If this is too long, too bad. The premise is that to learn most completely, one must be self-reflexive about experience. This course (EDSP 410) has reminded me again and again how extensive in some ways that experience is, how I’ve taken it for granted, subsumed it somehow without being particularly aware of what it’s done to me. A little idiosyncratic examination is in order, so you see this is not just a recounting, it’s a search intended as a reaffirmation.

Sherman Institute

Still an undergraduate newly supporting a young family, I fell into the offer to teach, without experience or training or even an idea to follow. The first day the VP, under five feet in physical stature and mentally somewhat less, led me across campus to Teepee 8, the back room, where the problem class was kept: “Worst class in the school…regular teacher had a heart attack, can’t keep a sub, librarian lasted less than a day, here’s the intercom panic button keep ‘em busy see you later….” Eighteen or nineteen years old nearly all much taller than I, in eighth grade basic math and reading, products of broken homes, mixed marriages (inter-tribal) Navajos, Apaches, Pimas, identity crises, which tribe do I belong to? couldn’t make it in the reservation schools, shipped to Arlington, CA, kept behind very tall fences, boarded, herded, penned. Ancient equipment in the shops (bakery, woodshop, printshop) so that if they learned, they had no saleable skill in the outside world. Forbidden to speak their native languages, not taught English with any intensity; the kids/students were not only culturally deprived, language deprived, but were denied any access to a way out.

“They make us go to chapel,” they said (in a Federal school!!), not understanding what brand of religion, mostly Presbyterian, was forced on them, only that it was not their own. They confided in me – I had the feeling of greatly privileged information – that they still conducted their native ceremonies as best they could, having maneuvered permission to construct fire rings on campus under the guise that they were “doing barbeques,” “community sing gatherings.”

“Don’t leave them alone, they’re like rabbits in heat, always in the bushes, we call it rape but they’re willing, have to punish them, make them rake leaves…” The cleanest campus I’ve ever seen. Caught a boy and girl kissing in the text book room (locked; how did they get in?), out of kindness to me they showed polite embarrassment and returned to class. I didn’t scold or say a word, we were all grateful for that.

What dumb luck made me so “successful” with these students who worked away at their lessons with some show of diligence, meaningless problems in ancient textbooks, an amused forbearance for the new kid teacher? I watched and learned, gave individual attention and gradually some class lessons, didn’t nag or push or yell, we tested each other and found we were alright together. I remember the awful day I brought in Salinger’s “The Laughing Man” because I thought (remembering it) that they’d like the story as much as I had, so I began reading it and they didn’t understand it at all, not any of the allusions, not the tone, the vocabulary, I saw that nearly at once, began in a desperate panic to edit, then summarize, then collapse the story lamely, then back to the security of the textbooks. They understood that I had tried to do something nice by reading a story to them and thanked me for the effort, and we let it go at that.

Brought my typewriter one day, writing letters and/or essays, they were fascinated, eager, like children, and we set up a schedule, a sign-up sheet where they took turns and I coached them (yes, of course, after they had done some “work” to earn the privilege, eh?). Was told by the administration: “Don’t let them touch that typewriter! You’ll only give them the false illusion that they might amount to something, have a chance to become a secretary maybe…” “But it’s my own typewriter…” “Doesn’t matter. I forbid you to let them use it…” So I moved the machine into the back conference room, out of sight, and we kept the schedule going. I wasn’t (and am not) courageous, but very upset. Administrators and some teachers would flaunt remarks like: “Lazy good for nothing Indians, all they want is a blanket and a bottle of firewater (yes, that’s verbatim)…” First faculty meeting there was a presentation by the math department on the “new math” (2 or 3 years old by then), and the principal whom I’ll call _____ said “You may not teach these new concepts. I don’t understand them myself, and they can’t lead to anything good, these students can’t even learn to calculate…”

I remember the basketball game against another school, the cheerleaders, four or five fat girls in gaudy short rah rah skirts, bemused, somnolent, going through the motions of someone else’s game that they didn’t want to play, trying to pretend to try to coerce their peers into a public demonstration of frenzy, and no one cheered, and they looked in helpless anguish toward the rulers of the school as if to say “Don’t put us in this situation,” and the rulers of the school glaring in hopeless frustrated anger.

I remember how the girls would go up to my car when my wife came to pick me up, and would peek through the window, and giggle in approval, and come back for another look.

I remember how townspeople would drive up on the weekends to “rent an Indian” for a few hours to clean house or stables.

I remember how we all gathered in the main room of one of the residence buildings to watch Johnson’s inauguration on TV (yes, that dates me). And the kids/students came back to class and drew cartoons, very sharp and funny, showing The Man shaking his finger at the camera and saying “I want you all to think the way I think, and you’d better do it or else!”

They drew pictures, hid them when they saw me see them, then thawed out when I showed interest, and drew (“for class credit”) often lovely scenes of the desert they had not seen for two years, rocks and horses and sky. I brought my tape recorder and they had a great time singing tribal songs and beating out the old rhythms on the desks and walls; a tape I cherish. One girl told me she wanted to become a pop singer and in a high clear thin voice sang “Angel Baby,” a song she said she had written herself but that I had just heard on the car radio that morning on the way to work. The class listened to her with respect for her singing, and for her ambition to be a singer.

And I cried at home over my students, and didn’t know what to do for them, and tried to teach them what I could. And what did I learn from that intense brief bit of my life? How easy it is to destroy a people. To force handicaps upon them. How important language is as the medium of life itself, our identity, our experience of the world. The value of democracy, the need to be free, what the mainstream is and how everything relates to it, how much I love teaching even though I didn’t (and don’t) know what I was doing.

“Stay with us,” the administration said, and those few well-meaning motivated teachers who worked not for the money and not for the lower hiring qualifications, and the students said “Stay with us” but not always in words. “We can legally hire you for a month at a time with one day off in between,” said the administrators (one good one in the lot), and I said with surprising maturity, “I need to return to school myself and finish my degree, because I’m already out of phase and haven’t graduated yet.” “We understand,” they said, “but come back to us if you can. Think of Indian Service.” “I do, and I will,” I said.

And I have.

Here’s another of the many Indian poems I wrote from that time, this one from
Many Smokes, Native American Earth Awareness Magazine:

			Tribal Council

	The Gathering of Nations
	is a coming together
	of the fragments
	of our scattered lives
	We learn again the joy
	of what we say as what we do
	Our body becomes whole
	Our courage becomes intense
	Our words hang in the air for days

Here is a YouTube video of me reading this segment: