Much needed update

Here is how Middle Ground stands:

-After much ado and discouragement, I am logging HURA hours. There is the matter of back-pay. Should I contact M. Bowling or the English Departments.

-I am really hoping to incorporate Navajo into all my pieces. I want to purchase this book:

Diné Bizaad Bínáhoóaah or Rediscovering the Navajo Language by Dr. Evangeline Parsons Yazzie.

Perhaps an interview can be gleamed.

-Have signed up for a (free) writing workshop on children's books on October 10. While I am not writing a piece aimed at children for Middle Ground, I am writing at least one story from the perspective of a 9-year-old. I am curious to see how this workshop will help this piece. Perhaps, it will keep my grown-up voice in check.

-Found out today that Neil Gaiman started as "a journalist with dreams of one day writing novels." I do not feel so soulless. 

-I am heading up to Kayenta this weekend, come hell or high water. I believe both will come. I have yet to reimburse my drivers (ie, my father) with HURA funds. I need to figure that it out. 

My biggest concern is that i will not be able to get into the classrooms. I will be sending out e-mails.

-I cannot figure out how to upload interviews from my digital recorder to my interviews. Which means they are taking up space on my recorders. Ew.

These are the logistics. Expect me emoting all over this place some time tomorrow.

chasing the last weekend's tail

This is late, me vouching for the work last weekend.

Here's a summary:

I am trying to figure out a way to up load the two interviews i was able to conduct this weekend, one with West Ellis, and one with that omniscient, Rez-centric figure, my mother. The Ellis interview may be of a grainy and distracted quality. While talking with him, his 20 month old daughter, Eseme systematically emptied my purse and put it back together. The shining moment: Eseme removing a tampax from it's paper wrapper and carrying the object in her mouth.

My biggest challenge for this project, I suspect will be getting to interact with the youth. There is a huge group of adults who would love to speak for them. Right now, a lot of data I am gathering is perception, which is falling into two categories.

1. "The Rez is great...no further comment, thanks you."

2. "Life here is really, really hard. The school is failing. We are poor. Alcohol abuse is rampant... Etc"

Perhaps, I am pig-holing  my subject .I am just finding it very difficult to get a clear picture of the young people's lives.  Ellis, however, was very helpful. He provided me with some insight into the security situations at KUSD, where the fences, brick walls, video cameras, and backpack searches originated and why. 

Note: Investigate bomp threats, Insane Clown Posse, civil rights/privacy rights for individuals under 18.

But beyond that, Ellis gave me great little kernels of story.  I don't know if he realized that that was the gold I wanted. Look forward to drafts. Ellis also told me that he has a study hall on Wednesdays and that i could come in and talk to his students than. Looks like I'll be making a few mid-week visits this fall.

So, anticipate my interviews. 

Anticipate a typed up version of my experiences at the Kayenta cemetery. I believe that one of my essays will chronicle the perceptions of death on the Navajo reservation. I hope to juxstapose traditional Navajo attitudes towards death and illness, with modernity as well as tie those together with the death of my friend, Beranda Thinn, three years ago from alcohol poisoning.

My biggest fear is this project is going to be, because of my work with the Lumberjack, perceived as  journalistic expositions.  I am doing this as a labor of love, and a labor of a few other things. I am really worries about the doors i will be unlocking. I am really worried about hurting this community in my efforts to present an honest, emotional account of this life.  There is a lot I am constructing form memory and from the lives of the people I have known. These reflections are a risky business.

Watch out for an interview with Nalani Piucci, a childhood friend,  interview next week.

"Beulah Land, I wonder when I won't need you anymore"

This is the first time I have been in Kayenta during this time of year in three years. The air smells like football games, like sports practices. It is more autumn here than in Flagstaff. There are leaves all over the ground that move the way they always have. There is an abandoned bike at a playground, the streamers on its handlebars are pink and opalescent and move in the wind. There is a pile of apple cores and skins. In the middle of the disintegrating pile is a pamphlet belonging to one of the many evangelistic sects in Kayenta. LDS? Witnesses? The Baptists? I have not be religiously propositioned since moving too Flagstaff. I almost missed the well-dressed and ultimately well-meaning missionaries asking me if my mother was home.

