A companion program to Winds of Change, a Matter of Choice, entitled Winds of Change,
a Matter of Promise, is now available.
For more information or to order the complete PBS Home Video American Indian Collection,
call 1-800-776-8300.
The following presentation is from PBS Home Video.
I think when you're away from the reservation you find out what you miss about this place and you
realize what you have here as far as especially growing up with the religion and the culture.
You really begin to miss that.
Living on the reservation is only one part of building this whole structure to help Indian
people.
We had chosen to do it living in an urban area.
I knew I wanted to go to college and I knew that I didn't want to marry young and have
children and remain on the reservation.
I just knew there was something else to do and I wanted to do it.
I didn't realize that I have an identity until I went to college.
When I was through one of my anthropology courses I learned that I have a culture and
I'm a special kind, I belong to a special group of people.
A matter of choice.
America's native people can be citizens of both sovereign Indian nations and the United
States.
They may choose to live their lives in one or the other.
Often they try to combine the best of both worlds.
Usually there are tradeoffs.
This is about choices and about some of the people who've made them.
Let's put aside for a moment the popular image of American Indians, the stuff of old movies,
current headlines or museums.
America's indigenous people are as varied as the terrain they occupy.
50% of American Indians now live in cities, more than 50% of intermarried with other tribes
or with non-Indians.
Hello, I'm Hattie Kaufman.
Half Nez Perce Indian, half German, born on a reservation in Idaho and now living in New
York City.
You see, in cities, in inter-tribal enclaves Indian culture can live, even thrive, and
yet the growth, the very survival of hundreds of sovereign Indian nations that exist within
the United States is threatened by the exodus of youth to cities.
Now those Indian nations are working to accommodate change, offer new opportunities while maintaining
tribal values.
Each Indian nation is unique, but all have been subjected to the same invading force
that has dislocated whole peoples and disrupted families.
The Hopi Nation in Arizona is no exception, but a harsh and protective desert has provided
some insulation and isolation.
There is a sense of timelessness here, and the oldest continuously inhabited community
in North America is among these villages.
And here, as with most American Indians, extended family and identity are inextricably intertwined
with spirituality.
As in all Indian nations, the connection between homeland, worldview, and tribal identity is
fundamental here.
It's why people stay, or choose to return.
Like the rest of America, this nation has social problems, alcoholism, drug addiction,
child abuse, and the villages have their own internal squabbles.
But despite all of that, life here still revolves around ceremony, as it always has.
Radford Kwanahungnua says Hopi identity is rooted in ceremony.
The moment the child is born, that's the beginning of the religious activity, whether they know
it or not.
This baby naming ceremony is as old as time, rarely photographed.
It is a tender coming out for mother and baby, after 21 days without sunlight.
After 21 days of being cared for by the mother-in-law.
It's a tie to the past for the child who will become the hope for the future.
Babies born at Hopi are always of the mother's clan, but it's the paternal aunts who gather
to name the child.
With the coming of dawn, little Santi Hanuma is presented to the sun, the first of the
rituals which will make him forever a Hopi.
The more you are involved with tradition and religion, you need to be on the reservation
because that's where the happening is.
We have ceremonies almost every month, and if they're not here to observe and participate,
they're going to be getting away from it.
They want to go on to improve themselves or get their degrees in some areas, get educational
leave and go, and then they still can come back if you want to stay with the tribe.
Many do come back, sooner or later.
Pat Ross came back to her extended family, to her butterfly clan, to her sister Dorothy,
to her nieces Kim, Joan, Carol, Susan, and many, many more nieces and nephews, to brothers
and sisters, to aunts and uncles, godparents, dozens of clan relatives.
Words can't describe how happy I was to come home, to finally come home after being away
for most of my life.
High on the mesa, home is a traditional house in the village that seems part of the cliffs
below.
It was this powerful sense of place centered on the spiritual that Pat was looking for.
There was college, a career, and marriage to a member of the Sioux tribe.
Pat says she never stopped missing her extended family and her place in it.
She says her small grandchild will be raised in the hopey way, but at first, her three
children felt like strangers here.
I feel that when we first came back, that they were missing where they had come from,
and they didn't really know anything about the culture or anything out here.
I feel bad about the fact that I'm much older than any of my sisters, and yet I know the
least because of my separation from my home for that many years.
When I came out here over 25 years ago and moved up to Second Mesa Village with my husband,
I felt like I was moving to a foreign country because no one spoke English, and I didn't
understand a word of hopey.
