Drive southeast from Rapid City, South Dakota, on Route 44, down into the Cheyenne River valley, past the ranches on the plateaus above the river, on poor land that will soon look rich by comparison with the near-desert given to the Lakota people of the Pine Ridge Reservation. Pass through Scenic, SD, the last, depressed storefronts before the Rez, and pass within sight of the rock castles of the Badlands in their Roadrunner-and-Wile E. Coyote strangeness. Now you’re on the reservation itself. The herds of shaggy beef cattle and blunt-nosed, round-bellied horses, animals that ignore the low barbed-wire fences that line the roads, belong to Lakota ranchers. The rolling, treeless hills trick an east-coast eye. Is that next ridge half a mile away, or five miles? Oncoming headlights appear minutes before you pass an old truck, Lakota men seated three abreast, gone at 70 mph--140 if you add your own speed to theirs. Small ash trees, cottonwoods and scruffy pines huddle and snake through creases between the hills.
The Pine Ridge Reservation is only a bit smaller than Massachusetts--minus Cape Cod--about 50 miles north to south and 100 miles east to west. Depending on whom you ask, the population is between 15,000 and 30,000 people. The U.S. government census of 1990 lists a smaller figure of little more than 12,000, but two Lakota men with whom I spoke emphasized the larger number. Many of the Lakota, they claimed, lead semi-nomadic lives, lives that stretch from Alberta to Nevada, and that disdain the white distinction between nations such as Canada and the United States. Further, suspicion of the government certainly leads to underreporting and to a lack of faith that any attempt is really made to obtain an accurate number. A smaller number, they claim, means fewer dollars for the Reservation from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA).
Turn left at the convenience store in Sharp’s Corner, and drive eight miles to Kyle (“Pejuta Haka,” “Medicine Root,” in Lakota). Trailers, shacks and small houses, some old, some new, are scattered like dice over the landscape. Many have half a dozen old cars, scavenged for parts, up on blocks or down in mud and frost, littering the yards. A halo of old tires, clothes lines--laundry sideways in the wind--and children’s toys around each house soon gives way to the relentless rise and fall of the grassy hills. Oddly, the untidiness of this rural poverty can’t compete with the bed of landscape and sheet of sky; what would be eyesores elsewhere are swallowed by the majesty of the land. People with an astonishing gift for painting and sculpture easily ignore the junkyard aesthetic of their own homes. (On the other hand, describing white people’s impressions of the Rez, John Haas said, “You see ‘Dances With Wolves’ and think, ‘How beautiful!’ You wouldn’t mind driving around. But a week of driving 200 miles a day will change your mind.” It’s 80 miles or so to the nearest supermarkets, in Rapid City.)
A right on a rutted dirt road puts you within sight of the Wolakota Waldorf School, two trailers, one doublewide, the other not. Three vans, one of which works, a Ford, a Dodge and a Chevy--effectively preventing part-swapping that might make life a bit easier--are parked before the west side of the main building. On the wall is a medicine wheel, a circle enclosing a cross, about eight feet in diameter, painted in traditional colors, black, red, yellow, and white. Four directions, four winds, four races of people.
The trailer opens into a main room--classroom, dining room and kitchen in one. Off one end are a larder, the bathroom and an office. Off the other, the teacher’s bedroom. Six students presently attend the school, three in kindergarten and three in first grade. The kindergarten teacher, who lives at the school, is a white man named Christopher Young (who is, incidentally, my half-brother). He attended Waldorf schools himself on the east coast--the Hawthorne Valley School and The Waldorf School of Garden City--and had some observation and student-teaching experience before he took the job in South Dakota. The first grade teacher lives nearby with his family. His name is Reggie Little Killer. He is a Lakota man, a Marine veteran and a Mormon. He believes strongly in Waldorf education, he says, but has little experience of it and virtually no training in its methods.
School comes with breakfast and lunch. There is no tuition. Unemployment runs between 75% and 85% on the Reservation, and most families clearly cannot afford to pay even a small tuition. The teachers are paid $10,000 to $12,000 per year from money raised primarily in Europe, especially in Germany and Switzerland. Some summers, Mr. Young or Mr. Little Killer travel to Europe with photographs of the school, visiting different Waldorf schools, raising money. Isabel Stadnick, wife of Bob Stadnick, deceased, one of the founders of the Wolakota Waldorf School, also raises money for the school in Switzerland. The school also receives small contributions from some Waldorf schools in the United States, and is planning a more concerted fund-raising effort.
