School daze.

This is my final paper for my Native American Studies class. I guess I am further proving my status as the ultimate school nerd, but I really dug writing this paper, and I had been wanting to write about this girl for a long time. So yeah.

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In this paper, I will create a retrospective ethnography by examining how one person's life speaks to broader historical contexts. I will recount my personal history of working as a counselor at a wilderness therapy program in Utah and engaging with a specific Native American girl. I will use this narrative as an analysis of how these experiences can be used to gain understanding of greater historical processes and structures. I do not aim to strip the girl of her humanity by portraying her as an example. Rather, I hope to show how concepts that are often manifested as social constructs create complexes that not only further tangle ideas of native cultures, but also develop damaging pathologies that can wreak havoc on one individual Native American teenage girl's soul. I will illustrate this by examining the psychological wounds and cognitive dissonance that She dealt with by carrying the burdens of her ancestors and kin on her back. I will examine how matters of relocation and removal, sovereignty, containment, savagery and violence, the repercussions of history, and conceptions of meeting expectations all while simultaneously being an anomaly all manifested themselves inside of her. All of these different threads expressed themselves through her actions, influenced her own beliefs about herself, and also affected the way she treated her body. I will also offer comparative historical examples, while discussing the implications of having a notable and notorious forefather who fulfilled a complicated and disparate stereotype of Native American people in the context of American History.
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The first time we met, the snow was coming down thick. It was hard to tell where the snow ended and the white sky began. Utah winters are harsh in the bleak desert, but She seemed pleased to be here, comfortably carrying her gigantic backpack and smiling wide and big, just the way Louise Erdrich described Fleur Pillager's smile in the novel Tracks. Years later, when I read Tracks, I would always think back to her and imagine Fleur as having her face. She was arriving from a residential treatment center in Idaho – She was here to see if wilderness therapy could set things straight and make her feel whole. Something seemed off about her though, something about her seemed different, and it was not just the fact that her skin was darker and that she stood taller. Even though notions of difference were tangibly marked by her physical appearance, it was clear that there were things going on inside of her, radiating something elusive and unsettling that we were ill-equipped to treat because of our lack of understanding. The first step in wilderness therapy is coming to terms with the fact that you are just like the rest of the girls that surround you, but the problem was, She was not, and trying to convince her to feel like she was, was useless.
She spent her first two days carefully keeping to herself, practicing politeness. When the snow stopped the following day, I woke before anyone, lugging the gigantic orange garbage bag full of frozen boots that I needed to thaw in preparation for the day’s hike. I was ready to start the fire, hoping there were some live coals leftover and glowing, buried under last night's snow. I was humming along to my walkman, trying to walk atop the snow without my feet shooting through the thin top layer of ice. Before I had the chance even to look for a glowing ember, I found her staring hollowly into the fire pit's burnt logs and grey ash, jamming a stick into her wrist and letting the blood spill forth and stain the sleeves of her winter coat.
I dropped all that was in my hands and grabbed the stick out of hers, yelling, frantic – it was my third week’s work shift, and I was in no way ready to handle a situation of this magnitude on my own. I ran back to the tent and grabbed the rest of the staff. They pulled on their clothes, grabbed their boots and ran with me. She had not moved at all. She found a new stick and was destroying her skin with purpose. The restraining protocols were followed. She was warned that if she did not stop hurting herself, and continued to fail to cooperate, force would be used. Then tears started rolling down her face, clearing streaks of clean skin from beneath the layer of Utah dirt. She wailed and screamed, becoming aggressive. She showed her teeth, kicked and wailed. Scotty took her down, put her in a restraint, and She lay face down on a small mat on this freezing Utah morning, howling in anger, writhing in pain – but She would not give up and stop struggling. Even when there was one person pinning down each of her legs, and one on each arm, I sat there watching, feeling sick while my insides twisted, confused by what was presented before me and not knowing how to manage it. Here was my Indian Problem.
Days would pass and She would smile. She would sing to herself while sitting alone. She connected with different staff, and then at night She would threaten to steal knives and suffocate herself in her sleeping bag. She told us we would not be able to do anything, that we would find her in the morning, lifeless and cold. She bred fear in us. We never knew when She would sing beautiful songs to us, threaten to attack us, or attempt to run away.