I realized there was something unique about being hopey, and there's something no one
else could be.
Fortunately my children have been able to experience this.
The hopey ceremonial cycle is festooned with colorful sights and sounds and airy anticipation,
but festivity is grounded in responsibility, a word heard often here.
A boy invited to the butterfly ceremony is obliged to carve an elaborate headdress for
his partner.
It is one of a multitude of predetermined responsibilities that guide ceremonial life.
Roles and responsibilities are clearly defined in this matrilineal society.
A married woman's brother, the maternal uncle, is the male head of family.
Carmelita Perley is a very contemporary woman, for whom the uncle's very traditional role
works well.
The uncle is very, very important.
The uncle is second in command.
Here's the female top, the uncle is right below it.
And everybody, branch off.
The father more or less sets aside, because he's got a responsibility over at his sister's
home.
He's only a visitor at my home.
He's only a visitor.
And if there should be a separation, the man leaves, and according to hopey tradition,
all a man owns are his ceremonial clothes.
The clothes you see the men wearing, that's all they own.
Everything else belongs to the woman.
The children, because it's a maternal society, belong to the woman.
They take her clan.
My husband and I, we had a lot of fights over that, because he was from a society where
the male were the ones.
And it made our marriage very, very difficult, because of that one thing.
And we never resolved it.
He's living his own way, and I'm here with the children.
The social structure here gives members an exquisite sense of their place in the world.
But the close-knit relationships can effectively shut out a newcomer looking to join the society.
Pat's son, of course, belongs to her clan, but he is part Sioux, and arrived with outside
ways.
Ridiculed by other children, he ran away.
Such a young age, that it literally scared me.
And I wanted to pack up everything, run back to where I was, where I felt comfortable,
where he wasn't discriminated against.
It hurt.
And I found that, you know, people do discriminate, just because you're a different tribe.
Pat's niece, Dorothy's daughter, Kim Sakakaku, was brought up in the Hopi Nation.
She traveled abroad with her family, lived away briefly, then chose to settle here with
her Navajo husband and daughter, Christy.
But like Pat, she felt the pain of discrimination, when Christy was barred from participation
in the Hopi way.
Everything about Hopi life involves both the mother and the father, because her father
wasn't the Hopi.
That part of her could not participate.
We eventually got a divorce, but you know, there were other problems that came up with
that, because at the intermarriage, we could never be that whole family.
With her new marriage to a Hopi, Kim observed the baby naming ceremony at the birth of her
second child, Lance.
The old ways no longer conflict with her modern role as a working woman.
It took a lot of years to get here in two ways that it took to be able to balance life
within the traditional world and the modern world is, for one thing, my father was a private
business owner.
My father also was involved with the tradition and the religion.
Kim's father, Feral Sakakaku.
I first came back from school.
I was not trusted by my own people, and of course, I was younger, and I had my own thoughts
and I had my own ways, and I thought maybe I could change the whole society, but they
changed me instead.
Things that you learn from academics does not really apply here.
You have to blend them in slowly.
The total society relies on the traditions such as corn planting, traditions of wedding,
dancing and things like that.
So the whole life centers around the tradition here first, then the business.
We cannot move that fast.
We have to work with our people in the village.
Here as elsewhere, change has been ongoing.
The population grows steadily and grows younger, and slowly traditions shift.
That change where they used to be able to sit down with their grandmother and the old
folks that are now gone and just visit with them without the television and all these
things that you see now.
The new ways come to bear on family life, new jobs for men who find work outside the
corn fields that still nourish them, body and spirit.
New roles for women, traditional householders who more often now move into the job market
and into politics.
New houses separate and unlike the Mesa village homes that cling side by side to the rocky
cliffs.
People move from the intimacy of Mesa life to the cinder block housing of HUD.
As food and other supplies are more available, dependence on cooperative labor diminishes.
In traditional way of living, we have clusters of home within the village, and all the family
are within this same household, and so the teaching is going constantly.
Now that we are increasing population wise, and that we also are learning the outside
ways of living, and one of them is having your own household somewhere else with your
own family, that's where the breakage is.
That's where uncles are not talking to the youngsters.
When I go to the village, it's entirely different, but within the past two years now that we've
had water, it used to be that we didn't have any water, running water up there, electricity
has just come about within the past 15, 20 years.
To be with my family there, as you know, everybody coming in as Hopis, I feel more comfortable.
