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The day that followed her first big ride with Bugood went
by in flashes – she'd been transformed somehow, but she didn’t want to look at the shiny new place in her
heart. “I’m a tough old broad;” she kept telling herself, “I’ve been alone a long
time, almost 15 years, and I like it. It’s just the loneliness, the culture shock, followed so suddenly by this burst
of love light that is making me feel kind of soft and vulnerable, more open for the big hurt.”
She pretended that nothing had changed as she walked over to the school that bright, mid-September morning.
A flock of the traditional early birds were lined up in their various poses, lounging against the wall by the front entrance
of the school, as she approached. She know they knew she'd been with that Bugood. How could they have missed the
two in that big old truck? She smiled. Some of the kids greeted her with a soft “Hey” or a quietly
clipped but not unfriendly “Hi.”
Carol, the school secretary, looked up from her spot behind
the counter as Sunny entered the office, her sweet, friendly face expectant but with a sly grin unsuccessfully hidden
beneath her pursed lips and raised chin as she inclined her head to the left and began her teasing query.
“Hey, Sunny. Thought you might be late this morning after your wild ride around Hays the other night.”
She bowed her head, hiding her chin in her collar and looking down with a smile as she inserted the “Shssssss”
that let Sunny know she was just kidding.
Sunny gave a soft “shssssss” reply and smiled broadly but didn’t respond to her teasing with a comeback. Carol
turned to a file cabinet and went back to her work as Sunny sneaked out of her office before anyone else could try her
unsteady sense of decorum.
Sunny loved her classroom
at the school. The short lines of kids’ desks facing her served as foreground to the wall of windows at the back
of the room looking out on tall, blonde grasses punctuated with a circling prairie road. Her green chalkboard was
behind her. Someone has drawn the yellow chalk outline of a crazed-looking horse in cowboy boots prancing into a cloud on
the upper right corner. Sunny snickered as she erased everything else but that and begin to prepare for the day.
With one or two exceptions, her ninth graders
did not love the study of English or literature. Never had, never would. They tolerated Sunny and her shenanigans
only because she'd passed a couple of their tests. The first was the hardest.
Students in her first and second period ninth grade classes didn’t speak, not one of them, for more than
a week, except in monosyllables, when they started out the school year. Sunny did everything she could
think of to get them connected, talking, or expressing anything. They followed instructions without comment, writing as little
as possible in their new journals purchased by their new teacher, taking the pre-tests she'd finally offered in a desperate
move, and answering questions with as little beyond a yes or no as was humanly possible. Sunny went home in tears after
the third or fourth day of silence. She’d have preferred bad behavior to this blank wall. They knew it.
One day, as she chatted along, passing out some graded papers, she mentioned that she was really interested
in the petroglyphs that she’d heard were near some hills on the road to town, some thirty-five miles away. She had begun her September season of the
study of language with copies of pages from a book about the sign language and pictographs of the Sioux and Ojibway. (Sunny
could not have known that this was a fatal choice: The Sioux were not dearest friends to any of the people either
tribe in this place, and the term, Ojibways, referred to the lowly, unenrolled Chippewa who lived in the area –
perceived as a little less than dirt to the more “superior” enrolled members of the legally enrolled tribes
here.) She proceeded with the lesson plan of the day: To read and interpret a pictographic story. To read the story,
“Sioux Brothers, Arrow Makers,” which was written on a large paper “hide” she’d prepared for
an imaginary teepee, the learner was to begin reading the pictographs in the center and then continue on to the left, following
the circular course of pictures to the end. They worked (as a group, with their game little teacher interpreting
grunts and one-word responses as she could) to figure out that the story was about two men, who by virtue of the connecting
line between them, were brothers, on a journey in a series of lines illustrating tracks to the three-peaked triangular mountains
to find arrow heads. Sunny thought she'd never worked so hard to invite kids to participate in an activity. Their one-word
responses became her enemies; she was certain she saw kids grinning surreptitiously at one another as she
danced around the room trying to engage them.
At some point, she casually
entertained the idea of a field trip to the hills where those petroglyphs might be found. Bowed heads flew up like Spring
blossoms reaching for sunshine. Like magic, the classroom suddenly became an almost noisy, maybe-even-excited, smiling team
of happy learners! Sunny was astounded. It was like the stick figures on her paper teepee hide had suddenly become
colorful, animated cartoons! The field trip idea was a winner. They began to plan the hows and whens; maybe they
could even go all the way in to town for lunch! She had a hit! Her next class
of ninth graders had the exact same response. Sunny had inadvertently hit a lucky rock in the road.
Or she was feeling lucky, that is, until she went in to the office that afternoon to find out how to go about
arranging a field trip. Carol, the helpful secretary, explained that this school did not go on field trips, ever.
