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.

fur, straw, metal

I am continuing to work on Middle Ground without being funded. This does not bother me because my current work load with regards to Middle Ground is so light. I do feel, however, that I am not able to do as much as I would like because of my lack of funding. For example, I cannot properly travel unil I find out how to get compensation.

I feel I am forever stuck in the land of the brainstorm. Great things I would like to start doing that I can't because of logistics.

What have I brainstormed this week.

1. Disregarding my feeling towards feminism, I am taking an introduction to woman writers course. Exciting news! There is a whole section of the course devoted to Native American woman writers. Selections for the course include works by Joy Harjo, Paula Gunn Allen, and Linda Hogan. Very, very easy research. This also reminded me: I need to come up with a very specific reading list for the semester. Look for that in the next week.

2. The first essay we are reading is by Virginia Woolf. I haven't read her since I was 15 or 16 and am interested in seeing how my own identity as a "woman writer" has changed. Who am I now? At 15, or was it 16, I felt like V.W. failed somewhat in her asserations, although I cannot presently remember just what those assertions were.
I learned today that VW held her own salons as a young woman in London. Bohemians talking loosely about everyone. I would like to have my a couple of my own salons to use as a research method. I would invite various mixtures of poeple over, provide eats and then let them cut loose on some of the topics I hope to address with this project.

In other news, I am more tired then tired. I go and go, I am a as fuel as efficent as a Yaris. My biggest fear is that I am losing myself under my work load. Who will I be come December? Where is my courage, my heart, and my brain? I am straw, I am metal, I am fur. I really cling to any taste of my former lackidasical self. I find myself in moments of eating sushi, in a kiss on my stomach from a boyfriend, or a good scarf. I find myself in my laughter. The kind that doesn't come from my increasingly forced jokes.

Dust

Going back to the source.

Having trapezed across campus for over a month now trying to get my grant funding figured out, I may actually have a solution.

Basically, I went to NAU Human Relations last week. Here's what they told me: We can't help you. Contact the financial aid office.

Who, as I expected, had never heard of the HURA award.

In addition, HR told me that they could not confirm my present NAU employment without first having contact with the Lumberjack. I then started out to fill out a New Hire application, my fourth, if memory serves.

Luckily, and I write this in the Lumberjack office, I should be able to get the my ambiguity as an employee squared away by Monday evening at the LJ's first ED Board meeting.

I will also probably finish filling out that new hire information.


*

Life feels a bit like camping with my father.

When I was young we would head out after dark. After we had eaten "pocket stews", potatoes, groundbeef, and bell peppers baking over a campfire in tinfoil.

We would head out on foot or in my father's Toyota Forerunner, which exists in my mind, a far off white beacon at the end of our many hikes.

If we head by foot, my father would often stop and attempt to call in owls.

But right now I feel more like those excursions. in the Forerunner. My father would take his spotlight and shine its yellow light out the window of the car and we would the dust swirl in front of us as we drove, very slowly, hoping for an animal that might dart out in front of us.

I feel like that. All night and wind, and one spotlight, a glaring metaphor, shining through the kicked up dust and sand.

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.

update

Three posting for this blog is shameful. And I am unhappy that my internet is still not up and running...
My equipment came in though, which is good.