I want a traditional house that's going to be made out of rock and with a nice view and
a good working space, and I want to put an outdoor oven out here for my bread and I want
to put a pit for the corn.
Janis Day chooses to live here with her bearstrap clan and her small shop.
After life in the city, there was that moment when she knew she had to be here.
On the Pennsylvania Turnpike, and I said, well, if I knew the book, Stranger in a Strange
Land, that's where I was at right there.
And I thought, if something happened, where would I be?
Nobody would care.
I'd be in a land full of strangers and I wouldn't have anything.
I wanted to go back home.
Those who stay here tend the old ways carefully, as Janis Day's uncle did.
He's the one that keeps our family intact, but the other uncles, they're off in the city
and they've forgotten about what life was like out here, and so when they get old and
their family leaves them and they get a divorce and they want to come back home.
And it's hard for them to do when they've been away so long and they come back.
But Janis Day doesn't deny that things here at Hopi have changed as well.
But nowadays, you've got too many choices, you can go down to the store and buy your
meat for supper and you don't have to worry about it.
And I think that's what's driving people apart, is because now they can go out and get a job
and feel that they're contributing by buying groceries, where a long time ago it was contributing
by helping raise things to eat.
So where the fills were a long time ago, way out there, and they'd have to run, start early
in the morning and take off running out to their fill and then they'd work with it and
come back in the evening.
And nowadays, it's not that way.
Now they want somebody to give them a ride down to the fill.
Now with the way things are changing with the modern world, you find that the father
is in one way becoming more involved with the family.
But then again, there's that problem with the alcoholism problem where again you don't
find the father there in the home.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, they apply here.
As change comes about, there is a new awareness of fundamental loss.
The elders, who affirm the inevitability of progress, are declining in numbers drastically.
Who will replace them?
Who will pass on traditional values and tribal wisdom to the young, both urban and reservation?
Adults may want their children to bond with the old ways, but they also want them to learn
and grow in new ways.
The Hopi looked to the new high school to break the off-reservation boarding school
tradition for teenage youth and to strengthen and prolong the tie to tribe and nation.
That was one of the main reasons why they wanted the high school, was so that the students
could stay at home and learn the values that are taught here and participate in the ceremonies.
That was one of the main reasons for being here and hopefully kind of put an end to intermarriage.
It was a totally new experience for all my children to have friends that are now all
Indian.
It was a totally new experience for parents, too, who hadn't had to cope with teenage
problems firsthand.
Children left here after they finished eighth grade if they wanted to go on.
The rearing of children at that point in time was done by the BIA boarding school personnel.
And now that the children are back, it's presenting some problems for families, and it's presenting
problems for me because I feel that families and parents don't know how to discipline their
kids.
They don't know that role that they have lost for so many years.
The reservation doesn't have a summer program like where we came from.
You had YWCA and you had all these youth organizations where your child got involved at an early
age, and my kids were in soccer and baseball and all these other things where they had
Saturday leagues.
So somewhat late, Pat chose this life for her children, hoping to capture the particular
circular wisdom of Hopi, which runs counter to Anglo-linear concepts.
Head football coach Charles Otterman says a Hopi athlete with a killer instinct is a
contradiction in terms.
Football's brand new to them.
I mean, if you say sweep and they're like, what, and you say pass, you know, the terminology's
even, they're not even vaguely familiar with that.
I just want an I-formation.
I want 23 isolation, but we're not going to have the four back.
One of the things that's interesting from a coaching standpoint that we coaches have
to deal with is the balance between Hopi cultural values and what we're trying to bring up here
as an Anglo football program.
Hopi religion is something that goes 24 hours a day, and it never stops.
So their dances are in the week or on the weekends, and they can go from 24-hour periods.
So we lose a lot of kids periodically because of that.
We're accustomed as coaches to working with children or students that your spine will
fire out, will hit people, will work hard and be real aggressive, and we find out a
lot of times with the Hopi kids that they're more used to the traditional values of working
together and the community comes first and everybody just pitching in and helping each
other.
Classroom, I want everybody at school every day.
We find out that there's an acceptable margin of winning and losing five to six points.
You're six points ahead, you're okay.
You're six points behind, you're okay.
And that killer instinct to say, we're at halftime and we're up 13 to nothing, just
motivate.
When the game ends, we want it to be 27 to nothing, you get more of a, it's acceptable.
We're okay.
