Edmund Nequatewa

In this book there is what we might call the mysterious, (much of which I don’t understand), such as the story of how, at the beginning of time, there was much lasciviousness, gender and class conflict, and social chaos, to which the ancestors of the Hopi responded by going into nature on a mystical quest, perhaps to purify themselves. There is also here what we might loosely call political, in a folklore kind of way, which is easier to understand but also easy not to want to understand—the Bahana (white man) taking the Hopi nation’s children, after war, into their schools, no questions asked, and with the intention of making them forget their people’s culture, and learning the white man’s way. We sometimes dismiss the educated as being “all woke” or whatever, but it is very true that education has often in our history been used as a bleaching agent, and of course it can still serve that purpose today if we want it to. And if it is sometimes possible to use education as a diversification agent, it is only as an alternative to the scripts of white supremacy that we all know, on some level. Old and young, American and foreign, we all know “what to say”, or better yet, when to keep silent. We do have choices today, but it is still this “Bahana” education that is the thing we are most familiar with, and perhaps our first, and one of our most important, choices is whether or not to acknowledge this.

…. Yes, every so often a white man would come to study the strange folk, but he wouldn’t come to stay; he’d get spooked by their savage ways, and high-tail it back to the white world.… (mer)