I had never thought much about her background, where She came from, or what was contained inside of her, until I read her life story that was scrawled in looping print on torn out notebook pages. She had been born in Arizona. Her mother had been murdered. She had been adopted when she was three by a white family who moved her to Virginia. A complicated web of strings tied her to various people and places and cultures. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She moved from place to place, treatment facility to treatment facility, connecting with different staff who would all become attached to her and spend time worrying and fearing her impending 18th birthday. At 18, she would no longer be under the jurisdiction of her parents, and could no longer be secured in treatment facilities for adolescents. That milestone date would allow her freedom to move as an adult, what teenagers so often view as their own sovereignty -- an arbitrary bestowal of freedom predicated on nothing more than an arbitrary number. The implications of her 18th year were more complicated and heavy than for most adolescents. Choices were laid before her. She could move on to wilderness therapy for girls over 18 – the only way her parents would continue to support her. If she chose the other option, she would opt for an unknown route in which all possibilities were cloaked in darkness. This enigmatic choice presented possibilities such as returning to the reservation, walking down roads to see where they led. She did not feel ready to be off on her own, but she did not want to exist in a space where she was controlled and choices were made for rather than by her. She worried, knowing that her self-destructive, self-sabotaging tendencies would most likely hold powerful sway on her chances of success in life.
It was not until a couple weeks later, when her therapist visited the group that for the first time her Indian heritage was brought to our attention. He gathered us all around, and asked the group of girls whether they knew about where She came from. He asked her if She was proud of her history. She did not say much, so he spoke to everyone else, "you know, She's 100% Pima Indian," he went on, "her great-great grandfather was Ira Hayes, the soldier who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima." Everyone looked at her, surprised and interested, lost at how to respond. I looked at her and wondered if there was a deep sense of shame stirring inside of her that was being reflected back to us in the blankness of her eyes as She gazed over the badland cliffs into the blue sky.
It was not until I started to immerse myself in Native American literature more than two years after my last interactions with her that I began to examine her case critically and in greater depth. It was almost impossible not to use her as a reference point when reading these biographies, ethnographies, and fiction, because of the profound impact she had on my life and the fact that she was the only full-blooded Indian I knew. Starting with the first class of this semester, when trying to grasp concepts we were discussing, I would inevitably be reminded of her, thinking of how the concepts we were discussing played out in her life and world. I contemplated how she might have perceived these issues and even whether she was unaware of them altogether.
It is perhaps most fitting to begin with an example that elucidates the trajectories her life had taken. She was adopted out of her native home, taken from her family at age three. She was then old enough to be at least somewhat conscious of what was happening, but still too young not to have developed concrete ties binding her to the reservation. Sometimes, She would talk to the group about returning to the reservation, and it would sound like she was relating a dream. She would describe walking down empty streets with her brother and her eyes would fill with sadness.
Her first removal was from her reservation in Arizona to a white family’s home in Virginia. This sent her a message that communicated that her own family was unable to raise her. What was also transmitted by her adoption was that her home was unsafe, that the people on the reservation were untrustworthy. It said that She did not belong where She came from. This calls to mind issues of sovereignty, interdependence, and attempts to assimilate Native Americans that began when the first boat of Europeans crossed the Atlantic Ocean and reached America's shores. It demonstrated a hasty decision to remove a child and "save" her from the same "fate" that her community had faced. It implied that removal was the only option, that severance of natural ties was essential. We can draw distinct parallels between this and the removal of Indian children from their families' homes, voluntarily and by force, to Indian boarding schools like Carlisle. These schools attempted to dispel the "superstitions" of Native American cultures and religions, and "modernize" and assimilate these children into white culture. The irony, however, was that the schools taught minimal skills that were outdated, reinforcing the prevalent notion that Indians were anachronistic anomalies, out of sync with modern times.
Another destructive aspect of these schools, was that in trying to debunk traditional Indian ways, they not only further distanced the children from their cultures, but from their families who still practiced these beliefs. Thus, rather than being accepted by the church-folk, white teachers, and missionaries, they were still viewed as inferior and coming from spoiled stock, leaving the children in an undefined space, a relative purgatory, stuck between their “discredited” indigenous identity and one separate from their families,' forced upon them in an academic setting by the dominant white culture. Therefore, they were neither fully accepted nor able to identify fully with either culture.