We're at 13 to nothing and that's okay.
We've done our job and everything's okay, but we got to keep pushing them.
Competition, new to a nation where cooperation is the way of life.
Anglo values insinuate themselves in subtle ways.
Everybody listen up.
Okay, guys, just change your thinking for a few minutes.
Monday we start classes.
We know that the no pass, no play has gone into effect.
Okay, guys, we got to start working hard in the classroom.
Did you hear me on that?
Yes.
It's a critical moment for all Indian nations when the best and the brightest leave for
another nation nearby, yet a world apart.
It's lonely now when you get older, you know, if you don't have young people that come back
to take care of you, well, you know, you don't have nobody to take care of you, you get lonesome
and that's what kills a lot of people too, loneliness.
That doesn't bother me, but it bothers my children because they're afraid that when
I get real old and they know they're leaving home now, they're afraid that I'm going to
be left alone with no one else.
And I just tell them, well, I'm home and you know that everything's extended families and
I don't think I'm going to really be alone like you really fear that I'm going to be.
And I'm an independent woman, I just don't want to get married again.
I choose to be a single mother.
Even as the winds of change blow through the nations of the world, this small sovereign
nation ponders its future.
Looking at social and economic problems, beginning to reverse the trend that deprives it of many
talented and skilled people.
Counting back about 10 years, there's hardly anybody coming back.
But now, presently, within the year or two, I've seen a lot of kids that graduated from
college are coming back as teachers, you know, providing education to our children.
I have not seen any entrepreneur like myself come back to really develop, try to develop
the land.
See, that's the emphasis I try to give to my people is that you come back and you do
it, we do it ourselves.
We are not ever going to depend on the government any longer because they're going to phase
out sooner or later.
They tell us a long time ago.
A nation needs its young and the Hopi tribe looks to economic development such as tourism
to provide jobs to attract the young.
Native arts and crafts have grown dramatically in value and popularity and more often now
buyers go directly to the native people to buy.
Some ceremonies here permit visitors and the number of tourists grows steadily.
There'll be some buildings for tourism maybe and maybe some more shops for the crafts.
Maybe other services like shoe store, Kentucky Fried Chicken, this type of a thing I see.
One issue is most important with each village.
There are clan holdings, there are religious holdings to the land that are used during
certain activities and those areas need to be protected and need to be as natural as
possible to do some of our religious activities.
We cannot develop industries and projects in just any area.
I emphasize the education, go to college, get a formal education and then you will come
back and you develop the land.
I hope to come back and do some stuff out here.
I was talking to a friend of mine who were just kind of joking around saying we could
build an amphitheater across the civic center, turn that into a concert hall or something
like that.
I think, especially with my dad also, he's been encouraging me with these religious aspects
of things also.
He's been teaching me just different names of things, how you do things, the process
that goes on.
I guess what Hopi has always told you is that you should marry another Hopi and so how are
you going to control all these girls that are out there?
I think in the back of my mind I always keep that ideal with me about marrying a Hopi and
what, I don't know, I'll probably meet some people.
There is something going on, he knows, because I talked to him about different cycles and
different ceremonies and when something is happening and he has already participated
in some and I said you need to continue that.
But that kept that in the back of my mind too also.
I live here with my grandmother.
I'll be the first one in the family to be going off to college.
To me that means having to make a major adjustment on which view you want to view the most, which
is important in your opinions, which path you want to follow in other words.
I'm under psychology right now but I'm thinking of changing to computer science, I'm not sure,
undecided.
I feel that the more exposure they get, the more they experience outside, the more they're
going to know what they've got here.
But if you haven't gone out there you can't experience it, you never know it, you just
take it for granted that what you've got is here and it's going to always be here.
It can only be away so long and I'll miss it and I'll come home and I'll kind of get
tired of it so I'll go, it's just like back and forth, I don't think, I know I come back
but I don't know for how long, probably just periods of time.
Back and forth, it's one pattern for those who have the money or the time and who aren't
too far away.
I don't know what all...
I don't know, it's her child, she has to make the decision but of course whatever she decides
we'll live with that for a while but I'm sure she'll be back until she finishes her education
then we don't know what's going to happen then but by then she'll be big enough that
she may want to go with her mom too, I don't know.
It's my whole life now, my whole life now, right?
Partings are nothing new of course, once forced, now voluntary, they remain bittersweet.
The early protective bonding with the Hopi way will bring some home for good, many will
return briefly to the mesa top for ceremonies.
