She told me that she spent 2nd through 7th grade in a boarding school, but didn't dwell on that for very long. Her reluctance to talk about it was probably because she was sent there against her will. Our country has a long history of sending Native American children to distant boarding schools, far away from their people, their land, and their language. Out of a misplaced sense of charity, the US Government made a practice of rounding up children, and taking them out of the hands of their "uncivilized" parents. In Nurse Gail's case, this resulted in generations of Navajo children unnecessarily bouncing around the child care system.
[I want this post to focus on Gail, and not US history. If you'd like to know more of the backstory on Native American boarding schools, check out this short piece by NPR. The key phrase: "Kill the Indian...Save the Man."]
After 7th grade, Gail returned home from the boarding school, only to find out that her parents had signed her up for the Mormon Church's foster home network. She knew that this happened in seventh grade, because she could remember where she was "when Kennedy was shot."
Something about that last recollection caught me off guard. At times, it's pretty easy to feel like I'm in a different country (because on some levels, I am). However, events like the JFK assassination are big enough to transcend our separate histories. It's not about the Navajo story, the Hopi story, or the story of the many consecutive waves of immigrants. It's about the American story, and we need to remember that we're all in it together.
But back to Gail's story. In seventh grade, she got on a bus to Utah, and was taken in by a series of Mormon families. Gail's stories of the Mormon foster homes took a very familiar pattern. A nice family took her into its home for a few years, until the host parents went back to college, moved to California, etc. But what struck me the most was what she did for work during that time. She described a farming system that would send busses to the junior high on the weekends, and pick up any child that wanted to work. The busses would drive out to the farms, and drop the kids off for a full day of picking crops. Harvesting sugarcane was alright, but picking potatoes was torture.
The most interesting job story, however, came from her time in the Butterball turkey plant. As she describes it, the boys would go up into the mountains, and bring back the live turkeys. Each kid in line would kill, de-feather, or prep the turkeys. Gail's job was to remove the gizzards. She described the process in full detail, even acting out the turkeys' clucking as they went through the machines. Good thing we didn't have many patients today.
Kind of puts "Tucson" in perspective, doesn't it?
-M
