The Tao of Nookomis Page 10

  There were many occasions when I would find myself defending the students from teachers and administration and other students. On more than one occasion, other students would target one of them for taunting and abuse. Some of the harassment was simple bullying, but on other occasions the incidents had basis in a racial or ethnic bias. And of course much of it had to do with the fact that my students had learning disabilities.

  One incident early on in my career seemed to define my role as an advocate for my students. It involved Alice Crow Flies High, who found herself the target of racial and sexual taunting, and of being called a “retard” by several of the school jocks. After a particularly difficult incident just before school one day, I came upon her sitting at her desk, crying.

  “Alice, what’s wrong?”

  She looked the other way, saying nothing. She sniffled and wiped her nose off with the arm of her coat.

  I sat down in the desk opposite her and for just a while looked at her. I let her become comfortable with my presence.

  “Tell me, Alice. What’s wrong? Maybe I can help.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Mr. D.”

  “I understand. But the only way I can help is if you tell me what’s wrong. Can you do that for me, Alice?”

  Her hands went to her lips, and then she wiped the tears away from her eyes again. Finally, she spoke.

  “They call me a whore, a squaw. They say we eat dogs. They stand all around me. Some of them try to touch me. I don’t know what to do. I tell them, leave me alone. They don’t listen. They just laugh. They call me a retard, too.”

  I reached over and touched her hand. For just that moment, memory came and sat down beside me. Of me as a little boy, standing in a playground surrounded by a group of town boys.

  “Hey, Chief.”

  “I ain’t no chief.”

  “Then you just a regular honest Injun?”

  “I ain’t no Injun, either.”

  “You know, Alice, when I was a little kid, I was teased horribly in one of the schools I was in because of my Native heritage. I’m Wampanoag, you see. You know that?”

  She looked at me.

  “I wondered what you were,” she said to me. Then she smiled, just a little. Sometimes, you know, there is an unspoken recognition, an acceptance, when we Native people talk.

  I continued. “It was terrible, I remember, and I fought back. Now I’m not telling you what to do in your case, but I would like to help if you’ll let me. No one should have to come to school and be treated like that. No one. I can help you, Alice. I want to help you. Will you let me do that?”

  Alice sat there with her head down, still in tears.

  “Let’s go see the principal, okay?”

  She nodded in acknowledgement, and we went up to the principal’s office.

  As we approached the receptionist’s office, I again reassured her. “Things are going to be all right now, okay?”

  After hearing her story, the principal called the perpetrators in one by one to get their stories. There was a reason for him doing this. They would eventually turn against each other using the “he said, she said” routine. He figured right, and they did implicate each other. As a result, four of the boys were suspended from school for three days each and were not allowed to play in the football game that Friday. The decision was unpopular with the athletic director and coach, who lost four of his varsity players as a result of the decision. It was also unpopular with the boys’ parents, several of whom called the principal to complain that their boys had never, ever before been in trouble in school, and that the punishment had been too harsh. “Boys will be boys,” one of their mothers had said. One of the parents even called a school committee member, who in turn called the superintendent, who called the principal and inquired what was going on. But in this case, the principal stuck to his guns.

  I suppose, however, I paid a price for helping Alice. Some days after the boys had returned to school, I found the driver’s side mirror to my car had been broken off as it sat in the faculty parking area, and there was a large scratch all along the driver’s side where someone had keyed it.

  I could not have imagined back in 1969, when I was somewhere in the middle of the Vietnam War, that someday I would be teaching some the children of refugees of that war, being their advocate. Sometimes I have asked myself if my decision to teach students with special needs was somehow unconsciously linked to my experience there, to the times I stood by and watched the needless suffering of Vietnamese civilians, people who were dark-skinned like me, who suffered the same atrocities as my ancestors. Maybe unconsciously I had decided that someday I would do something to try to make up for it, without ever realizing it.

  And to be a teacher to Alice Crow Flies High, who was Lakota and a long way from Fort Berthold, North Dakota, and the rolling sea of grass and wind.

  After that incident with the jocks and Alice, she opened up to me. She told me that back home her family had horses.

  “I miss my horses,” she would say to me in her reservation sing-song English voice. Then she would tell me of riding them across the rolling hills of her reservation.

  Alice was receiving special education because she had difficulty with reading and recalling. So besides the regular reading materials I was able to scrounge, I went looking for materials that had something to do with her Lakota heritage, and books about horses.

  She was in my classroom for three years, until she graduated in 1987.

  I still remember at graduation she wore an eagle feather given to her by her grandmother, who came all the way out from North Dakota to see her get her diploma.

  The years have gone by, and me, I’m still teaching at Hull High School. I still love teaching, still love working with students with an array of learning disabilities.

  From time to time, Alice Crow Flies High sends me a card to let me know of important times in her life—when she got a degree in social work from the University of North Dakota and started work for her tribe’s human services department; of her marriage; of her first child.

  “Mr. D.,” her cards always begin.

  The last time I heard from her was about five years ago. She sent a picture of her oldest daughter, a spitting image of Alice when she first came into my classroom so many years ago.

  And she was sitting tall on a horse.

  In the Creator’s Eyes

  I can’t really articulate everything that transpired to send me on this journey, but when I turned fifty I went to find things about my Native heritage. You see, I’d been living with my grandparents because my mother ditched out on me soon after I was born. My grandparents died just a few months apart when I was ten years old, and I was fortunate to be adopted instead of spending the rest of my childhood being bounced from foster home to foster home.

  Soon after they took me in, we moved from my birthplace in northern Wisconsin to Massachusetts, where I was raised by my new parents, who couldn’t have any children of their own. They were white Irish like most of the people living in Dorchester at the time, and me, I was brown as can be. Well, growing up there with all those poor Irish kids, I got teased a lot and called all kinds of racially derogatory things, especially the “N” word, but no one ever called me a redskin or wagon burner, or all those other names that Native people are called in a derogatory way. Anyway, I just lived my life away in the Boston area all those years without too much thought about my birth mother or whether I had any brothers or sisters, or anything about my Ojibwe heritage. Along the way I became a special educator, teaching young people with learning disabilities. Then at fifty I went in for my annual physical and found out I was diabetic, and the doctor said that certain ethnic groups are almost predisposed to it. “Like what ethnic groups,” I asked, and he rattled off the list, and one group mentioned was Native American. Me, all along I’d been living like a white guy painted brown, so being referred to as something “other” was new to me, at least as an adult. Anyway, to make a long story short, th
at led me to thinking about my origins and birth mother and all. And I suppose being diagnosed as a diabetic caused me to think about my own mortality. Pretty soon all I could think about was going to northern Wisconsin, Red Cliff, where I was born.

  My adopted mother and father had been good to me and had treated me like their own. And, of course, when I was old enough they had reminded me where I was from originally and that I was Ojibwe. I knew enough to keep that in my memory banks.

  Guess I’m just a late bloomer, or having a late mid-life crisis or something. I started reading all about my Ojibwe heritage in books I searched on the Internet and ordered through Amazon—Ojibway Heritage and Ojibwe Ceremonies by Basil Johnson, The Mishomis Book by Eddie Benton Banai. Reading the books just gave me a thirst for more knowledge. Through reading I learned that my Ojibwe ancestors had at one time lived on the Atlantic coast, but had migrated westward over a thousand years ago because of a series of prophecies.

  I wish I could explain it, but I just kept thinking about “home,” a place I had never seen since I was a young boy, but wanted to know more about. So this past summer I just started the long drive back to Red Cliff, Wisconsin, where I was born. My wife couldn’t go because she had already burned her vacation time, but she gave me her blessings.

  I decided to take the northern route, to follow the path of the ancient Ojibwe migration, to see each of the stops made by my ancient ancestors—Montreal, Detroit river, Manitoulin Island, Sault Ste. Marie, Duluth, and finally Madeline Island. I guess I felt that if I walked in the same places as my ancestors, and saw what they saw, sort of, then it would help me understand more about them, and ultimately, more about me.

  My first stop was in northern Maine, a Passamaquaddy reserve. I had read an article a few months back in the Boston Globe about the place, and about a Native man, Wayne Bishop, a blind man who was a teacher of the language, history, and culture at the reserve school, as he put it, “so traditional knowledge could be passed on down the generations.” And I thought maybe he could lend me some insight into my own journey. So that made me decide, what the hell, I’ll stop there and see if he’ll take some time and talk to me.

  Indian Township is a six-hour drive north of Boston, deep in the woods and lake country of northern Maine. I arrived there mid-afternoon. I was far enough north to see my first “MOOSE CROSSING” road signs. I laughed to myself when I first saw it, because I have this big dude of a neighbor who lives the next door down in Hingham that sign would be perfect for. As I pulled into the village, one of the first buildings I noticed was an old wooden school, with a parking lot filled with cars and children playing out in the playground. A school, I was thinking, a familiar place to an old teacher like me.

  I made my way to the principal’s office and introduced myself to the receptionist, a young Native woman. I told her why I was there, that I was a teacher and where, and that when I noticed the school I figured it was probably the best place to stop and ask.

  “I’m interested in learning more about my Native heritage and thought maybe you could let me know how I could get in touch with the man the Globe profiled a few months back, the one who teaches language, history, and culture here. I’m Ojibwe, you see, but I was adopted out young and never learned anything about those ways. So now I want to know more, and I thought maybe this was where I could begin, by talking to him.”

  “Wayne is down in the lunch room. He teaches our summer Passamaquoddy language and culture. Just go down the hall that way,” she said, pointing with her lips.

  That was a first. I hadn’t seen anyone point with the lips before.

  The elderly man the receptionist referred to only as “Wayne” was sitting at a lunch table having coffee when I entered the room. He appeared to be about seventy years old and had thick salt-and-pepper hair tied back in a tail. He was surrounded by a group of five or six children, all Native. They were laughing, and I could tell right away how much the children liked and respected this man.

