Soul sisters
Words of wisdom
By: Taylor Notah
Tribal Affiliation: Navajo
B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication
On the cusp of graduating with their master’s degrees, five grandmothers and mothers from the Gila River Indian Community are reshaping what higher education looks like.
Priscilla Espinoza, Edwardine Thomas, Marcella Hall, Nina Allison and Starleen Somegustava are known as the “Soul Sisters” in the Gila River Culture and Language Teacher Cohort, a collaboration between ASU’s Center for Indian Education and Gila River Indian Community Tribal Education Department that prepares educators to go back and work with their community. For the Soul Sisters, their ambitions are to instill their Akimel O’otham language and culture within the Gila River Reservation.
As they prepare to graduate from ASU’s New College of Interdisciplinary Studies with a concentration in Indian Education, the Soul Sisters share how they found a support system with one another as they returned to college, remained resilient during challenging times, and how their families and communities propelled them to achieve their goals.
“I’ll be the first in my whole family to have received a degree and I’m the oldest in my family,” said Thomas, 58, a family and child educator at Blackwater Community School and grandmother of four. “I want to help our people, our children, our future generations. I work with parents and I want them to be able to learn the language and not feel guilty for not learning it back when they were little.”
Espinoza, a grandmother of six and great-grandmother of two, is a community liaison officer at Casa Blanca Community School and says graduating with a master’s degree will help her to accomplish more for her community.
“This is just the beginning,” said Espinoza, 69. “What I’ve learned, the knowledge that I’ve found and that I have in my heart is to help our community, to set an example of what I can accomplish with higher education. Even though I’m an elder, there is so much that I have learned that I am utilizing for our people. That is the reason why I’m here.”
Enrolled in the cohort since 2014, the group has shared similar challenges in returning to school such as time management, struggles with technology and coping with family loss. These shared experiences have developed into a deep and striking camaraderie among the Soul Sisters.
“We’ve all been through a lot together,” said Thomas, her voice gently breaking as she looked at her classmates. “These are my sisters. We’ve gone through a lot, and we’re still going through a lot, but every week we come to class, we lean on each other and help each other out.”
For Hall, a 36-year-old mother of one and caretaker to her niece, working as a cultural educator at Sacaton Middle School puts strain on her time between work, school and home life, but she remains committed in providing equal time for all.
“It is hard,” admits Hall. “And it’s not just that, there’s other things that come on your path, (but) we made it this far and we’re almost there.”
Allison is a grandmother of three and works in early education in Sacaton. Family is Allison’s top priority.
She urges her family to set goals and strive for them, a teaching she had to reassert to herself when a loved one passed away.
“I forgot about everything. I didn’t do homework, I didn’t do readings, and that was a struggle for me,” Allison, 50, said tearfully. “I told myself, ‘I got to get on track, I got to do this because, like Edwardine said, you do it for your children, you do it for your family because you’re those role models, you’re the example for them.”
Due to schedule conflicts, Somegustava was unable to take part in the Turning Points interview.
The Soul Sisters take their stories of resilience and persistence in their college journeys and pass them on — not only to their own families and communities, but to those who are currently enrolled or are considering pursuing their own path in higher education. These sisters impart words of wisdom as they close one chapter in their life and embark on another.
“I always taught my nieces and nephews, ‘Do it now, do it when you’re young. Look at me, I’m old, I’m still going to school,’” Thomas said.
“Really set your goals and say you can do it. It is a struggle, but set your priorities straight and know that your family will always be behind you. You can always go home and go back to your family, but education is going to take you a long way. The world is right there.”
“I tell my students, ‘Please don’t be a statistic,’” Hall said.
“We have a lot of high school dropouts and we don’t have many of our people going to college. We need our own people in our own communities sitting in the seats we are at. You’re all going to be filling in our seats. It will get hard, but you have your family. Anybody you look up to, talk to them. Don’t keep everything in.”
“Keep positive and never doubt yourself, never say ‘I can’t,’” Allison said.
“You can strive for what you want in life and keep going. At the Early Education Childcare Center, I work with 3-year-olds who say, ‘I can’t do it’ and I say, ‘Let’s see, did you try? Did you even try to do it?’ That’s what we need to do is try. And they end up accomplishing it.”
“There are so many others who go through similar conditions, similar situations like you,” Espinoza said.
“Maybe it’s more severe because we go in our own footprints and on our own journey, we have our own way of coping with different things. I talk about how difficult it was for me to go back to school after all these years and how hard it was when I went to ASU campus feeling lost. But reach out to others. Everyone on campus is a student striving to be somebody and you’re going to be walking among them, you’re going to be the one that’s striving, showing our people and yourself that it can be done. Our reservation has boundaries, go beyond it and you learn that there’s so much out there in the world. You can read it in the books, but once you having a turning point, it turns everything around. You’re experiencing what you read.”
