In 1990 I signed a contract to teach in Heart Butte, the most remote community on the Blackft Reservation, thirty miles from both Valier and Browning, in the foothills of the Rockies and in Pondera County rather than Glacier County like rest of the reservation. The first time I saw this village, in the Sixties, it was truly tiny -- a little scatter of log cabins and shacks with a log “round house” and a school with many tall windows and an attached wing of teacher apartments. In those days wild boys had horses instead of cars and occasionally shot up the teacherage.
The Flood of 1964 changed everything by destroying many of the buildings. The Catholic church was far enough up a hill and the school was sturdy enough that they survived, but the stream that came through the town did much damage and many people had to move to Browning, either to be with relatives or to occupy the quickly-made flood houses.
The next big change came when the roads to Heart Butte were paved, not by the counties but by the tribe. Until then people were often trapped by the weather because plows didn’t get through the snow or because even gravelled dirt roads through gumbo turned to impassable slime. Paved roads meant that people could keep their Browning jobs while moving “home” to Heart Butte, if they were willing to make the thirty mile commute. (Paved roads along the main river valleys meant that housing could be built along Birch Creek, Badger Creek, and Two Medicine instead of in clusters near Browning.)
Soon it became clear to the number-crunchers that there were enough children living near enough to Heart Butte to build a high school there. This became a battle cry as soon as people realized that meant another basketball team. Basketball is the replacement for the once exciting raiding lives of male Blackft. Anyway, the thirty mile bus ride for high schoolers out to either Browning or Valier had long meant that they simply didn’t do well because of many absences. Boarding schools out of Montana had been their best solution, but not an easy choice for someone who grew up in a remote village.
Just to try out the idea of a high school, the first year classes were organized within the new elementary school, which was sunk in the top of a hill in order to save fuel. I was the first and only English teacher 7-12. On the first day of teacher preparation I found my windowless and rather clammy classroom. (There was a vein of water just outside the wall of the school there -- if we’d have punched a hole, we’d have had a spring of ice water.) In the middle of the room, on the dubious carpet, was piled a mountain of textbooks the last eighth grade teacher had ordered. ALL were grammar and usage books. No literature. I was told, “These kids are SO BAD at English, you’ll just have to drill them constantly.” Grim.
The superintendent said, “If you have books you can’t use, send them back.” So I did. He kept the refund. I mean, personally.
The seventh grade readers were meant for kids that age the way they were in the Fifties and they were almost that old. (The books, not the kids.) Childish tales about puppies and bunnies, they totally bored the little band of lively seventh graders, who were acting as though they were forty. Well, twenty anyway. It was impossible to keep them reading.
About that time the superintendent bought a dozen Macintoshes from a friend of his who had a computer store. They were the little boxes with the screens built in, actually about to be obsolete at that point. The superintendent bought them as a way of saving their value for his friend. We were told many wonderful things about what they could do, but the superindent didn’t understand that in order to network them, he would have to actually string wire, and he would have to buy software. He bought software only for himself and the sports director. And two printers.
I had a friend who coached me to choose my own software: WriteNow, a very compact and simple word-processing program. I put the Mac in the corner, explained what I knew to a couple of the boys, and within a half-hour they had it working. They were writing dirty stories, but they were actually writing. So I tried it myself.
Sitting in the classroom while the students did worksheets, I turned casually and said to Christy, “What’s a good name for a boy?”
“Che,” she answered without thinking.
I began a story about Che. (The story will follow.) Then it dawned on me that this might be a way to deal with the constant social issues that came up among us. The kids obsessed over bad behavior, over emotions, and about family. Clearly it was impossible to talk personally about real people -- this was a place DEEPLY committed to secrecy, because of the trauma of having to hide from white conquerors in order to continue their sacred practices, because alcohol and violence reinforce secrecy, and because prudish missionaries had imposed shame over the simplest and most natural of forces. (We had a big flap when one teacher breastfed her new baby, though she did it at home on breaks.)
But if we were talking about a person in a story, who was not real, maybe we could address issues like drunkenness, getting pregnant, loneliness, inadequate parenting, growing up and so on. My thought was that when we had written enough to make these characters real, I could bring in experts to explain why what was “right” really WAS the “right” thing to do -- that it lead to success and happiness.
But in the meantime I needed a girl’s name. “Heather.” There was a little discussion about this. Earlier I had pushed this class a little harder than usual and the girls had protested, “You just don’t know what our lives are LIKE.” To prove that I did, I went home that night and wrote an imaginary letter “from” an imaginary girl in which she described her life -- a girl like these in class. “Is that what your lives are like?” Grudgingly, they said it was, more or less.
Later this letter got mixed into some papers I sent to the Office of Public Instruction, and I got an excited letter back from them. “This girl is remarkable,” they said. “We want to help her. Can we send some money for a scholarship?”
Sheepishly, I explained that it was a made-up letter, but that it was a pretty accurate account of at least six girls. Would they like to help six girls? They immediately lost interest. I wondered why.
Anyway, over the next week or so I’ll “publish” the story of Heather and Che, a chapter at a time. The chapters were each about four single-spaced typed pages. We talked them out, like a script-writing group, and then I actually “wrote” them according to what we said. Late in the week we took our copies and analyzed them for character development, plot line, issues, and sometimes spelling and punctuation. (Getting the hang of punctuating dialogue takes a lot of noticing. The kids tended to just skip over punctuation, which sometimes damaged their ability to get meaning.)
Everyone in the school was anxious to read what happened to Heather and Che. One girl’s grandmother decided our story was “dirty” and she was forbidden to help write it. She spent that day in the library but, of course, she read and discussed the story, often coming up with good ideas.
What I wanted was for them to feel writing is something they could do, that they could write about their own lives, and that people would care. Construction, rather than deconstruction, was my strategy for a post-colonial world.
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