  When I walked over and introduced myself, he seemed eager to talk to me. He turned toward me, his blind eyes facing me, and I reached toward him and grasped his hand. He shooed the children away.

  “Go on outside and play now, children. The bus will be here any minute,” he told them, waving the white cane he kept alongside his knee and laughing gently.

  “Goodbye, Uncle,” they said. Each of them came to him and gave him a hug.

  When they were gone he led me outside to a picnic table, then lit a cigarette and sat down.

  I didn’t really know why, but I felt very comfortable with the man. So comfortable I just started jabbering away. I told him my life story, about vague memories of when I was a small child in Red Cliff, Wisconsin, about my grandparents, and about my adoption and moving to Boston.

  “Now I’m headed back home to see where I came from. I don’t know what to tell you, but something is just calling me back there. It’s just something I’ve got to do.”

  Then I told him what little I knew about the time the Ojibwe had lived on the East Coast, and of their migration west. The man listened to me as I talked. He hadn’t said much at all, intent only on hearing my story.

  Then I finally shut my trap he started talking, and I, the teacher, became the learner. He said he had gone to a Native language gathering a few years ago in Tama, Iowa.

  “I speak my language and I teach it here to these children. Anyway, when I was at this conference I heard others speak their languages—Cree, Ojibwe, Odawa, Mesquakie, Pottawatomi. I could understand a lot of what they were saying,” he said, “and, for the most part, they could understand me. We’re all related, you know.”

  “You know,” he continued. “When you Ojibwe went west, we sent you there. We stayed here.”

  Then we both laughed. I was thinking that was the likely story coming from those who had stayed.

  “You’re full of it,” I said, laughing, teasingly.

  “You’ll never know,” Wayne replied, also laughing, his voice gentle, knowing.

  (There was one group who supported the migration but who pledged to remain at the eastern doorway and care for the eastern fire of the people. They were the Wa-bun-u-keeg’ or Daybreak People.)

  The elderly man impressed me like few men I had ever met before, but I couldn’t explain why. Maybe it was the way he conducted himself, with certainness and a quiet dignity. I had opened myself up to him like I’d had known him for years, like he was my trusted friend, a respected teacher.

  Wayne told me that he’d lived in Indian Township most of his life, and that he also served as a member of the tribal council.

  “I’m the honest one,” he said and laughed when he said it. Then he told me more about himself.

  His children were grown, but they all lived on the reserve. His wife and he were raising two of their grandchildren because one of their daughters was unable to raise them on her own.

  “Drinking,” is all he said.

  “The grandkids speak our language, though. All of them.” He spoke proudly when he said that.

  “My house is always full of grandkids and nephews and nieces, and my grown children, all coming and going. It can be a busy place. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

  We talked that afternoon for a long time. Then he stood.

  “How far are you going to drive tonight, my friend?” Wayne asked me.

  “I was just going to go down the road as far as Calais. Going to head up toward Montreal tomorrow.”

  “Well, rather than have to spend money on a motel room, why don’t you stay with us tonight?”

  I was quietly pleased to be asked. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course. Now, let’s get out of here. I’m done for the day.”

  I followed Wayne back into the school and down the hall to his classroom so he could pick up his things, then down the hall and out the door, the tapping of his cane echoing off the walls as we walked. There I led him out to my car and we drove down a dirt road a few miles to his place
, an old farmhouse nestled in a grove of trees.

  Wayne’s description of all the activity in his home was right on. It was a busy place, with the phone always ringing, kids coming and going, and sons and daughters visiting. Wayne’s wife had a fresh pot of coffee on and cookies and other snacks for their company to munch on. She seemed a lot like Wayne, happy, content. I felt immediately at home, like I was family, and, thus, I knew why the Bishop home was always filled with their loved ones. Everyone who came through the door felt good there. Theirs was a joyous place.

  When it was time for dinner, Wayne’s wife and a daughter and several daughters-in-law all pitched in and took over the kitchen. When it was ready, the food was all set out on the kitchen table, buffet style.

  She handed her husband and me each a plate and fork.

  “You two eat first,” she said. Then she looked toward me to explain.

  “Elders always eat first in this home.”

  There was plenty of it. Boiled potatoes, macaroni and cheese, hot dogs, goulash, Kool-Aid, bread, government cheese, government peanut butter. For dessert there was white cake with chocolate frosting, washed down with plenty of strong coffee. I filled my plate several times, eating while sitting in a living room chair, balancing the plate on my lap, with my coffee cup resting on the floor beside me, all the while one of Wayne’s grandkids was sitting alongside him on the floor, looking up at him.

  When dinner was complete, the house slowly began to empty. We talked. I told Wayne and his wife, Lorraine, about my wife and daughter, my work as a special educator, and about growing up and living in and around the Boston area.

  “I went for a semester to BU (Boston University),” Wayne told me. “But I got so damn lonely for home I flunked out and came home. So I finished up down at Orono.”