The Reservation, I hear, attracts a large number of central and northern European tourists in the summer (I was there in bleak February). Many come for a “spiritual” experience they cannot seem to find in Europe but that they believe lives strongly in the native Americans and the austere land of the Rez. A Swedish woman camped alone on a butte, vision-questing. It’s something of a joke to the Lakota, for many of whom spirituality is simply not something foreign or exotic. I was impressed, for example, by the effortless, seamless expression of prayer before a conference I attended and before each meal. Everyone stands, and someone is asked to say a prayer. The prayers I heard were an easy combination of Lakota tradition--mention of the Great Spirit, grandparents before us and grandchildren after us--and Protestant Christianity--ad hoc, “traveling mercies” for those attending, and thanks for the gifts around us. Some were in English, some in Lakota. Some ended with “Amen,” some with the Lakota words “Mi’takuye’ Oya’s’in,” “All of my relations.” Before sitting, many Lakota would add the phrase, “Oh han,” expressing agreement with what had just been said. If the Lakota have formulaic, written, memorized prayers, I did not hear them.
In the late 1980s, several Lakota people, including John Haas, Lemoine Pulliam, Robert Stadnick, and Ermina Red Owl, active in local schools but suspicious of involvement with the elected tribal Council, believed there had to be a better way to educate children. Dropout rates at the public schools on the Rez were approximately 70%, they said. Schools, under Federal law, could not acknowledge Lakota spiritual traditions, which would conflict with the “establishment of religion” clause of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And as money found its way from the BIA through the tribal Council to the schools, it was allegedly funneled off by rampant corruption of elected and appointed school officials and others. School governance, spirituality, and teaching and learning. In each of these areas, these people believed, there had to be a better way to educate children. And in their research, according to John Haas, the one name that cropped up again and again was “Waldorf.” So, knowing relatively little beyond what they had read, they founded the Wolakota Waldorf Society.
Robert Stadnick, school custodian at the public Little Wound School in Kyle; Norman Underbaggage, a lawyer; and Richard Moves Camp, a medicine man from nearby Wanbli, SD, traveled to Dornach, Switzerland, to research Waldorf education. There they met with Dr. Heinz Zimmerman, head of the Pedagogical Section of the Anthroposophical Society, who was “extremely enthusiastic about the idea” of a Waldorf school on the reservation, according to a promotional pamphlet produced by Mr. Stadnick. This trip raised money for the school, as well, which then opened in 1993. The small school began with only a kindergarten, but the founders hoped it would find support in the community and grow quickly through twelve grades.
According to some rumors, however, rumors that have hurt fundraising efforts since, Mr. Stadnick appropriated some of the money intended for the school in order to build himself a large house. (The house is now a bed-and-breakfast owned and run by Lemoine Pulliam and his German wife, Ulrike Frei. It is by far the largest and best appointed house I saw on the Reservation, although in a middle class suburb of any city in the United States it would pass unnoticed but for four round rooms that protrude from the ground floor. These are based on traditional tipis; Lakota life is lived in a circle literally and metaphorically.) It would be almost impossible to substantiate--or disprove--such rumors today, but, according to another version of the story, Mr. Stadnick’s wife, Isabel, brought money of her own to the marriage, money enough to build a large house.
Climb a small hill behind the school, less than two hundred yards, and you can see the rocky spine of a ridge a mile to the south, beyond the school and the track of the road. Hills roll for miles to the north. East, one small house. Little else. The wind drives ice before it, and provides the only sound. At your feet, another medicine wheel, about 18 inches in diameter, made of small rocks and pebbles. In the center, wrapped in red cloth tied at the ends, like hard candies, are ceremonial offerings, probably tobacco. Here, in what is literally the backyard of the Waldorf school, people used to come on vision quests. Again, I am struck by the nearness to the road, the school, the town. Spirituality is part of life here, not distant in space or in mind. I walk down the hill, away from the tiny acropolis behind this struggling school.
***
At the invitation of the Wolakota Waldorf School, I returned to participate in a teacher-training workshop. I remained after the conference to see the school in operation. The day I observed was typical in most respects. History cannot be built on one day of observation, but this day contributes to an image of contemporary Waldorf schools, an image that is part of a changing history.
The school has three teachers now: Susan Bunting, an experienced, trained kindergarten teacher from England and then Vermont; Christopher Young (mentioned above); and Edwin Around Him, a jack-of-all-trades who teaches Lakota language and culture. There is talk of, eventually, converting the school into a Lakota immersion school. (Reggie Little Killer discovered that teaching was not the career for him, and has moved on.) The school has grown from 6 to 21 students in kindergarten and third grade. Mr. Young, in good Waldorf tradition, has remained with the class that he started with in first grade. Because money and teachers were lacking, this means there are no first nor second grades. Mr. Young and Ms. Bunting are certain that, with funding, they could add first and second (and next year, third) grades. They have a small pool of talented and interested local people, two Lakota and one white, who would be willing to teach, and many families who would send students to the school. Mr. Young and Ms. Bunting are in the middle of a fundraising campaign, based on a poster and a letter from the school, and their joy was obvious at receiving a $100 donation from a medical doctor on the east coast the day I observed. They presently run the school, including instructional salaries, on $32,000 per year, or about $75 per day excluding salaries.
