Virtual Book Tour -- Stop 2

I want to thank our hosts so much for opening their home to us this evening so that I can have the opportunity to read a little bit and to answer all your questions about my historical novel, Though An Army Come Against Us. I especially want to thank them for these cookies which are the bomb. I am trying not to eat all of them myself, but I am not having a lot of success. And, of course, I want to thank all of you for joining us here this evening. I hope you will enjoy my book.

I am going to read a little bit from the second chapter, which is a letter from Luther Standing Bear to Zitkala Sa. Here goes:

When I first graduated from Carlisle Indian School I worked as an assistant teacher on the Rosebud reservation, where much of my family lives. I was a new and inexperienced teacher so I followed the same monkey-see-monkey-do approach they used with me when I was in school. Like me, my students would repeat all these words and phrases in English, but their actual meanings were obscure, and often referred to a world the children didn’t even know. You know all those memorized dialogues about ordering a meal in a restaurant and asking directions to the opera? I see this clearly now, and I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I didn’t understand any of it back then. 

Back then I truly believed that once we mastered the white people’s learning we would be welcome to enter into their world. I thought I had personal evidence of this: when I was a student at Carlisle I worked summers at Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia. Every summer my hard work earned me a promotion. Returning home to Rosebud, I immediately got what seemed to be a great job as a teaching assistant. I thought opportunities were opening to me. I believed that I could provide even better opportunities for my pupils.

Then the agent at the Pine Ridge Reservation asked me to transfer from Rosebud to the Allen school near Wagmíza Wakpála: as head teacher, not assistant! I thought everything was going perfectly, and I was confident that I could be a better teacher than the wašíčus from the moment I took over my own classroom. After all, I am Lakota, just like my students; that would be an immediate bond between us. I speak their language; I wouldn’t have to waste time pantomiming to make myself understood. But it did not work out that way. Not at all. Being head teacher turned out to be more of a test than I ever imagined. I was doing no better at reaching the children than the white teachers.

At first I thought the problem was my suit and my short hair. But thinking about those things didn’t help me make any progress in the classroom. And, truly, I failed to see just how accurately my white man’s clothes and white man’s haircut represented my inner state at the time.

Don’t you find that the best moments in a teacher’s day begin with digressions and misunderstandings? That’s how it happened with me, anyway. One day I was reciting a dialogue in English – with appropriate gestures, of course – about doffing one’s cap when being introduced to a stranger. One of the big boys, a kind of class clown, always pretended to mishear and misunderstand what I said. I still remember his name, Isaac Iron Cloud, and in my mind I can see his laughing face. It occurs to me now that his ability to joke may have shown that he understood the words better than any of his more cooperative classmates! They were all, as I said, simply repeating everything I said, like a flock of parrots.

Anyway, there I was, bowing from the waist and taking off my imaginary cap. Suddenly Isaac asked, in Lakȟótiyapi, “Why do you have a beaver on your head?” He was punning on the Lakota word for “beaver”, which, as you know, sounds a little like “cap.” 

I’m sure that Corn Creek, like all those creeks in South Dakota, used to have lots of beavers. But by the time I was a teacher they were pretty much trapped out for their furs. So I asked, in Lakȟótiyapi, “How many of you here have ever seen a beaver?”  A couple of the boys surprised me by raising their hands. And that made me wonder to myself, What do I really know about any of these children other than what I observe in the classroom?  Then, just when I thought we were as far away from the lesson plan as possible, a quiet girl, Esther Big Owl, took us even farther. She said, also in Lakȟótiyapi, “I know the story of how Iktómi captured Beaver.”

I had a moment of clarity. Why were we performing dialogues about taking off caps, and serving tea with biscuits, and asking for directions to the nearest train station? I said, “Esther, tell us that story.” Most of the class already knew how Iktómi, the spider, tricked the beaver into thinking there was something dangerous in the water, and how he clubbed Beaver when he got near the shore. They had heard it from their own grandparents. But they all listened with great attention to Esther’s account.

Then I told them, “Open your notebooks. Everybody write the story of Čhápa and Iktómi in English.” Jaws dropped. Loud protests erupted. This was unheard of.  English was for school and the agent’s office. Lakȟótiyapi was for home and for the fields. Were there even words in English to tell this story? But I insisted, “In your notebooks!” So they picked up their pencils and began – laboriously, and with a lot of hushed conversation – to struggle through this task. I had never seen them so engaged. I had never seen them learning so much.

