HOW I CAME TO THE REZ

Everyone carries around with them many fantasies about what an Indian reservation might be like, most of them fantasies invented by Hollywood script writers who maybe went through one summer. (“Journey Through Rosebud” is one of the better ones, but too reality-based for the consuming public, even the Indians. It’s about a white boy hitchhiking through the Sioux rez and what happens to his rather heroic Indian friend.)

When I was due to graduate from Northwestern University with a teaching degree in 1961, I went to the teacher placement office and told them I wanted a job west of the Mississippi but not in California. The woman stared at me with her mouth hanging open. “There ARE no teaching jobs there!” she said. “There’s nothing there at all!” Neither of us knew that each Western state maintained a placement office for its school districts. So my parents drove me home across the West, both populated and not, wondering what would become of me. Then I hit on the idea of Indian reservations. Actually, I was thinking about the Navajo, since we’d traveled through there once and since I’d read “Tangled Waters,” a 1936 book for “young people” by the wife of a trader, Florence Crannell Means. It holds up pretty well today, though -- of course -- it’s considered politically incorrect these days and an act of robbery for a white person to write about Indians, unless you’re Tony Hillerman. Means was very wicked: she seems to have specialized in books about minorities. “Tangled Waters” was illustrated by Herbert Morton Stoops, born in Idaho in 1888 and migrated to Connecticut where he was among the major illustrators of Westerns, though never so famous as some of the others.

But we didn’t drive through the Navajo reservation because we were traveling between Chicago and Portland, Oregon. On the Blackfeet Reservation we paused to see the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana. My mother asked whether there were any teaching jobs, there were, and I was hired. This was just before the Peace Corps became popular. The superintendent was overjoyed to have a qualified applicant and I was thrilled, though baffled about exactly what I would do since my practice teaching was in Evanston with very sophisticated high school dramatics classes.

In those days kids were tracked by performance (how do you judge the abilities of kids like these anyway when tests are based on conformity to the norms of totally different people?) and I was asked to teach junior high English about which I knew nothing. One opened the textbook (also tracked), started at the beginning, and hoped to finish by the end of the school year. I had the “top” of the eighth grade and the “bottom” of the seventh grade. If kids got out of line, the principal paddled them. Discipline was pretty good.

My first class was the bottom of the eighth grade. On the first day when I said, “All right, students, please take your seats,” a great tall boy bellowed, “No!” Students were required by law to attend school until they either passed the eighth grade or turned sixteen, whichever came first. This particular boy was close to sixteen and already a father. I didn’t know that. I only took teaching classes because that’s how women were supposed to earn a living. When I had taken a “methods” class that came to classroom discipline, I asked the professor what I should do if a student pulled a knife on me. His answer was “immediately get a better job!” Lots of laughter at my expense.

I had seen “Blackboard Jungle.” I was idealistic. I said to this tall father/boy, “All right, children. Everyone please sit down except those of you who choose to lounge on the radiator.” He sat down, but only because he figured there was a trick of some sort. He was in for a baffling year because I was always going off on some tangent about the glories of the world. When I taught again briefly in 1989-91, I was teaching the children of these students, and I still try to keep track of those families, though now they’re so mixed with other kinds of people and live so differently that I can’t recognize them without prompting. Today’s kids watch television and try to be like people in sit-coms. Sometimes I attend the funerals of my original students.

When I began to teach I was told that if any student called me a “nahpi-yahki” I was to take him or her to the office immediately. “Nahpi-yahki” is Blackfeet for “white woman,” but in those days it had the same kind of pejorative overtone as “squaw” does in English now. In those days speaking Blackfeet was considered very backwards. The morality of language has flipped over so now learning Blackfeet is a high ideal.

But it was the land that seized me and it has changed very little except for the booming settlements. The Blackfeet Reservation is the east slope of the Rocky Mountains just south of the Canadian border. It is about fifty miles on a side, an ecotone from the western foothills to the eastern flats. An ecotone is a place where one ecology interacts with another. There are five main rivers and many small feeders draining from the snowpack of the Rockies. Because the Rockies create a rain shadow, meaning that Pacific moisture is usually wrung out of clouds before they cross, there is not enough water to support trees except in the valleys. In any case, the constant driving winds discourage trees. But the winds are catabatic, which have compressed while piled up on the west side of the mountains and then expand, warming, on the east side. So this is surprising country. One crosses flat grassland, then suddenly drops into a coulee. A journey begins in sun and ends in snow.

Blackfeet as I used to know them were a patient people who survived by adapting to terrain and weather. They waited for the right moment, which was seen as “Indian time,” and took the option that required the least exertion, which was taken to be laziness. Their survival depended on their ability to respond and adapt. And that included me. They had no agenda except to survive me, because people came and went all the time and none of them agreed about what Indians ought to do.

This tolerant watchfulness affected me profoundly. It wasn’t just that the sheer vast environment was exhilarating. It wasn’t just that it was like going to a foreign country, which many were beginning to do by joining the Peace Corps. I wanted to write and this was just the sort of situation that a writer ought to be in. It was a chance to be Florence Crannell Means. But what I really needed to know was how to teach these kids to read. Only now, a half-century later, do we realize that we don’t really know how to teach kids to read. They either figure it out or they don’t. Now, of course, it’s politically incorrect for whites to write about Indians. In fact, it's rather politically incorrect for whites to teach Indians on reservations.