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.”

Braincloud

The clouds part, and behold! A Blog post.

Seems like "middle-ground" is no ground, or at least, no where to be found.

What haev I been working on, exactly? Alot of brainstorming. My brain is a storm.

1.After what seemed to be a miraculous, Lazarus like healing by my Laptop, the thing broke again last Sunday. It appears to be the 8 month problem of a bum charger cord. I am getting a new one as soon as I get paid Friday. Blog will bemore frequent. As many as three times a week, or with multiple posting in one day.

2. I will head down to Kayenta, (Or elsewhere on the Rez) every second thursday of the month. I will spend Fridays in the schools. See what I will be doing below.

3. I started to think about the student assemblies my elementary eduacation was pepper with. I have theorized that I could probably get permission to have such an assembly. Even, possibly on in the S.A.C. center, but more likely, I will present in teacher's classrooms. I know quite a few teachers who probably wouldn't mind if I took twenty minutes out of their class time in order to present my project. And what will I say? I don't neccesarilly want to talk at kids, I want to talk with them. If I aim to truly capture a portrait of you native culture, while at the same time examining my own culture, I need to talk with these kids. I want to hear about the music they like, where they shop, what they think of their grandparents, and what they eat for breakfast.

4. Playing off the idea of above, I have started to think aboiut interviewing groups of three or four at a time. Interaction.

5. If iam interviewing minors, if I am asking to interview minors I will most likely need to get permission slips. I could e-mail copies to the teachers whose classrooms I might be presenting to before hand and they could get them filled up and I could interview people at lunch.

6/. I need to e-mail the entire school district.

Fences or Nothing New

I have spent the past three days being officially employed by Flagstaff Medical Center. I spent to sitting all day in orientation and one grueling day serving, well, gruel.
I have alot of personal concerns regarding this recent job choice, mostly with regards to my personal strength and willingness. But one thing i noticed immediately.
I am one of the only Anglos holding this postion. Further more, as far as i can tell, I am the only Anglo my age, who is enrolled in college, at this job. Aside from the pay, which, compared with most jobs available, is generous, I have no actual stake in this job. One of the reasons I stuck with my equally grueling food service job for so long was because it infalted my ego.

Almost the entire staff I work with is Navajo, ranging from girls around my age to woman in their sixties.

A confession: When I am in a new situation and I see a Navajo I have a tendency to want to really really really talk to that person. I feel this instant kinship and draw.
I watched two of my new coworkers put fruit in a blender today to make sorbet or a smoothie, and they were chattering and talking with that Navajo repor and I really wanted to join them.

In my interview, my boss made the comment that I would probably never be boring because I had "grown up on the Rez."

I have never felt more invisible then today. Perhaps, this is because the hospital is a huge business with who knows how many employees. Perhaps it is because I am once again doing a completely diserable job, cleaning up undisireable objects, only this time I don't have the advantage of being related to fine dining. I found that very few people made eye contact with me today. In and out of the kitchen.

More frustrating then the distance I felt from many of the hospital employees was the distance I felt from the staff. Like with the pair blendling fruit, I wanted, very badly to shout "Hey, hey! I grew up on the Rez.!"

I often feel that when this little tidbit is disclosed then I instantly earn a little, well, street cred. In both cultures.

This raises a few questions:

Do I use being from the Rez? To I use it to gain equality with a Navajo coworker? To stick out from a Anglo crowd?

In Orientation we actually had to hear the hospital interpreter speak on the cultural sensitivity with regard to Navajo patients. I am not sure what I can or cannot disclose, due to confidentionality, but I will say that I the audience was very sensitive, very curious, and for the most part, entirely uninformed. Some questions I heard:

"Do I shake ALL their hands? Sould I not shake the men's hands if it's a matriarical society?"

"Why don't they like eye contact?"

"Can you say that 'yah-ta-hay' word again?"

I'm not sure where all this is going, but, I still felt a distance between employees, and, as if this was new, I was again agog at the lack of information about the tribe in Anglo culture.