Hopi prisoners on Alcatraz: jailed for keeping their children home

Hopi prisoners at Alcatraz, January 1895. Back row, from left: unidentified; Polingyawma; Heevi'ima; Masatiwa; unidentified. Middle row: Qötsventiwa; Piphongva; unidentified; Lomahongewma; unidentified; Lomayestiwa; Yukiwma. Front row: Tuvehoyiwma; unidentified; Patupha; Qötsyawma; unidentified.

In November 1894 the U.S. Army arrested nineteen men of the Hopi village of Orayvi (Oraibi), in Arizona, and shipped them to the military prison on Alcatraz Island. Their offence, as a San Francisco newspaper put it, was that "they would not let their children go to school". They spent most of 1895 on the island. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office has been piecing their story together since 1995 — from government records and newspapers, and from what Hopi families remember.

Schools by force

In the late nineteenth century the government set out to "Americanize" the Hopi, and taking children to boarding school was the centre of the policy. The first government school at Hopi opened at Keams Canyon in 1887, far from home, and most parents refused to send their children. The school was overcrowded and disease-ridden; even the agent at Fort Defiance, E. H. Plummer, warned in 1893 that deaths there would turn people against it.

The government tried persuasion; parents made "half-promises" and kept their children home. It tried pressure: in January 1894, with two feet of snow on the ground and the temperature at 17 below zero, Plummer cut off annuity goods and stopped work on houses and wells at Second Mesa. And it used force: in December 1890 soldiers took 104 children from Orayvi, and in 1894 police and then troops were sent to Second Mesa. Plummer suggested it might work better to arrest the village leaders instead.

"Friendlies" and "Hostiles"

Agents divided Orayvi into "Friendlies", who sent their children to school, and "Hostiles", who did not. The labels were the government's and misleading: nearly all Hopi opposed the attack on their culture — the "Friendlies" fought land allotment too — and many who sent their children did so simply to survive.

The crisis came over land at Munqapi (Moenkopi), near Tuba City, already tense between Navajos and Mormon settlers. In October 1894 some fifty men of the "Hostile" faction planted wheat on fields there that their clans had once held but that "Friendly" families had farmed for years. On November 6, before the whole village, the village leader Loololma asked the new agent, Constant Williams, for soldiers. Lomahongewma of the Spider Clan and Heevi'ima of the Fire Clan answered that they wanted to follow "the Oraibi path": no school, no white man's clothes or food — to be left alone.

On November 15 Williams asked for two cavalry troops with Hotchkiss guns. On November 25, 1894, troops came to Orayvi and arrested nineteen men.

Soldiers and prisoners at the pueblo, 1894. Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College.

On the Rock

The men were taken to Fort Defiance and then to Alcatraz, landing on January 3, 1895. The San Francisco Call announced "A Batch of Apaches", "murderous-looking" — it had the wrong people. A later story insisted the prisoners lived "a life of ease", sawing logs and taken on trips to see "the harmlessness of the multiplication table" in city schools.

The reality was harder. The old cellblocks were described a few years later as rotten, dark, damp and dangerous. At home, families heard rumours that the men were starving, overworked, or dead; the Mennonite missionary H. R. Voth wrote to the prison that photographs of them were "very much appreciated" for that reason. The men missed ceremonies, planting and harvest. Two of their wives gave birth to children who died while they were away.

They came home in September 1895.

Hopi prisoners on Alcatraz, held for "seditious conduct", January 3 to August 7, 1895. Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College.

The men

Heevi'ima, Polingyawma, Masatiwa, Qötsventiwa, Piphongva, Lomahongewma, Lomayestiwa, Yukiwma, Tuvehoyiwma, Patupha, Qötsyawma, Sikyakeptiwa, Talagayniwa, Talasyawma, Nasingayniwa, Lomayawma, Tawalestiwa, Aqawsi and Qoiwiso.

An unfinished story

The written record is the government's and the newspapers'. The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office has traced descendants of the prisoners and continues to gather Hopi memories of what the men and their families endured.

Sources

Written from Wendy Holliday, Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, "Hopi History: The Story of the Alcatraz Prisoners", published by the National Park Service as "Hopi Prisoners on the Rock". Quotations are from government reports of 1893–1894 and the San Francisco Call, 1895.