I’ve been making generalizations about small town life for about thirty-six hours now. I’m wearing silk but my sleeves smell like diesel. I am confused about my capacity. Am I to be soft and impressionable or fueled, spitting fumes, an aluminum dragon?

Writing is, I suppose, viewed as being a transformative art. When you type you are really spinning out cocoons for yourself and your friends. Write something that will make you change. People keep asking me what I think of the changes.
“What do you think of the new school,” one teacher asks me, from behind and metal screen that separates the cafeteria from the courtyard.I look at the rows of cafeteria tables, the giant menu on the wall, the big screen TV where CNN broadcasts Ike swirling collision with Texas.
“It’s so,” I’m trying for linear. “Institutionalized,” he finishes for me. I interview him tomorrow.

And maybe he’s right.
But I walk through the halls, I can’t help but wonder if those cameras are functional.
The school was always a place of half-hearted noncommittal threats.
A nine-foot black metal fence borders almost all of the school property. The tops of the fence are sharp like spears and I imagine them snatching a wiggling sophomore by their backpack. But I opened the gate as easily as anything tomorrow and entered the science building unnoticed.
Inside that black fence at least ten red-roofed pagodas have been built, kids get shade from a beige brick wall. I can already hear what everyone was talking about.
You can change the property but you can’t change the school. Or the people inside. The lockers and the couches in the library are the same. So are the kids, from what I can tell. High school, the land of sneakers.
It’s weird to inhabit a place where so many dramas took place. Where friends dished out sympathy or talked behind your back and shoved notes gleefully trashing the newest white girl. Francesca, olive-skinned, and oozing tom-boyish sexuality was the target in the 7th grade. After her, it was Jenny, who had animal fur from home stuck to her fleece sweater and a habit of spouting socialist-esque propaganda.
I’ll admit to my espionage. I helped create ugly nicknames for all these girls, while, at the same time, brought them Christmas presents. Eventually the girls, pale and cracked thermometers, moved away.I befriended a lot of these girls, and, to an extent, found them more comfortable than Racquel, Beranda, or Brittany. Brittany is the one friend I can’t find, in my memory, perhaps because we were the closest or because, in the end, I chose myself over her.

The faces that stump me the most are those of the Anglos. At Basha’s, which looks like a well-stocked warehouse, I play the Tourist Game, my own invention. I try to guess if this or that white face is a tourist. And, if possible, what country they hail from. A lot depends on whether or not they have a fanny pack.

Everyone expects that I am here with a Kayenta-instilled sense of pride. I don’t know what I am here for. I imagine my mind to be like on of those space-age smart foam mattresses. I imagine the impressions left behind my fingers and kneecaps.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Katherine, one thing that has changes,” my mother says. “I remember people coming to town with wagons and mules. No one liked to drive at night. Because of the sheep, and the yannies. Now you see all those houses, but then it was dark. Dark as a wilderness. Now there are so many lights.”

Week 1 pt.1

Coming up here is a strange-Pandora’s box experience. I feel a bit like I am smashing open Zeus’s head and watching all these sand-colored babies pop out of a Black Mesa sized crack.
Maybe that’s overwrought.
The two and a half hour drive up here never feels long anymore. I’ve had to have done it hundreds of time by now. Mostly it feels like a tumble-weed filled time machine.
My father drove me.
Not long after we passed Cameron, we hit rain. The rain out there, by the dinosaur tracks, doesn’t sink into the soil. It sits on the surface, the land is a giant puddle. The clay under the surface dirt expands when it comes in contact with water which makes it impossible for water to sink any further.
“They line stock ponds with this clay” my father says a name I can’t remember. “It’s a cheap way to keep water from sinking into the ground.
I feel like my ears are stuffed with this clay.
When I get up tomorrow morning, I will head over to the middle school first. Apparently, if I want to have any interactions with the students, I will need to be fingerprinted and receive a special access card out of Virginia. It will cost 50 dollars. But my HURA equipment funds will probably got towards that.Apparently, though, if I want to go hang out at the school, I should just show up and sign in at their main office.
Small town life, expect small time complications.
When I expressed concern about the unplanned-ness of my visit, my mother told me “Everyone knows you’re coming,”
I feel slightly prodigal. I am making every possible effort to leave my preconceptions in Tsegi.