IV. WHITE LANGUAGE, WHITE SKIN
In 1957, when I was eight, my parents sent me to mission boarding school, 135 miles from home. It was the first time I had classmates who were White. One day, during recess, we were out on the playground by the dorms. It was spring, and we were playing marbles. It was my turn to shoot, and I couldn't find my red cat eye shooter. I called out in my best Dummitawry English "Hey, you kits, ditchyou saw my rat marvel?"
Katie Van Boven, a White girl who lived at the mission with her parents and had never lived in the Nation, hooted. "Hey, what did you just say?" Her laughter had a mean edge. "Who do you think you are? You think you're a Navajo? You're not Navajo. You're White. You know that?"
I looked around at my friends, who were Diné. They kept their eyes on the ground, studying the marbles in the circle. I felt my face flush, and clenched my hands. I stopped looking for my shooter and jumped up from the marble circle. I brushed the dirt and pebbles from my knees and ran to the monkey bars. I traveled across and back, across and back, three-at-a-time. I swallowed hard against the thick saltiness in my throat.
After that day, I took care to notice who was around when I spoke and which form of English I used. Sometimes I slipped into Dummitawry English without realizing it, but never again so heavily around the other White kids. I thought of the Diné kids as my real friends. At the same time, I began to admit to myself that I wasn't one of them.
I started to want to belong to the secretive, tightly woven group of White missionaries' kids, the ones who had never lived in the Nation but always on the main mission campus, where the school was. I felt ashamed for wanting it. I asked myself why I should wish to belong to a group that excluded me and was mean to me. I excused my longing by telling myself that my Native friends all went home from boarding school in the summer, and who was left for me if I wasn't part of the White group? But I never broke into that knot of whiteness.
I felt an in-between ache that wouldn't go away. Some part of me thought that because I looked like those White kids, I must be part of them. At the same time, my heart held an opposite, even more impossible longing—to be Diné. As time went on, I created fantasies in which I had been born mixed—Diné and White. I cradled those stories to myself and dwelled on them over and over.
V. A TWO-LANGUAGE LIFE
After high school, I left for our church college in Michigan. We had visited relatives there some summers, but that was different from living and going to school there. I was rammed into culture shock in that green-treed, gray-skied, Dutch-American world. I never fit in, and after two years, I transferred to the University of New Mexico. At UNM the Diné language was offered as a university subject, and in those classes, a systematic approach gave me an appreciation for the tremendous intricacies of the language. My natural next step was to study linguistics and the field of bilingual education, which took me onto a career path that fit with my early life.
Because of the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, Navajo Nation schools had started to teach children to read and write and do science, math, and social studies in Diné bizaad. To do this, teachers needed vocabulary that hadn't previously existed in Diné bizaad. New colors joined the Diné spectrum. Teachers needed to know what to call a parallelogram. As a graduate student, I was hired to travel from one bilingual teacher training program in Dinétah to another, recording the terminology teachers were trying out, working to help standardize nomenclature among the schools. Until then, no one had talked about the color purple in the Diné language; the new word became tsídídééh, the name for the wild purple four o'clock flower. "Triangle" became táá'go deez'á, meaning "three-pointed."
Bilingual education grew into a movement, and the government funded bilingual publishing houses around the country. Most were for Spanish programs; the only Native one was located in Albuquerque. People on staff were mostly Indigenous—artists, writers, educators, linguists, and the Diné half of the creators of the Navajo-English Dictionary then in use. These were highly skilled, creative and innovative people, and I felt lucky to be one of the few White teammates. Our director, a visual artist, poet, and educator from Shiprock, had a master's degree in education from Harvard and was a consummate networker and visionary. She encouraged us to think outside the box. Gone were the rough illustrations on mimeographed paper from which I'd learned to read Diné bizaad. Our center produced four-color, glossy books and posters—materials that legitimized reading and academic learning in the Diné language and made it attractive besides.
Our biggest project was the creation of a full-day curriculum that integrated Diné tradition, language, and learning modalities as vehicles for teaching customary school subjects. The goal was to create Diné graduates who were fully bilingual and bicultural, able to function in many worlds with ease, and accomplished in the unique gifts of their culture.
Before we wrote, we spent days listening to a hataałi—what Bilagáanas call a medicine man and literally translates as singer—teach us about the Diné cosmos, the astonishingly intricate web that connects all of life. This was when I learned the word k'é and realized that I had practiced k'é in a limited way for a long time. I knew now that when old Grandma Begay rocked me to and fro, calling me shitsóí, shitsóí—my granddaughter, my granddaughter—we had been acknowledging k'e together. But now I also saw that there was so much more to k'e than our human connectedness. The constellations were related to cycles of life, corn pollen and sun, thoughts and the Earth. Every. Thing. Related. The complexity of it made me gasp. The hataałi just smiled and nodded at my wonderment. It also became painfully clear to me that this way of seeing the universe, though I really had so little comprehension of it, was what my parents—missionaries—and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) had sought to destroy.
From our days of listening to the elder—the singer—a rough outline of the future curriculum evolved. Later, it fell to me to refine, expand and apply the outline to a school setting, then work with Diné teachers to create sequenced lessons. After that, our writing staff refined the lessons further, created accompanying stories, and worked with our art and design department to create visuals for completed curriculum and materials kits.
Our collective zeal was not unlike the passion of my parents and their fellow missionaries. We were living in high times, standing at the forefront of a movement that we thought could turn the tide of cultural losses—losses that were becoming more and more rapid and far-reaching. I realized, dimly at first, that I was, on some level, trying to repair the damage I felt my parents had inflicted. And I began to be aware of wanting to atone for being White.
At the same time, I longed for the place that means home to me—Teec Nos Pos. I remembered the beating drums and chanting voices, starting low and slow, growing high and passionate on the hill above the mission—my summer lullabies. In addition to the confusion of being White Not Diné, I knew I could not go home again to Teec Nos Pos or any part of the Navajo Nation. Not to live. What had once been home was now Home Not Home.
© Anna Redsand, 2024. All rights reserved.
To be continued on Monday, 4/22/24.
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