Many if not most will find a permanent place in the larger nation that's filled with promise
of another kind.
Turning points, the move to boarding school, to college or to city jobs.
Making the choice for yourself usually means making the choice for your children.
My parents moved seven children when they left the reservation.
I was just four years old.
Now there are those in the city who shed their past like so many early immigrants to the
United States but for most Indian identity persists, indeed identity can even grow stronger
in the face of discrimination.
Now in the city where the ideal and the isolation of the nuclear family prevail, native people
reach out to other tribes instinctively seeking an extended family and new inter-tribal traditions
and institutions are born.
Indian summer, what a perfect idea because you get all the tribes from all over the country
come down to this powwow.
All the different tribes that are down there, they all get along like family.
In the city of powwow, clans, bands and tribes come together and native concerns transcend
tribal differences.
This is Georgian Agnes.
Hi.
This is Georgian.
I know you but I don't know your name.
I'm Georgian Agnes.
I'm the chairman of the Miss Indian Summer Pageant.
Our judges this year, Diane Porter.
The winner will be announced tonight at 7 o'clock at the powwow grounds.
Good evening ladies and gentlemen, looks like a nice crowd tonight.
I'm Georgian Agnes, I'm the new interim director of this school.
Far from reservation nations, Indian identity persists and large numbers of urban Indian
people pass on native values as best they can in a rushed and often hostile mainstream
society.
We are proud to be Indian and speak a little of our language.
In urban settings, there's a wide spectrum of economic and social lifestyles.
Here in an affluent suburb of Milwaukee, public relations person Georgian Agnes, physician
Gerald Agnes and their children lead a sophisticated mainstream upper class life with a difference.
One Indian may say you're not Indian enough because you don't do the powwow scene or if
you really live in a suburb and not in the city, well definitely you're not Indian enough.
Granted you do lose a lot of your Indian traditions and cultural values, hopefully we try to maintain
that as best we can.
There have to be some trade-offs.
I grew up on a reservation, I was one of twelve children, my family was very poor and I knew
that I didn't want to marry young and have children and remain on a reservation.
I just knew there was something else to do and I wanted to do it.
Georgianna Agnes knew what she wanted, her choice to leave the Menominee Reservation
for College dovetailed with that of Gerald Agnes, a Coeur d'Alene from Idaho.
One of the reasons why I went away to school was the fact that my parents, and I have to
give them a big deal of credit with this, felt that the only way that I was going to
get ahead or do anything was by education and this is why all these sacrifices were
made for me to do that.
That we instill in our kids that they are Indian and family comes first and you're Indian
second.
How do you want this?
No matter where they go, they're an example.
Just show society what Indians could do.
What time will you be home then?
Before practice starts.
Half hour before, what time are you coming back?
Right after, I promise.
We hope they marry an Indian.
What are we going to do when you're 17?
You could leave.
There are a lot of Indians to choose from.
A lot of Indians are getting more and more education.
I don't think there's an excuse not to marry an Indian.
Realistically in mainstream city life, the odds are that Lyle Ignace will marry a non-Indian.
Other people's eyes, it wouldn't make a difference.
It's possibly more traditional people, Indians.
If they saw I was to marry a non-Indian, they might look down upon that or down upon
me.
I was brought up in an urban area where predominantly a white society and most of my life I've
seen nothing but white females.
All we could do is help maybe perhaps expose them to others because they're not exposed
here in the suburbs to Indians that are very talented, very brilliant and have the same
goals that they may have.
We take into account those many experiences.
We take into account all of the loved ones that we have within our families, within our
clans, within our bands, within our tribes.
We can use our traditional ways and our traditional ideas and our traditional healing and mix
it with Western medicine, with Western living and Western life.
I think the one thing we can really take home too is that it's a current thing.
The children are there now and they need our help now.
Without the Indian youth, there will be no Indians in the future.
I think I only express the practical side but there's something about the drum that
draws you back and I felt that as a kid growing up.
That I think is part of the thing that you don't lose, you don't forget.
I think one of the things that you tend to see on Indian reservations is the fact that
there has been some breakdown in families and the social nature of the community to
the point where children don't tend to get all the support that they need.
Smallism becomes a problem, suicides, homicides, drugs, they all become a problem.
The city too has social problems but for those who emigrate from Indian nations to find empty
promises, there is sanctuary and family sometimes in unexpected places.