Next day, as soon as class began, Amos Yellow Thunder raised his hand and asked if he could tell the story about why we hunt the buffalo instead of the buffalo hunting us. Now remember, like the beaver, the buffalo herds were long gone by then. Nobody was actually hunting buffalo. But Amos knew the story of the Great Race between the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds that was run on Khiíŋyaŋka Očháŋku and how Magpie beat Buffalo. Again I asked them all to write the story in their notebooks in English. Again they all set to work with great intensity. This time I asked who would read their English version aloud. Amos did, haltingly, to both laughter and applause from his classmates.

Isaac Iron Cloud, the class clown, raised his hand and I groaned inwardly. What now? But he wasn’t making jokes. He said, “The Great Race is a good story. But I heard that the reason ptéȟčaka give us their meat is because of a cow buffalo who married a man.”

I had him save that very strange story for the next day. We still had to fit in our required lessons, especially arithmetic. And I had Isaac tell that story to the class in English too, but, again, only after everybody had written it out in English.

I did not yet understand why this was going so well. I only knew that I felt like a much better teacher when all my students were working so hard. I remembered an experience from my student years. It seemed to be related, although at the time I wasn’t sure why. One day an astronomer came to visit us at Carlisle. During an assembly he informed the entire student body that there would be an eclipse of the moon the very next week. In the auditorium, under the eyes of our teachers, we all listened to this preposterous statement in respectful silence. Later, back in the dorms, we mocked him mercilessly.

All the boys knew stories of haŋwí, the light of the night, crossing áŋpawí, the light of the day, and causing darkness in the daytime. In fact, there had been a solar eclipse the summer after I was born; by our calendar waníyetu áŋpawí waŋ t’e, the year the sun died.   So it was clear to us that such a thing as an eclipse was possible. But we were very certain that no wašíču could predict such a thing. Or we were certain… until the eclipse came on exactly the day he said it would! I remember that eclipse because that was the day when I decided that I had to take my school learning seriously. That day I saw that there was an actual connection between things the teachers said in school and the real world. And by “real world” I mean the real world of earth and sky, not just railroads and cities and things made by the wašíčus.

In my classroom at the Allen School I moved on from the stories to talking about the weather and about the plants and about the night sky. In Lakȟótiyapi, as you know, these aren’t separate things. The constellation tȟayámni pȟá is the origin of humanity as well as a group of stars. The big storms of spring and summer are incomprehensible to us without knowing about the wakíŋyaŋ, the thunder spirits. What worked so well was showing the children that the things they knew – things their grandparents taught them! – were important enough to discuss in the classroom. And, vice versa, that the classroom was a place where important things could be discussed! We learned that the real world could be discussed in English. We moved back and forth between Lakȟótiyapi and English, showing that they didn’t have to abandon one world in order to enter the other.

This was a learning experience for me, too. After all my years in school, it turned out there were lots of English words I didn’t know. For example, in Lakȟótiyapi I could easily tell the difference between the great pȟeháŋǧila and the tiny tȟanáǧila. I could even distinguish between the hokȟátȟo and the very similar-looking pȟeháŋ ská. In English, though, they were all just birds to me. I realized that I didn’t know one grass from another in English, either. But in Lakȟótiyapi every one of us knew dozens of grasses: hupȟéstola, pȟeží šašá ókhihe tȟaŋkíŋkiŋyaŋ, sipȟáwičhakaše, wápaha kamnímnila pȟeží, pȟeží wakȟáŋ… and on and on.

It was just about that time that your friend Mrs. Elaine Eastman came to visit us at the school. She was then the superintendent for all Indian schools in both North and South Dakota. Mrs. Eastman quizzed the students aloud on their English and was amazed at our progress. She said the children in our little school were learning so much faster than any others that she wanted to know the secret of our progress! I kept it a secret, though, because I was pretty sure that she and her superiors in Washington would not be happy if they knew what I was doing. Shortly after that visit I received a formal letter of commendation, citing me as one of the finest teachers in the Lakota schools. I was so proud.

Not for long! Just a few days later I got the results of the new civil service examination for teachers. I had failed, along with every Indian teacher in the reservation schools! And then I received another letter from Mrs. Eastman, a letter firing me, even though the ink was barely dry on her letter commending me for doing better than all the wašíču teachers.

Every Indian teacher in the reservation schools was fired. We were all replaced by wašíčus who passed the test, wašíčus who had book knowledge but knew nothing of the lives of our students. Speaking honestly, most of them knew nothing even of the wašíču world outside of books. The man who replaced me broke his leg by putting it between the spokes of his wagon’s wheel. He thought that was a good way to keep it from picking up too much speed driving down a hill!

Thank you for that. Thank you. So, any questions?

I have one. Is this a real person?

Yes. Luther Standing Bear was a Lakota Indian who lived from the buffalo days almost to World War Two. Today he is best known for the four autobiographies he wrote but at the time the novel takes place he was working as an actor. Standing Bear was a little boy at the Battle of Little Big Horn and a young teacher at the time of the Wounded Knee Massacre. He performed in Wild West shows across the United States and in Europe and then for two more decades in Hollywood films.