The sports teams went on buses to the games, and that was it. But when Sunny didn’t back down, Carol created an
informal permission slip for her and with a quick smile of secret support, sent her on my way to the next obstacle:
Administrative approval. Sunny plodded from one end of the line of administrative offense to the other over the next
several days, writing and rewriting goals and objectives for the trip, making calls to proper authorities, arranging for a
certified someone to take her classes (free of charge, of course or, as it turned out, at her expense), defending her
belief that this trip could contribute to the possibility of an awakening of learning in my students. Not one of the administrators
was interested in her goals or objectives, strategies or tactics. With no exceptions, all were interested in finding
as many ways as possible to say no without ever giving one rational reason for their negative responses. Sunny persisted.
Three or four days later, she won her battle. They were going!
The kids and Sunny were jubilant! Her classes became busy, talkative, sometimes even argumentative cliques
of planners. They interpreted another pictographic story and whistled and cheered when they got to the end. Teams created
colorful, sometimes very funny, original pictographic stories, arranged in spiral formation on paper hides, that they
plastered around the room.
Finally, Sunny was having the time of her life
at school. Her intense loneliness and homesickness of the first several weeks in Hays dissipated; she began to love her
new life in this place where she’d been shocked into a new sense of her ignorance. But now she knew this trip
was going to be an education for all. They were going to learn about one another, about their cultures, about English!!!
Little did she know.
The day of the field trip was bright, the sky a snappy blue; twinkling splashes of frost decorated the grasses around
the teachers’ compound. The noisy yellow bus, spewing clouds of black smoke, crunched out of the school gates. Everyone
cheered as they drove slowly down the curling dirt road to the main road heading toward town and their goal, the
pictographs in the hills. Clyde the bus driver kept giving Sunny puzzled glances from his rearview mirror; she
ignored them, believing he was probably against this field trip of hers, too. When the bus finally stopped on the road and
then slowly turned up the very bumpy dirt path toward the hills, he turned to her and asked, “How far up here
you want me to drive?”
“Gee, I don’t know. Haven’t you ever
gone up here? Maybe we should walk?” She giggled as her voice bumped up and down the scale with the ride.
“Uh, no, I never went up there. But I think my brother
did one summer when we were young. I don’t think you want to walk up there now, though.” Clyde
stopped the bus.
“Oh. Huh.” Sunny stood at the front of
the bus and turned to the kids. They were all grinning wickedly. She still didn’t get it.
“So, who has been up here before? How should we proceed on our adventure? Shall we ride further or walk?” She
waited. Big. Silence.
“Well, I guess we’ll just get out here and
start walking up there. Okay?”
Silence. Grins.
The smile on Clyde’s smooth brown face started sliding both ways. He looked
at Sunny, and with a quiet chuckle, whispered loudly, “I think you’ve been had.”
“Huh? What do you mean? Hey, let’s go! Open up, there, Clyde!” She
started down the steps to the bus door. And the kids just burst out laughing as she turned to stare at them with her
eyebrows hanging high on the upper range of my face, trying to figure out what the hell was so damned funny.
“I thought you knew. It’s rattlesnake season,” explained Clyde,
wheezing between breaths of quiet laughter. “No one in their right mind would go up into those hills right now.”
And there was another gust of laughter from the kids.
At first, Sunny was royally pissed. How could they have done this to her? Didn’t they realize what she’d
gone through to make this trip a reality? What were they trying to pull? Then she was hurt. They thought she was
stupid. They didn’t like her or her damned old English, and they were paying her back. They knew she
was ignorant about their customs and culture, and they were showing her just how dumb a white lady could be. She
was on the edge of tears. Shit! She just couldn’t win in this place.
But the good-hearted laughter simply wouldn’t allow her to wallow in her insecurities. There was no
ugliness in that laughter, just delight in the knowledge that they had pulled off an outstanding joke. Finally, Sunny
joined them and enjoyed one of the best laughs at herself she’d ever had. They roared.
The group went on into town for lunch at the restaurant, drove around the small, dusty town and then headed
back to the rez, full of greasy food and a sense of accomplishment. The contented “shssssss” sounds accentuated
the little barks of laughter that rode along on the journey home. Sunny had been tested. Her ability to laugh at
herself and to take a joke had helped her pass the test, not only with her students but maybe also with many of
those people at home who later enjoyed the good story told by their smart kids. She noticed more folks acknowledging her
as she walked up to the Trading Post for her mail every day from that point on, and there was a definite thaw in
the formerly closed silence of the store as she bought my cigs and drinks. As far as Sunny knew, her kids in
those two classes never once said a word to anyone of an administrative bent about their trip. They went back to
class with plenty to write about, and Sunny had few problems from that point on with getting people to express themselves. They
had, in the words at the end of the pictographic story about Little Crow, had “a very sociable time.”
That second test, however, was to be an even stickier challenge.
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