After finishing in Sherman we drove all night, as per usual. The night before, I had dropped out of dinner and some planning stuff, and slept for nearly 15 hours. The ability to do this was a Godsent, as I would have been in a world of hurt, otherwise. I could feel my body wearing down, between the stairs and the sunburn and the never, ever sleeping, and the constant driving -- without that break I would have probably have been physcially unable to go on soon.
As is, however, I'm feeling just fine. Hello, Arizona.
We entered the city via exit 133A, which is an awfully nice way to enter the city. Because of the labyrinthian road system, this particular exit makes a truly huge arc over a tangle of roads, and provided us with a flyby view of the lights of the whole city. It was beautiful. The lights were mostly pinpricks, of course, as it was nearing 1AM by that point and most things were closed.
I was dreading the day's filming (bright and early start!) because my sunburn was just starting to heal. Luckily, I guess, the thermometer spiked at 102 degrees and everything was moved inside. Blessings can be funny like that.
The room they put us in was just lovely. It consisted of a medium-sized white wood auditorium, with an extra few rows of seats above in a glass-walled balcony. I cordoned off the balcony, and used it as my personal camera mount and equipment storage. It ended up working out really well, both for me and for the event: this forced everyone into tighter quarters down below, which helped create a community feeling that had been absent from Sherman.
The downside of it being so nice was that they banned the use of tobacco, sage, and anything else that is used by burning. This ruffled a few feathers (so to speak) and sage, particularly, is an important part of the ending ceremony.
I suppose I should more clearly define how these days are conducted... someone remind me of that soon. For now, just know that sage is needed.
As a minor rarity, the opening speakers were great. Too often, the opening speakers have either not understood what was going on, or had an ulterior motive like re-election, promoting rennovation, or expressing some unrelated political opinion. As a result, this seems to give people permission to ramble, themselves, during the open-mic period. These speakers were focused and on-topic, and everyone who spoke after them followed their lead. As a result, we had lots of time for some amazing stories to come forth, a few of which I will paraphrase here.
One middle-aged woman (50ish) talked about her family's relationship with boarding schools. Her grandparents' history is unknown, but they feared the schools greatly. When agents came for their son (her father), they had him hide in a basket. When the police started ransacking their home, they tied the basket down, strapped it to a horse, and sent the horse racing off into the night with a hard smack. The boy was five years old.
Through tricks like this, they kept him out of school. When he grew up, however, he was not so lucky. Agents took away his eldest daughter, age 8, to 'civilize' her. The remaining family would often think about her, imagining how she was learning skills, becoming educated and successful, maybe making friends. In truth, she died almost immediately after arriving at the school. The school was a hotbed for smallpox; no measures were taken to curb the disease. It was assumed preventative measures were hopeless, because Indians just had naturally deficient immune systems. This just sped up the natural selection process. Her family didn't know she was dead until 4 years later. Her body has never been found; it's unlikely she was given a grave. Her younger sister was the one speaking, and her rage and grief were clearly still a daily burden for her. 4 years of dreaming and wondering.
One can hardly wonder, however, that no one bothered to contact her family. The teachers probably didn't even know who had died. This was a planned, carefully executed strategy employed at virtually every school: dehumanize the students by making them unrecognizable. This was accomplished by regulation uniforms, government-issued boots, and identical bowl haircuts. In nearly any picture, the students are virtually indistinguishable. This allowed the teachers to do their work with less risk of attachment or emotion.
Kneeling was a common form of punishment, both here and elsewhere. It was mentioned more often here, though. Straight-up kneeling, no matter for how long, was unlikely to be satisfactorily viscious, so it was often varied based on age. Young kids would get a few hours kneeling on rice. A little older: that would add another hour and wood chips, instead of rice. The oldest kids would have to kneel on a broom stick. One would be tempted to say that the older kids should have known better, except -- oh, that's right -- the punishments were handed out randomly as a way of keeping the students psychologically timid and unbalanced.
Clothing was not only regulated during the day, but at night, as well. Suitable clothing for girls consisted of a nightgown, and only a nightgown. Some nuns had the job of going into the girls' dorm during the night and randomly stripping the sheets off of a sleeping child. If the child was found to be wearing underwear under their nightgown, she was forced to strip naked immediately and was then whipped.
This may sound terrible, but isolated. It's not. Steele is the SECOND school so far where women have talked about being whipped for wearing underwear at night under their nightgowns. Since it's only the seventh school we've been to, and it's been brought up unprompted both times, those numbers put it pretty close to "general practice." As I'm sure everyone is thinking it already, I won't bother to put in a paragraph about the nuns following up these nightly raids with sexual molestation.
These children are now adults. This isn't distant history. Anyone else feel nausious?
Towards the end of the day, an elder stood up and told about her daily ritual at Steele. Once a day, class would be put on hold, and everyone would line up along the side of the classroom. One-by-one, each student would be bent over the teacher's knee, spanked, and told, "you're filthy and you stink." This happened every day. She then broke down completely into tears and apologized to her adult children in the audience: "The teachers were my mothers... I was only just learning how to be a mother with you." There were few dry eyes in the audience.
Another woman talked about how, for generations in her family, children would go off to school (mostly Carlisle) and vanish. It was family custom to never speak of them again or say their names. Today, she feels that's had a strong negative impact that stretches down to current day.
Also, somewhere during the day, someone talked about how the teachers would send you to Confession if they could you wearing mocassins. There, you had to confess to wearing mocassins, and you would be given a penance to make up for your "sins." How stupid.
Like every place, Steele wasn't entirely without some scrap of virtue. During the 70s, it was the only place for miles around that would give a high school education to pregnant teens. That's worth a little something, I suppose.
In all, it was a powerful and satisfying day, maybe the best so far. I appreciated not having quite so many stairs to deal with, and being out-of-the sun was great. We opened up a lot of wounds, but we left with the feeling that that's exactly what they needed to heal. Today we did good work.
Marlin uses a wing to "wipe the pain away" from a woman.
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