No Turning Back : A Hopi Indian Woman's Struggle to Live in Two Worlds

Rating:
Summary: Indian Autobiography in Novel Form
Review: This book provides the life account of a Hopi woman who chose to privilege the white American way of life over her own Native ancestry and tradition and the struggles--both internal and external--resulting from this choice. Polingaysi Qoyawayma (or Elizabeth Q. White), unlike many other Native Americans, deliberately chose to attend both local schools and boarding schools run by white Christian missionaries. While she does recount atrocities committed by these white missionaries against Native children--one example would be the child who had an eraser shoved into her mouth for disobedience--Qoyawayma tells these incidents with an astonishing detachment. She makes no judgements on the whites who perpetrated such offenses.

Indeed, the whole book is written in a third person, novelistic style. That is, she doesn't say "I did this" or "I said that" but rather, "SHE said this" or "SHE did that." This seems more than a little odd, considering that this book is autobiography--a life story told by the person who lived it. One cannot help but wonder if this odd novelistic style isn't a reflection of Qoyawayma's own ambivalence about the choice she made to follow white Eurowestern education instead of her own Hopi traditional way of life. This is, however, mere speculation. While Qoyawayma was an educated person, she chose to collaborate with a white woman writer, Vada F. Carlson, to produce this book. Perhaps the third person style was chosen by the collaborator and not Qoyawayma herself. Still, one must assume that Qoyawayma had final say over the content and style of the book.

It is interesting to speculate about the thoughts that went into the writing of this text because her own people, the Hopi, did accuse Qoyawayma of wanting to be "white." In an odd way, she did "become white" because she married a white man whose last name was White.

The book is worth reading because it provides another perspective on the lives of those Native peoples who were, as the title of this book states, "In Two Worlds."