Joe Porter finds his extended family in the gym, brought up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he
calls himself a city Indian.
This area right here is a real bad gang area, there's two gangs here that are the Latin
Kings and the Cobras, they're both pretty well under shooting and a lot of drug dealing.
Del, a Chippewa whose father chose the city for him, has come late to what he calls Indian
ways.
The gym has become central to his feeling of Indian-ness and his need for extended family
which includes Indians and non-Indians alike.
Indian people are a really close family, all of them, a lot of these kids aren't Indian
but we're almost like one big family up there, we go to each other with problems or they
talk and we get up there and beat each other up.
Two of the boys in there, their father was involved with DOPE.
The two boys, the mother is gone, I think she's in California some place, the grandma
is raising them and if it's not for the gym they might be on that DOPE road.
Keep working, that's it, keep working, keep working.
Your first jab is if you get your distance, then you know you got a half a step you can
reach up.
They've been up here every night, they never miss a night and that oldest one is the one
that says if I get real good though maybe my dad will wake up and notice me.
Here's a kid, when he was on a reservation he must have won himself five or six Golden
Glove titles, amateur boxing titles and he came off the reservation the way I understand
it is for an education.
There's not much thought in my mind this guy could have been one of the top professional
ten, ten top men in the world, he was that good and the drugs just got him down and he's
back on the reservation.
Probably coming to the city you know to hear all about the jobs and the work and they come
here and they find there aren't that many jobs, it ain't that easy to find a job, so
you got nothing to do, you look for maybe a week or two trying to find a job you can't
find one, you get discouraged, you hit that tavern and sit there and listen to everybody
else that can't find a job so you're all drawing your troubles together, that's the only way
I could see it.
Taverns are also home to urban pastimes like bowling and pool and provide a place for the
city's inter-tribal family to come together.
You don't go to the Menominee Reservation and find Chippewas and Oneidas and Cherokees,
you find Menominee Indians.
All the reservations, they stay with their own tribes and the city, they're all different.
My name is Richard Schofield, I'm a Pueblo Chippewa from Upper Michigan.
We have Menominee, three Chippewas, an Oneida, a Stockbridge and Apache.
There's a great bunch of people, they're working people and what recreation they do, they come
out one night, shoot a ball, they want to shoot on a good team and this was the team
to shoot on.
Living in the city and liking it, still, Del Porter talks wistfully of the things he's
missed.
God bless my father, I get disturbed and I get mad because he didn't raise us in a lot
of Indian ways.
When I contacted my mother I asked her, how come dad never took us to powwows or I didn't
really know anything about the traditional dresses and the dance and all and she says,
listen, we didn't want you to have all the problems of which when I think back about
how we did have it, oh there's an Indian over there, I get in a lot of fights.
My daughter in school, she reads a lot, she was reading back about Indian life back then
so she more or less inspired the whole family to get involved in Indian ways again.
Del's daughter Deanna, city bred, college student and committed to this extended family.
My grandfather is where I get my Indian blood from, when he passed away, no one else cared,
no one else in the family kept up, I mean they cared but they didn't have the time.
You have to keep at things and for a lot of people it's different from them coming off
the reservation and moving into a city.
A lot of young people aren't interested anymore, they see, they look back at their parents
and their elders and where did it get them, they're on reservations getting their rights
taken away and there's a lot of reservations where their land's being taken away and so
I think a lot of young kids are looking back and saying it doesn't do any good, they just
give up on it and so a lot of the Indian people that move to the cities, that's drawing them
further away from where their people are and they're out on their own here and in the city
more or less you feel like you have to abandon your traditional ways, you really don't.
In the city, inter-tribal celebrations and ceremonies function as extended families.
On the reservation they are part of a total experience, Deanna Porter discovered this
on the White Earth reservation of her ancestors.
I'm there for that maybe week or two weeks and it just, everything comes together there
for me, it's kind of hard to explain unless you really experience it.
I think I'll end up staying, you know, living primarily in Milwaukee but I think I'll be
going back a lot, back and forth.
In different ways Deanna Porter and Lyle Ignace relate to their Indian identity short of moving
back to the reservation.
Hearing stories about living on the reservation does not really seem appealing.
My parents have came off the reservation so they know what it would be like if I was on
the reservation and have to struggle through school, college and graduate to finally succeed.
I think my dad wanted to cross that out for me.
He didn't want that part of struggle in life and I think it was a good choice.