As She got older, She became destructive in her new home. She became violent towards her parents; it reached the point where their love for her was insufficient to keep her in their home. She fought back aggressively, she rose up – she fulfilled fears of an Indian uprising, she exemplified expectations of Indian violence and savagery through her primal actions. So She continued her journey, not by choice, but by forced removal, trying to find a place and a home that was deemed suitable for her. However, any such home would be gauged not by her own wants and needs, but by others deciding what was “right” for her.
It is hard not to draw parallels between her journey and the journeys of the various first nations. Those journeys were forced, taking place in the 19th and 20th centuries, moving Native Americans from their indigenous territories to newly defined and bound lands. In all cases, these forced removals were attempts at solving the "Indian Problem," a " Problem" which must be defined as loosely as it was then understood –keeping native peoples at a safe distance. It defined native peoples as matters to be dealt with, not cultures and established civilizations. It substantiated prejudice, and reduced fears of difference. It led to policies of containment that not only removed Native Americans from regular contact and interaction with the rest of the population, but also provided physical boundaries for a place in which guilt was confined and contained. The implications were and are enormous. This process transferred the collective guilt and hostility of a colonizing nation to a physical space, and then forced the people who were “settled” and, hopefully, “civilized” during the process to live in these sharply bounded confines. The negative emotions and toxic feelings directed towards the first nations inflicted on the colonized Native Americans an enormous disadvantage, the inherent yet unconscious and unarticulated purpose of the forced relocation in the first place. This disadvantage had many implications. It attempted to put limits on what could be achieved in the context of a white culture, while also restricting the practices of Native American cultures and livestyles.
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With her first stay at her first treatment center, She started to develop her pattern. She came in carefully and sweetly, wary of immediately exposing the turmoil inside of her. She sang. She enchanted the workers with her beautiful voice and connected to them by asking them about their lives. In return, she would share select parts of her own story. The relationship would grow, and when She felt like She could, She would expose more of the broken pieces of herself. These pieces were dark, weighty, and obscure. What She had been going through in her life was so heavy and incomprehensible to everyone else. Once these events were brought out into the open, they hung in the air between us like thick fog, making her appear even further away than she had before. And, rather than the workers being able to help her process her history and pain, they stepped back from her a bit. This growing distance scared her, and once She would start to feel it, she would be reminded that She ached for connection to other human beings, but remained markedly different than those around her. She would act out. She would act irrationally because if She did not get the kind of attention She craved, She preferred being destructive and did things that could not be ignored. She fought back – against what was unclear. She would act out on her body. She would tear at her brown skin, mutilating and destroying it without even thinking about what that meant. Her lack of understanding flowed directly from her inability to address her own history – She bore the weight of her ancestors on her back. This very concept has been articulated by Carl G. Jung in his writings on the unconscious. It claims that if we fail to address our past, that will, in turn, deeply affect our lives in ways over which we will have no control. It is a more refined conception of "history repeating itself." This concept reigned in powerful ways over her life's trajectory.
My relationship with her was complicated, knotted, often messy. Frequently, we butted heads. Other staff claimed I was too hard on her – I asserted that I would not reinforce her manipulative behavior, that she wasn't nearly as fragile as they seemed to believe, that she was stronger than everyone supposed. When she claimed to be incapable or unable to do things, or acted in a childish manner, I would tell her that she knew she was capable of more. I tried to challenge her to surprise herself with competency. Because of the dynamic of our relationship, her therapist always paired me to work with her, due to the staunch boundaries I set for her. It was clearly trying for both of us, but there were also distinct moments of obvious and deep respect and tenderness; we connected on intimate, feeling human levels, sharing our lives.
Within a few weeks, it was time for her to move on. She was sent back to her previous program in Idaho. Weeks went by, and I often thought of her in passing. Mostly, I was just relieved that she was gone, that work would be easier, that I would not continue to worry for her safety hour-by-hour. But on the morning of my twentieth birthday, as we opened the door of the car in which we had driven to work, we were greeted by the rest of the staff team. They let us know that there was a new student in the group – she had arrived yesterday, she was doing fine, but that this was her second time in the program. She had come back.
