Reality Check?

WHITE TEACHERS, INDIAN CHILDREN

By Bobby Ann Starnes (Oct 2003)



TWO YEARS ago, my ignorance and I began to teach on Montana's Rocky Boy Reservation. Until then, I had never really thought of myself as white. My identity was formed by the facts that I am an Appalachian woman, the daughter of a coal miner, a hillbilly -- somehow not quite white. But at Rocky Boy Elementary, I was bride-dress white, and it mattered more than ever before.

Before Montana, my only Indian experience had been in the summer of 1959. Our family was on the way to Florida, and the route took us across the Smoky Mountains. My father nervously maneuvered our 1949 Buick along the twists and turns and through the tunnels that curled around and through the mountains. The road was narrow. The turns were sharp. The valley was far below. There were no guard rails. I held my eyes tightly shut but could not contain persistent slow-motion images of our car flying off the mountainside and drifting silently to the ground below.

Moments after the mountains were behind us, a wooden sign welcomed us to the Cherokee Indian Reservation. Stretched out before me was the closest thing to Disneyland I'd ever seen. Motels, restaurants, and souvenir shops were lined up wall to wall on both sides of the highway. There were cars and people as far as I could see.

My father wheeled our tank of a car into a parking space right in front of Big Bear's Cherokee Trading Post. I jumped out of the car and ran to the window. There before my eyes was a virtual cornucopia of essential Indian and frontiersmen's regalia. They had everything I needed -- hard plastic bows with yellow-suction-cup-tipped arrows; rubber tomahawks decorated with secret Indian symbols; cardboard headdresses adorned with blue, red, or yellow feathers; and a real cedar ash tray with a ceramic insert showing a hillbilly boy with his pants down. "Put your butts here," it said. While that was funny, it paled alongside the bag of corn husks labeled "Hillbilly Toilet Paper."

My eyes continued to scan the window until they landed on a genuine faux fur coonskin cap. I knew I had to have it and began to concoct a plan to attain it. As I crafted the finer points of the coming battle between my mother and me, my eyes were diverted. The coonskin was erased from my mind and replaced by the most remarkable thing I'd ever seen. There, right in the parking lot, stood an enormous painted teepee. I was lured to it as though under a spell. But I forgot all about it when I saw an Indian chief standing beside it. I looked him over as if he were a museum specimen. His arms were tightly folded across his chest, his headdress was feathered all the way to the ground, and his stance conveyed emotionless power. "Just like Tonto," I thought.

"The chief wants us to take a picture of him with you and Tom," my father said. I couldn't imagine why, but, sure enough, the chief motioned to us to come stand beside him. I was going to get my picture taken with a real Indian! Why, it could be the best thing that ever happened. My neighborhood status would shoot to the top when kids saw me standing beside the chief. My little brother refused to loosen his death grip on my mother's arm. "Always a baby. He's going to ruin everything." I took matters into my own hands. With whispered threats of bodily harm once Mother and Daddy weren't there to protect him, I pulled him into camera range. Just before the camera snapped, I flashed my biggest smile, Tom's face froze in terror, and the chief contorted his face to create an appropriately fierce look. Later, I saw my father drop quarters into a cup labeled "tips."

TODAY, MOST Indian children are taught by white people who, like me, possess only the sanitized knowledge and understandings of Indian people and their history from bland white history texts. We learned about the pilgrims, but not about the Indians who saved them; about Lewis and Clark, but not about the Indians who saved them; about the great westward expansion, but not about the destruction of the Indian way of life it required; about reservations, but not about the attempted genocide. And Indians disappeared after they killed Custer. At least there was no more about them in my history books. As a result, we learned little beyond one-dimensional caricatures of history.

Here in Montana, and I imagine throughout Indian country, deep wounds and resentments still fester. Many of the white teachers' great-grandparents participated in the wars that gave them the right to plant wheat and graze cows on land promised to Indians. They told their version of history to their children and their children's children. The children we teach are descendants of warriors who fought fiercely but lost the war to preserve their way of life. Like white men, they passed their version of history along to their children and grandchildren.

Even as a teacher not burdened with the histories shared by many of my colleagues, I struggled to understand. But only seemingly random thoughts cluttered my brain. Then one day, I had a bolt-of-lightning realization so obvious it stunned me. As the new understanding began to sink in, everything I knew, or thought I knew, about Indians and settlers morphed into a new perspective. Our "relocation" was their death march; our rebellion was their resistance; our sport shooting of buffalo was their loss of food, clothing, and objects of great significance in their religious ceremonies. When a small Cree band killed eight white people, we called it the Frog Lake Massacre. When 200 mostly unarmed men, women, and children were killed by the Seventh Cavalry, we called it the Battle at Wounded Knee.

In our school on the Rocky Boy Reservation, much is taught about life far beyond the reservation. Virtually nothing is taught about life just outside our school walls. Sadly, the marginalization of the Indian people seems never more blatant than during Native American Week, as children fashion construction-paper moccasins, color in profiles of Indians in headdresses or pulling back a bow, construct toothpick teepees and birch bark canoes. The focus is crafts, not meaningful understandings of their own history. But white teachers don't know history from a Chippewa-Cree perspective. And, as one teacher pointed out, you can't teach what you don't know.

Our social studies textbooks are no help. They are the same series used by many mainstream public schools. The fifth-grade book has special inserts about women, blacks, and Asian Americans, but no Chippewa or Cree is ever mentioned. Texts whose titles call for exploring "our community" do not, in fact, have anything to do with our Rocky Boy community. When we study government, we learn how Congress and state governments pass laws. But we never explore the government that has the greatest impact on our children's lives -- the tribal council. Facts and understandings of Chippewa-Cree history don't show up on E. D. Hirsch's list of what literate people need to know, and they definitely won't be on the Iowas. Our job is to educate our students to perform as if they were white. Not because there are practical applications for the isolated knowledge bits, not because children need to feel the American Dream is within their reach, but because white history is the real history.

Still, in Montana every school is required to teach the history of the state's seven tribes. There is no agreement on the content of these histories. There are no texts or curriculum manuals, no standards, no assessments, and no support materials.

Teachers are indentured into inservice workshops of every form and shape. Funded with No Child Left Behind monies, unsupported by research predicting positive outcomes for our children, and showing no connection to our kids, the workshops teach us approaches that will only push our students further behind. What we white teachers really need is intensive professional development to help us learn to teach children living in a culture we do not understand. We need to learn history from an Indian perspective, to learn the language and traditions that are so much a part of reservation life. But there is no funding for such things. So, with the best of intentions, we stumble on.

The Indian wars are not really over. They may never be. Their effects are visible every day. The issues that matter are seldom, if ever, discussed. Persistent cultural mistrust, long-ago miscarriages of justice, and who did what to whom for what purpose silently linger just below the surface.

Last week in the grocery store, I overheard a white man telling a joke. I didn't hear the beginning, but the punch line was, "There's a limit of one deer, but there's no limit on Indians." The cashier's booming laugh rolled across the aisles. I hoped no child was near as my eyes scanned the store.

Even my terminal optimism is challenged by such experiences. On good days, I believe white teachers can educate Indian children. But sometimes, standing in line at the grocery store, I begin to wonder.

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BOBBY ANN STARNES is president of the Center for Collaborative Teaching and Learning, Opelika, Ala.