Life vs. Literature

My daughter read Lakota Woman by Mary Crow Dog for her language arts class, Hands for a Bridge. It is a social justice class that sends students to Northern Ireland and South Africa for two weeks to learn about social conflict. They also examine social conflicts here in the U.S.

The Hands for a Bridge group has a family potluck dinner once a month, and last week the kids were asked to talked to their parents about Lakota Woman. When I was in high school in Columbus, Ohio, I took a class called Native American Culture Studies, taught by Tom Molnar, where we learned the history of Native Americans. We had a field trip at the end of my senior year of high school where we spent a week on the Navajo and Hopi Reservations. It was the first time I had ever been west of the Mississippi outside of a family vacation to St. Louis when I was six. I had never been to the Southwest before, and I was blown away by the landscape. I felt like I was on a different planet.

Claire-Adele and her friend Madison talked about the book which I had not read. Both girls had read stories and books by Sherman Alexie, as had I. Lakota Woman was different.

"She was drinking a fifth of vodka by time she was twelve," Claire-Adele said. "Everyone in her family was drunk all of the time."

"There was also the historical trauma they were dealing with in addition to the poverty," said Madison.

I started thinking about this, and then spoke up about my trip out west to the reservations. I had gone in 1987, three years before Lakota Woman was published. I missed reading it when it came out. Lakota Woman takes place in South Dakota instead of Arizona and New Mexico.

"When I was visiting the Navajo and the Hopi, I didn't see the poverty as much as I saw the people," I said. "The kids when to boarding school, not because the goal was to indoctrinate the kids, but because the land was so sparsely populated that the closest school for some of these kids was eighty miles away. They couldn't make the round trip twice a day. They would arrive on Monday and leave on Friday."

I remember we showed up on the night of their prom. They were all dressed up in their gym, and we crashed the party wearing jeans. It was terrible. We had just returned from a hike in the wilderness (I would say woods but there were no trees) and we were covered in red dust. Before that, we stopped at the home of one of the students. It was a small cinderblock house all painted white with a couch and a television set on. Rugs covered the walls and floors. The dad was watching a show. I thought to myself, So this is what poverty looks like. It isn't as bad as I thought it would have been, but then I had no idea what to expect. Everyone was dressed well and there was food. I don't remember where we slept for the night. When we went out to the Hopi Reservation, I stayed with a family in their new pre-fab home. It seemed pretty nice to me, and the kids had a new high school. For other parts of the trip, we camped outside, often without tents, throwing our sleeping bags and pillow on the ground.

"We hung out with these kids for a week," I said. "and we never talked about alcohol, poverty or problems in their families. The kids were super quiet--they hardly ever spoke. They were present, not aloof or distant."

I had always thought that literature was a poor substitute for life, not the other way around. I would have thought that going to see a place and meet people would be more important than reading about them in a book. This conversation with my daughter in front of strangers made me rethink this. Even though I had been to the reservation, I didn't understand it in the same way my daughter who had read about it did. Mary Crow Dog said the things that the girls we traveled with did not say, that they couldn't say.