And the person he was writing to?

Zitkala-Ša, 1898

Zitkala-Ša. Yes, she was real, too. She was a Yankton Dakota Indian who attended Earlham College in Iowa. She was also well-known in her time, as a musician, a writer, an educator, and as a political activist. She was an associate of Luther Standing Bear's brother Henry.

Were they actual correspondents?

I have no idea, and I have no reason to think so. They traveled in slightly different circles, but both were both Native intellectuals who worked hard to imagine a place for Native people in the United States in the twentieth century so I chose picture them writing to one another about their ideas.

Why did you choose to write about this - about them - at all?

Sure. That's a fair question. If you're like most people, what you know about Native Americans comes from a high school history class and from some Western movies. You may have heard about Custer's Last Stand, the Battle of Little Big Horn. If you had a teacher who was interested you may have heard about the Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890. But then Native people probably disappeared entirely from your class and from your textbook. They have certainly not disappeared from the country. So I think it's worthwhile wondering what was going on with them around the time of the novel, around the time of the First World War. And I certainly think it's worth telling that through Native eyes.

I'm wondering about all those words you use. Are they made up, like Klingon or Dothraki? (Laughter)

No, that language is not made up. Lakota and Dakota are mutually-intelligible languages with several thousand native speakers. People today are working hard to make sure they do not vanish by teaching them to adults and children. When I began working on this book I used a print dictionary of the Lakota language. By the time I was doing my final edits I was using the online app of the Lakota Language Consortium.

Why did you bother? How many Lakota speakers did you expect to be reading this book?

The point isn't about a few words. It certainly isn't about me confusing my readers with words they don't know or about me showing off that I discovered a dictionary. It is about an entire culture, an entire life of the mind that loses something in translation. That's why I made the point about all the different kinds of grass. That's why I have the kids working on the stories they hear from their grandparents in the lodges.

Luther Standing Bear as a
student at the Carlisle School

Did Luther Standing Bear make this kind of theoretical leap in his teaching practice? 

Not really. He did translate back and forth from English to Lakota when he was a teacher. But it wasn't until the early 1930's, long after he had given up his classroom, that he publicly advocated bilingual instruction and teaching Native subjects in the schools. He was very conscious of the failures of the white teachers to understand and respect his kids. He was very conscious of how he looked to the kids with his short haircut and suit. And that story about the eclipse? That's true. He told it in his book My People, the Sioux.

So why did you include this at all? Isn't it just an anachronism, imagining people a hundred years ago having twenty-first century thoughts?

Not at all! In the very next chapter I introduce the character of Septima Poinsette, a teenager and a novice elementary teacher in coastal South Carolina. She grew up to be Septima Clark, who Martin Luther King called "the mother of the movement." And she developed precisely those ideas - of teaching the children reading by having them dictate their own stories - way back there during the First World War. It was the basis for the Freedom Schools and the Citizenship Schools fifty years later, but she had already developed that practice. I am a teacher. I was a teacher for twenty-five years before I ever gave a thought to becoming a principal. In writing the chapters about teachers in this book I looted my journals for my own experiences when I was a rookie. When I write about the best moments in a teacher's day coming from tangents and misunderstandings? That was my experience as a teacher and that was my experience coaching teachers, too. I'll say one more thing about this. I think it's really important to get the idea that teaching across cultures has to be more than indoctrination. The teacher has to see the value in the lives and relationships of the kids and their parents. Otherwise, why should they have any respect for the teacher?

Did all the Native teachers really get fired?

Yes, they did. That testing thing is a very old trick. As soon as you are assigned a numerical score it looks so objective. Who can argue with that number? In actuality it is entirely a matter of what questions are asked and how are they worded. Later in the book Luther Standing Bear writes his brother Henry about Henry's friend Chauncey Yellow Robe who was still working in the schools. But Yellow Robe was essentially a truant officer, tracking students who escaped from the boarding school back to their homes on the reservation. It's also worth mentioning that the superintendent who fired Standing Bear, Elaine Eastman, was married to a Santee Dakota man who was the physician at the Pine Ridge reservation where Standing Bear taught school. And Dr. Charles Eastman was fired, too. He was replaced by a white man, too. But that's a subject for another chapter of my book.

Why did you choose the story of a Lakota?

That's just this character and this plot thread. Elsewhere in the novel you can read about Muskogee Creek Indians in Oklahoma and Apache Indians in Arizona. It's a long and complicated book. Now I think we should break so people who want can get their copies signed. If anybody wants to purchase a copy, I have a stack right here. Also, I think I need more cookies.