I said to her what I said to every student that I encountered twice, who had returned to the woods -- "I'm glad to see you again, but I feel sad that things didn't work out." And she nodded. She told me I had been right -- that she missed the freedom in the desert and woods, and the feeling of the open sky. Being confined between walls, under strict watch, did not feel good, and so she acted out. She threatened the staff that she would hurt herself, and when she did, the staff asked her what they could do to help her. She said that she wanted to come back to the woods.
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We can examine the effects of her past swaying her in a tangible way, with the example of her great-great grandfather, Ira Hayes. Hayes was dramatically portrayed by Adam Beach in Clint Eastwood’s 2006 movie “Flags of Our Fathers.” He was also immortalized in the classic country song, “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” by Peter LaFarge, later made famous by Johnny Cash. The song illustrates the irony of Hayes’s life, how he fought in a war for a land stolen from his people, returned to a home of disillusioned people who did not care about his feats. He became a caricature, and then fulfilled the most over-simplified and barren stereotype for a Native American – he became an alcoholic.

“…When war came, Ira volunteered
And forgot the white man’s greed …
Ira returned a hero
Celebrated through the land
He was wined and speeched and honored
Everybody shook his hand
But he was just a Pima Indian
No water, no crops, no chance
At home nobody cared what Ira’d done
And when did the Indians dance …
Then Ira started drinkin’ hard
Jail was often his home
They’d let him raise the flag and lower it
Like you’d throw a dog a bone
Call him drunken Ira Hayes
He won’t answer anymore
Not the whiskey drinkin’ Indian
Or the marine that went to war
He died drunk one morning
Alone in the land he fought to save
Two inches of water in a lonely ditch
Was the grave of Ira Hayes
Yeah, call him drunken Ira Hayes
But his land is just as dry
And his ghost is lying thirsty
In the ditch where Ira died.”

“The Ballad of Ira Hayes” does not paint a pretty picture of Hayes’s life. In Eastwood’s depiction of him, the viewer comes to understand that the implications and complications of making Hayes a hero ran so deep, they caused him such pain that it could only be numbed by drinking. I raise the example of Ira Hayes in relation to this girl’s history because clearly the toll that the dissonance of what Hayes believed of himself in contrast to the public’s view of him as a hero, had been passed on. Her therapist publicly proclaimed her Indian heritage and her great-great grandfather, who was a historical celebrity and war hero, was someone and something to be proud of, but she knew that millions hummed the tune of his life story in which he was reduced merely to a song, while she solemnly recalled that he died from drink, facedown in his own blood and vomit, alone in a ditch on a cold night.
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As her stay began to wind down, the ice started melting, creating a muddy slush on all of our camp grounds, the grass turning green, the sun growing heavier in the sky. It was spring and her 18th birthday was just around the corner. For her last few days with us, her therapist directed us to put her on an intervention called "the island." In that setting, she was required to build a wall surrounding herself, and create a self-sufficient life within the bounds of those walls. This example of containment blatantly brings to mind the very definition of the boundaries confining Indian lands, and more abstractly, laws and notions of understanding. What "the island" communicated was paradoxical – it defined self-sufficiency through aloneness, yet what She needed most was connection to others and understanding of herself. When the car arrived to pick her up and drive her down to southern Utah for the adult wilderness program, she quickly grabbed the dull knife, covered in rust from rain and use, and ran it across her arm. She reminded herself she was uncivilized, that her skin was holding her back, that it must be destroyed.
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Her story is unique and florid in its often elegant sense of tragedy, though it is not hopeless and she is not alone. There are countless others who would recognize her path as similar to their own. I have used her example in hope of communicating a new knowledge – o ne that transforms, deepens, and grows over the course of time, upon each further re-examination. She provides new answers to failed understandings. The truths of personal experience and life story trump the certainty of faceless studies. She gives life and dimension to the negative effects of a post-settled nation, to the disparities between two worlds. She is real, and her suffering and experience is inarguably genuine.