Bell High Experience of Young Hopi Reflects Hurdles in Indian Education

Linda Lomaintewa, one of hundreds of Hopis in greater Los Angeles, laughs uneasily when she recalls how close she came to dropping out of Bell High School.

Linda, now 18, would dutifully go to school in the morning, dump her books in her locker and then head right back out the door.

A favorite teacher was concerned enough to foil most of her attempts to ditch her classes. Her mother also pressured her to continue her education.

“She used to tell me that I better not drop out or she was going to ship me off to boarding school,” Linda recalls, tossing back her straight, jet-black hair.

Her mother, Madeline Kaye Lomaintewa, grew up on the Hopi reservation in Keams Canyon, Ariz. Like many of her tribe, Mrs. Lomaintewa was educated at a Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding school that was as strictly run as a convent. (As to the threat, it was idle but effective, according to Mrs. Lomaintewa, who explains: “You have to keep the kids in line somehow. They’re too big to send to their rooms.”)

Long before a mainstream education was regarded as desirable in Indian circles, a few prescient leaders saw that Anglo learning could be an invaluable tool. The Navajo leader Manuelito advised his tribe a century ago: “We are like people trapped in a canyon. Education is the ladder. Take it.”

But the ladder has been a shaky one for Indians. As recently as 1980 only 55.5% of Indian adults had finished high school, compared to 66.5% of the adult population as a whole. Statistics on college attendance are even bleaker. Only 7.7% of Indian adults had college degrees in 1980, compared to 16.2% of the adult population as a whole.

Linda Lomaintewa’s experience is both hopeful and disturbing in what it suggests about the education of Indian students in Los Angeles today. Linda got her high school diploma, unlike her two older brothers, and she has begun taking courses at East Los Angeles Community College.

“My brother (who passed a high-school equivalency exam) and I are the first in our family to go to college,” she says. “We’re the first to go in who-knows-how-many generations.”

But Linda was not a distinguished student in high school, and her college work so far has also been disappointing. “I have the potential, but my problem is letting my potential out,” she says.

Linda wants to be a chemistry teacher and plans to transfer to UCLA to finish her undergraduate work. So far, however, she has dropped most of her community college courses, even such favorites as chemistry. She theorizes that she wasn’t prepared for the permissiveness of college so soon after the wit-testing repression of high school.

“I had a jolly old time in high school, trying to get around the system. Then all this freedom hit me, and I couldn’t handle it in the right way,” she says.

Her mother, who is an education aide for the school district, says Linda had time-management problems in high school and was often distracted by outside interests, notably sports and a boyfriend. But Linda speculates that she was rebellious as well, resistant to the pressure to succeed that her mother and several teacher mentors put on her.

Linda grew up in Los Angeles. As a result, she didn’t experience the culture shock that Indian children accustomed to the homogeneous classes and personal attention of reservation schools often experience when they transfer to a big urban school, according to Alicia Stevenson, the part-Penobscot director of the district’s American Indian Education Commission.

But Bell, which has the largest Indian enrollment of any school in the Los Angeles district (43), is no academic paradise.

High Attrition Rate

A year-round school, Bell serves Bell, Maywood and Cudahy, among the poorest, most densely populated communities in the county. The school’s attrition rate is 53.4%, eighth highest in the district. Three-quarters of the high schools in the district scored higher than Bell on the last California Assessment Program test for seniors.

Bell’s Indian students form a tiny minority in a student body of 3,690 that is almost 90% Latino.

Linda, who now tutors Indian students at Bell and helps run the school’s Indian club, says her alma mater suffers most from the non-academic orientation of many of its students and the unwillingness or inability of their parents to prod them into taking school seriously.

There are a number of fine teachers at Bell, she says, “but the school could be a lot better. Most of the kids just come to school because they have to. They don’t come to learn.”

In Linda’s experience, being Indian complicates the academic experience. Her mother is a champion of education. But she is also Hopi. And as Linda explains, “in the Hopi way,” moral and spiritual values are paramount. Being a good person is far more important than scholastic achievement.

The Hopi way and local mores sometimes clash painfully for Linda. Since she was a pre-adolescent tomboy, she says, she and her mother, who retains many traditional tribal values, have disagreed on how she should dress and behave.

“She used to tell me, ‘An Indian young lady shouldn’t be out playing basketball,’ ” recalls Linda, who favors a uniform of jeans or painter’s pants, a man’s shirt and tennis shoes and frankly envies the greater freedom her mother allows the boys in the family.

Indian Customs Differ

Others involved in Indian education agree that tribal customs or values can make school more difficult for Indian youngsters. Earl Sisto of Inglewood, an Apache who counsels Indian students at UCLA, recalls that he was reluctant to raise his hand and answer questions in grade school or high school. “It’s not the Apache way to be competitive or out in front,” he explains. “You are discouraged by your peers from speaking out in class.”

Linda is now actively involved in the education of other Indian youngsters. She is the math and science tutor for Bell’s Indian education program. “Not many of these students go beyond geometry,” says Linda (who successfully completed trigonometry in high school). As someone who has seen, and felt, the educational needs of Indian students firsthand, she is distressed by recent cutbacks in Indian programs.

“We were the first people here, and yet we’re probably at the bottom of the government’s fund list,” she says.

Linda was active in the Title IV-A program, including the Indian club, when she was a student at Bell.

Today Linda and her best friend, Donana Browne, virtually run the Indian program at Bell with the help of a faculty adviser. Donana, who is Navajo (the traditional rival of the Hopi), tutors those students who need help with reading comprehension and other English language skills.

Together, the young women supervise the Indian club, called the Tribe of Many Feathers, a name that reflects its multitribal composition. Bell’s Indian students represent at least 21 different tribes (more than 100 tribes have members in Los Angeles County).

Organizations Valuable

Earl Sisto believes that organizations such as the Tribe of Many Feathers are valuable in providing urban Indian students with an Indian-oriented, if non-traditional, “alternative to identifying with the low riders and surfers” who dominate the youth culture of many local communities.

But Linda has no illusions about the success of the club. The tribe is scheduled to meet at lunchtime Wednesdays. Only a few students, mostly girls, show up faithfully. Many others surface only when the club is going on a field trip.

“A lot of them participate just to get out of class,” Linda says.

A few titular members of the club are more active in local gangs.

But the club is rewarding for some. Jessica Browne, a 17-year-old senior, enjoyed making beadwork earrings at a recent workshop and learning about local Indian traditions during a field trip into the Santa Susana Mountains.

More important, Jessica, who is one of Donana Browne’s three younger sisters, has also taken advantage of the tutoring offered by the program.

As Jessica explains, “I know what to say, but I can’t put it out on paper in words.” With Donana’s help, Jessica recalls, “My English grade went up from a D to a C, then from a C to a B.”

After graduation, Jessica plans to work full time and study accounting at night.

Jessica’s mother, Angela, has exposed her daughters to the Navajo way in such forms as traditional cures for their colds and traditional foods, including a dish made with sheep intestines.

A True Urbanite

But Jessica is a true urbanite, who likes the indoor plumbing, electricity and music videos that her cousins on the reservation live without.

Most of Jessica’s friends are Latino, she says, and “I don’t really make a big thing of the club around them.”

But Jessica is quietly proud of her ethnicity. Whatever its source, such healthy self-esteem is one of the stated aims of the Indian education program.

Occasionally, non-Indian peers have teased her by whooping and dancing around her in what she describes as “a really dumb way.”

“I was offended,” she recalls, “but it didn’t really bother me. I’m proud to be what I am. I’m not ashamed.”