Hopiland, You're on the Air

Hopiland, You're on the Air

Drums and chants fill the Arizona air as the sun rises over the sandstone mesas and cedar-spotted canyons of the Hopi Reservation. It’s powwow music, but this powwow is only on the airwaves.

“Gooooood morning!” Wallace Hyeoma cries into the KUYI radio microphone, greeting listeners from every tribe that may be tuned in. It’s morning drive time on the reservation, and Hyeoma, wearing a “Don’t worry, Be Hopi” T-shirt, sends a lively mix of traditional tribal music, contemporary American Indian songs, and rock ’n’ roll over the desert.

“I’m the ‘Salad Man.’ I mix it up. All kinds of music,” says Hyeoma. “It’s a public radio station. It’s for everybody, so I try to play something for everybody.”

Last December, KUYI hit the airwaves from a gray doublewide trailer at the foot of First Mesa (pop. 2,000), sending music and news to Hopi villages scattered across the three mesas that make up the bulk of the reservation in northeastern Arizona. Its 69,000 watts also reach growing audiences of non-American Indians in cities like Flagstaff and Winslow.

“The idea of radio really came from local people years ago who wanted a radio station to connect them with other villages,” says Loris Taylor, the station’s general manager and associate director of the Hopi Foundation, a 16-year-old nonprofit group that launched the radio station.

“They didn’t feel that they were being included in other mainstream media, other television and radio stations. Even weather reports I remember used to cover the Grand Canyon, but never ever the Hopi Reservation. It was like the Grand Canyon, Flagstaff, and Phoenix existed, and there was a big void in between.”

Taylor grew up in that so-called “void,” but spent much of her life in a very different world. At 12, she left for an American Indian boarding school in Riverside, Calif. She graduated from an Ivy League school, Dartmouth College, then taught at Phillips Exeter Academy boarding school in New Hampshire before returning to her parents’ remote Oraibi village—which had no electricity, no running water, and a lifestyle she hadn’t known since she was a child.

Taylor, whose husband Wayne is chairman of the Hopi Nation, now sits at the controls of the country’s 30th American Indian radio station. KUYI, whose call letters spell the Hopi word for water, has four paid staffers and about 15 volunteer disc jockeys who knew nothing about broadcasting before the $1 million in state-of-the-art equipment arrived, courtesy of a contingent of federal and private grants.

“No one on Hopi has any experience with radio,” Taylor says. “Well, I shouldn’t say that. We know how to turn on the radio.”

Mornings start with traditional music. “It centers you. It reminds you who you are,” Taylor says. By midmorning, the station expands to contemporary American Indian music. By noon, anything goes, from reggae superstar Bob Marley to native rocker Chester Knight, from the soulful Temptations to hard-rocking Aerosmith to danceable Janet Jackson. Many DJs broadcast in their native language. That’s made Hopi “cool” to many young people, Taylor says, and is helping save the fading tongue.

“I think that’s the phenomenon of radio: the ability to change attitudes,” she says. “It gives us an opportunity to express ourselves through our songs and our traditions and our stories,” says Taylor of radio’s good fit in a place where many have battery-run radios but no electricity for television or computers.

“While we may not be a mainstream medium, we have our own forum to voice our own concerns, and our own issues, and our own ideas, and our own creativity. I think that’s the highest opportunity of expression that you can give to a group of people.”

David M. Frey is a freelance writer from Carbondale, Colo.

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