It's known as the good life but as they say you can't have it all, few choices are made
without some regrets.
People lose something even though you may have come to be very fortunate.
Sure, we have a home in the suburbs but that doesn't mean we've made it friendship wise.
The old stereotypes die hard but among the well to do they may be more difficult to track.
It's more subtle and it's more competitive and it's keen and it hurts.
People are so sophisticated on a higher level that sometimes you don't know they're doing
it to you but the more experience you get, you know.
By going to PAHOs or working with Indian organizations or doing volunteer work for Indians, that's
what keeps you connected with your Indian identity.
The Indians are not just an ethnic parade for one day or a few hours.
They are different and they don't want to assimilate.
They don't want to be just like everyone else, the melting pot of America.
Well I think tradition never remains stagnant, I think things always change and what may
have been traditional a hundred years ago is certainly not done in the same way now.
There is a default, academic achievement, drumming, Ojibwe language and reading.
Kachiri Flores, drumming most improved and penmanship most improved.
The ethnic parade, the community school, the powwow all speak to the need for continuity
with the past.
Alert to outside attempts to assimilate them, bound in a unique relationship to a larger
nation, American Indians in the city recreate something of the singular spirit of the reservation.
Conversely, native people on the reservation want to select what they need from mainstream
society, the skills and the skill to develop their own resources.
Indian nations have survived for centuries against all odds, contrary to outside expectations
and they are expert indeed in adapting to change.
The elders that went to Washington, this is what they had brought back, is that we as
Hopi people need to know the language, we need to know good things of the dominant society.
But on the other hand, that the religion, the tradition and the language should also
be preserved.
And if there was just some way where you could still have your career and your job and your
education for your kids and all these other things and yet be close enough, it would have
been beautiful but it didn't work out that way.
It is indeed a universal dilemma, how to arrive at a delicate balance between economic security,
prosperity and still preserve the protective, nurturing interaction and cooperation that
makes life more precious.
Now that we are going into semi-modernization on the reservation, my feeling is that that
would be one way of helping the Hopi people, is to teach the Hopi youth, the children,
some of the necessities that we would get from the white people so they would have knowledge
of good things from the white people and also knowledge from our own traditional things.
But the uneasy partner in the design for the future is the influx of Anglo ideas, values
and the view from a competitive world.
That has initiated what's been called a small renaissance on reservations, the enhanced
interest in preserving native language and customs.
My father tells me I should always have the farm going because corn represents life.
Whatever amount of corn that you raise and produce and gather for your home, it means
that my children and my business will grow, it will never die.
It all goes back to the religion and spirituality part of the Hopi way of life.
So that's the reason why I always plant corn.
It's coming back.
Everyone's waking up and saying, oh, intermarriage.
Maybe half the population is intermarried.
No one's speaking Hopi anymore.
What's that doing to Hopi?
What's it going to do to religion?
We're slowly seeing ceremonies die out.
You can see where people are beginning to realize and wake up and say, hey, we've got
to do something about bringing these things back.
That's why I say to these people out here, they should all go back east and just even
see the city and then come back and see what's here and what they should appreciate.
Indian nations aim to be more than places to grow old in or to be buried in.
The task is to bring home the talented young with their newly acquired skills.
The challenge is to acknowledge the demands of the future.
The fear is the spiritual ceremonies left untended will mean a loss of access to the
next world.
Extended families, like nuclear families, continue to change and are redefined.
But on reservation or off, family remains the center of Indian life, a tie to an indelible
past and, like Indian nations, a tie that cannot easily be undone.
When I go to Phoenix, everyone's in such a hurry to go here and there and everywhere
else.
And I think, is this how I was?
I don't miss it at all.
I really do not miss it.
I don't think there's any guilt in leaving the reservation.
I think they still like me.
I ran for some political offices on the reservation and did not get completely turned away, but
I'm guilt by leaving, no.
Family is your sisters, your aunts, your clan members who may not be related to you closely,
but they are a tie and they will always be a tie.
My home, all I knew and grew up with is on a reservation.
I will be buried on the reservation.
I would not be buried in the city because it's not my home.
Hopi are hospitable but private people.
In the villages and at all ceremonial dances, secular and sacred, cameras are strictly forbidden.
We appreciate the rare opportunity and permission to photograph in the Hopi Nation, especially
in the Hunyama Baby Naming Ceremony and the Jackson Family Feast, given in honor of their
mother and the uncles who have passed on.
Thank you for watching.
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