. The money came from a fundraiser that was part of Bethel’s display at the Mennonite Church USA Youth Convention and delegate assembly in San Jose, Calif., last summer.
Besides the check, Wyse also brought a large sheet of canvas covered in writing. The youth who visited Bethel’s booth and dropped off their tickets (which added up to the donations made to several service projects in MC USA’s Pacific Southwest Conference regional area) also signed their names on canvases to be given to the organizations along with the money.
The presentation of the check, Wyse says, “was a lot of fun. I had the kindergarteners unroll the canvas and the older kids hold it up. The kids were amazed at all the names. One of them said, ‘There are a million names on that!’ They loved it.
“I explained the connection between the two schools [Bethel College and Hopi Mission School]. Many of the same people support both of them. I told them that all the names on the canvas were a reminder that a lot of people know about Hopi Mission School and support it.”