Polingaysi Qöyawayma, also known as Elizabeth Q. White, was a Hopi educator, writer, and potter.
Biography
Born to parents Fred and Sevenka, Polingaysi Qöyawayma grew up in Oraibi, a village on Arizona's Hopi Reservation. Her given name means "butterfly sitting among the flowers in the breeze". Qöyawayma's father worked for Mennonite missionary Henry Voth, who built a school in Oraibi and attempted to win converts to Christianity. Many in the village saw Voth's efforts to enforce attendance as heavy-handed, and this caused a rift between Hopis who opposed and supported the school. In 1906, Qöyawayma joined a group of students traveling to study at the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. In her four years at the school, she lived with a teacher's family, learning English and converting to Christianity. After returning home to Oraibi, she had difficulty readjusting to traditional Hopi life. Villagers saw her as having adopted white people's ways, and were unreceptive to her Christian teachings. She left to live with a Mennonite family in Newton, Kansas, and to receive missionary training at Bethel College. In 1919 she worked as a substitute teacher in Tuba City and attended the Los Angeles Bible Institute. She had second thoughts about missionary life, however, when she continued to be unsuccessful in converting any Oraibi residents, while attempting "to blend the best of Hopi tradition with the best of the white culture, retaining the essence of good, whatever the source."
Teaching career
In 1924 Qöyawayma began working at the Indian school in Hotevilla, first as a housekeeper and later as a teacher. Unusually for the time, she taught bilingually, introducing subjects to students in their native Hopi and then transitioning to English. This caused friction with her fellow teachers, and with parents who preferred that their children be taught white language and customs exclusively, in order to be more successful in American society. She persisted, believing that Native American students were more receptive to concepts which were related in terms of traditional stories and legends. She became a government employee after passing the Indian Service test in 1925, and continued to teach in Hopi and Navajo schools until 1954. She later articulated her teaching philosophy: Her methods eventually met with acceptance and acclaim. In 1941, the Bureau of Indian Affairs chose Qöyawayma to demonstrate bilingual teaching to school officials across the country. In 1974, Qöyawayma helped create a scholarship fund for Hopi students at Northern Arizona University. This was later renamed the Elizabeth White Hopi Scholarship in her honor.
Writing
In 1941, Polingaysi Qöyawayma wrote the novelThe Sun Girl: A True Story about Dawamana, about difficult decisions faced by a young Hopi girl. Her autobiography No Turning Back, which she related to author Vada F. Carlson, was published in 1964. Literary critic Robert Kirsch praised it as "one of the rare and important documents of the Indian experience. It belongs alongside Theodora Kroeber's Ishi as an account of the collision of two cultures." She also co-wrote Broken Pattern: Sunlight & Shadows of Hopi History with Carlson in 1985.
Pottery
After her retirement from teaching, Qöyawayma dedicated herself to music and art, particularly pottery. She created a unique style, using pink clay with raised symbols such as corn and Kokopelli figures. The Heard Museum in Phoenix held an exhibition of her work in the late 1970s, and some of her pots are included in its permanent collection. She frequently hosted anthropology students at her home, as well as writers such as Ernest Hemingway.
Personal life
Qöyawayma married Lloyd White, a part-Cherokee man, in 1931. They divorced one or two years later. Her nephew Al Qöyawayma is a successful potter and sculptor. Polingaysi Qöyawayma remained healthy into her eighties, but suffered a stroke in 1981. She died in a Phoenix nursing home in 1990, at age 98.
