“The pen that writes your life story must be held in your own hand.”
Nine months ago, in the middle of this insane pandemic, I chose to relocate to the Navajo Nation and begin teaching English to a generation of culturally confused teenagers who are predominantly English Language Learners. After the initial shock of this drastic move, the reality of living and working here has been equally astonishing. Living large in small spaces has taken on new meaning.
After completing the classroom novel study of Canyon Dreams by Michael Powell and watching the limited Netflix series, Basketball or Nothing, I realized that my students have what appeared to me to be fragmented and differing descriptions of Navajo culture, including language proficiency, traditional ceremonies, tribal history, and personal faith/beliefs. As we studied the origin of boarding schools (“Kill the Indian, Save the Man”), The Long Walk, Kit Carson and Canyon de Chelly, the Navajo Creation Story and the Four Worlds, Spider Rock/Woman, and so on, the students were willing to write about their exposure to this history; however, no two stories were alike. I suppose all of history/memory is like this at some level, as my siblings and I have differing accounts of the same events from our childhoods.
Historically, the Navajo have followed an oral tradition. When I started teaching here, I rationalized story variations by comparing them to the childhood telephone game where one person whispers a story in someone’s ear and repeats the story to another until it makes its way around the circle. Of course, the story ends up being a bit different than the original, thereby explaining why my students have various accounts of the same story. Some Navajo would suggest that different clans have different stories, making them unique. Furthermore, others would profess that there is power in oral tradition because it deeply unites and promotes self-identity because those outside the culture are less likely to understand and, dare I say, continue to break it down or tear it apart or try to interpret it in writing.
Some of my students are fluent speakers of Navajo, as it was their first language and/or is primarily spoken at home. Others can barely understand but are trying to learn. It has been reported that in 1980, 93 percent of the Navajo population spoke their Native language, but today, it is estimated that fewer than 40 percent of the Navajo population speaks the Native language. Additionally, over 60 percent of Navajo identify as Christian, while 25 percent follow their ethnic religions. Within a mile of my house, there is a Catholic church, a Baptist church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the Church of Christ. A bit further, there is a Pentecostal church and Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall. Of those who profess Christianity, a large majority also practice the traditional Navajo religion. I wonder what faith practices were like on this land a few hundred years ago? Those oral traditions continue to circulate, I am certain.
The school claims that the majority of our students are English Language Learners, yet statistics state otherwise. How can this be? I guess it is because many students are not fluent in either language. This week, I had a couple of students ask me questions that floored me. After reading a court case in preparation for reading To Kill a Mockingbird, a well-spoken 16-year-old, who I have nicknamed “Romeo” because he always has a young lady on his arm, asked me what the word “sweetheart” meant. To be exact, the exchange went like this:
D: Uh, Miss, may I please ask you a question?
Me: Of course, Romeo! (to which he always smiles and blushes with pride). What’s up?
D: What is a ‘sweetheart’?
Me: (Trying to respond with utmost respect without showing my complete shock at the question) It is a term of endearment like, ‘honey’ or ‘babe.’ Seeing the definition still didn’t register, I quickly added ‘girlfriend.’
D: Wow. That’s cool. I may have to use that.
That conversation prepared me for the next question the following day that came from another top student I don’t have in any of my classes but chooses to hang out in my classroom after school and during Saturday school. She’s 17 years old and asked what a fish gill looked like. We ended up having about a 30-minute ichthyology lesson on the anatomy of fish. She had no idea fish didn’t have lungs. That teachable moment ended when she asked if I could help her with relationship advice. 🙂
Because of the pandemic and hybrid learning initiatives, students worldwide have moved to virtual learning, requiring computer technology and internet access. Before this change, the majority of households here on the Rez didn’t have access to either. Overnight, this changed. Now, my students have the world in front of them with just a click away. Be assured that they are not using this newfound gold mine as a way to study the anatomy of a fish or to be active learners in the classroom. It’s a battle that teachers are fighting all over the world. My teacher’s wheelhouse is nearly empty, but I insist on meeting the students where they are educationally, emotionally, and physically (even on Zoom).
Because I noticed that this group of kiddos seemed a bit discombobulated and culturally confused, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why – not why they were discombobulated and culturally confused, but rather, why I believed they were discombobulated and culturally confused. At the end of last semester, I showed a TED Talk by author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who spoke about the danger of a single story, and a YouTube video “Indigenous People Review Native American Characters in Film & TV,” along with several other journals and discussion-prompting articles and videos. In Adichie’s talk, she stressed how a story that defines someone else’s race, culture, economic status, gender, religion, political beliefs, and so on is dangerous because it is not a complete story. As a young child, she wrote and illustrated stories that included characters she was exposed to in literature and film, but who looked and acted nothing like those in her world. Adichie argues that single stories often originate from simple misunderstandings or one’s lack of knowledge of others, but that these stories can also have a malicious intent to suppress other groups of people due to prejudice (Adichie). So, she began writing her story with her own hand.
For a semester, we studied literature and poetry written about Navajo life – some by Navajo authors and others by non-Natives. As we studied, I think we all learned a bit about the cursed Common Core State Standards, but more importantly about people – fellow human beings. My students, they learned more about themselves. As their teacher, I learned that I love this culture and desperately want my students to tell their stories. The oral tradition and Navajo culture have been documented – often unfairly and inaccurately – for them. Before living here, I was utterly ignorant and, frankly, uninterested in spending a large amount of time trying to navigate truth from fiction to become properly educated. Once I arrived and began teaching, my sheltered and questionable Native education became evident. I’m unsure if I am capable of ever truly understanding, but I am getting to know a fraction of the culture having been somewhat immersed in it.
Together, my six classes of students and I listed every possible Native stereotype and filled the classroom whiteboard. I asked which stereotypes they could fit into and which ones they could not – which characters in our novel or in our stories and poems could they relate to and which ones they could not. We discovered that everyone is different and that we all have our own story – even siblings living in the same home attending the same family event can have different stories. So, why then, do we look at a group of people and see the group and not the individuals? Why did I assume that my students were culturally confused teenagers? Why are we so divided by vaxxed and anti-vaxxed, left or right, black or white, male or female or other, believer or non-believer, and so on? Perhaps, I’m not teaching a generation of culturally confused teenagers, but that I am living in a culturally confused world. Maybe, the only way for us all to become less confused is for each of us to be the author of our own story written by our own hand because there is tremendous danger in a single story.
Chasing Verbs 