Their day begins before 6 am, putting classrooms in order for the day, and by 7:15 Mr. Young left to drive an hour and a quarter bus route to pick up about two-thirds of the students (the rest are dropped off by their parents). Ms. Bunting stayed at the school to prepare breakfast for all of us. Mr. Young stopped first at a general store--an unmarked metal barn with gas pumps out front--to pick up milk. The store doesn’t need a sign because everyone knows about it, Mr. Young said, and it stays in business by bootlegging alcohol, illegally, from the back.
The bus route wound through the town of Kyle and surroundings. Children appeared from derelict trailers, run-down government-built housing, and small ranch houses. They were neatly but frequently underdressed, and got in the van eagerly. They obviously had much affection for Mr. Young, telling him “knock-knock” jokes and teasing him. They also were precociously aware of mainstream American culture, far from the Rez, talking about movies like “The Matrix” and “Fast and Furious.” Their conversation was larded with violent images (“I’ll blow up that house with my bazooka.”), but my overriding impression was of their sweetness and openness. They looked after each other in small ways, buckling the seat belts of younger children, offering to lend a sweater, and asked many questions about my life in Massachusetts. Given the harsh home lives and poverty from which many of the children come, they were extremely well-disciplined and mature. A calm word from a teacher was enough to still them instantly. Eleven children, about two-thirds of the possible total, got on the van. Mondays and Fridays are not well-attended, Mr. Young told me, because of family activities that may involve driving to or from a powwow, for example.
We returned to the school a bit after 8:30, and all the students followed Mr. Young to the top of a knoll behind the school. We stood in a circle, as they do each morning, to say the morning verse. Then Mr. Young greeted each student in Lakota. Some responded in Lakota, and some in English (all but one of the students is Lakota).
Breakfast was cold cereal and milk, sugar or honey, and fruit juice. The tables were laid immaculately, with cloth napkins and rings, and children sat to bless the meal and eat. They chatted during breakfast, the routine well-established. After breakfast, the teachers put out bins of soapy water and students cleaned and dried their own dishes; a couple took it on themselves to wash my dishes for me.
The kindergarten children left the table to play, which they did spontaneously and imaginatively. The two boys who had been discussing bazookas and explosions on the bus stood at a play stove cooking an imaginary meal for the rest of the class. Other students built with blocks or played with dolls.
The third grade building is a shed, really, with a classroom about 15 by 20 feet behind an unfinished plywood alcove or mudroom off which are an enclosed toilet and a small storage closet. Untrimmed windows look roughly north and south, and a “blackboard” is painted on the east wall. Student paintings are pinned to the walls, and some seedlings rest on a shelf near the south window. There is a sink and some storage space in the rear of the room, with a recognizable clutter of painting supplies, chalk, beeswax for modeling, crayons and drinking mugs. The desks and chairs are hand-me downs from the local public school, or look like this, formica and brown-painted steel. The walls are painted a cool blue. There are 7 third graders.
The third graders sauntered up to their building, where they said another verse and then answered math problems that Mr. Young asked them to solve in their heads. Their abilities varied tremendously, and Mr. Young tailored his questions appropriately. He then asked for quiet and told part of the Lakota creation myth. Mr. Young spoke the names of the gods in Lakota, so it was hard for me to follow, but the story involved the creation of plants, with their differently colored flowers, and animals, with their different numbers of legs. When Mr. Young sensed attention flagging, he ended the lesson, and the students poured out for recess.
The playground consisted of a small swing, a climbing structure, and a (broken) slide. These occupied one end of a level dirt patch about 25 yards long and 10 yards wide. In the middle was one pole of a broken volleyball set, with shreds of netting wrapped around it. The children quickly decided to play an imaginative game of tag, similar to “Red Rover”, with the volleyball pole as “home base.” They were remarkably uncompetitive, taking the game seriously, but not crowing about winning, losing, or rules violations. This attitude manifested throughout the day in each activity, and I take it to be part of their culture, part that has not been destroyed by the circumstances of their lives. One boy had brought a baseball and bat, and I pitched in turn to those who wanted to play. Each batted until he got one solid hit, then gave the bat to the next hitter. Older children helped younger ones hold the bat and stand properly.
Following recess, the class returned for a brief math class, and then it was time for lunch--sausages, potatoes and mixed frozen vegetables. Several of the students drowned their food in ketchup. The routine was the same as that at breakfast, although some of the kindergarten children were noticeably tired, slumping in their chairs and having a hard time finishing their meals. (Ms. Bunting described some students living in large extended families in very small houses, and not getting to sleep until after midnight.) After lunch, the kindergarten bedded down for rest, and the third grade had painting. Once again, their mood was calm, serious, and good-humored. They were eager and helpful in setting up to paint and cleaning the room at the end of the day. A stepladder from outside the building was brushed off to provide an easel on which the teacher could demonstrate.
School ended at 2:30, and students piled into the van. Mr. Young’s route was extra-long because one parent had asked him to drop his daughter off at her aunt’s house, far outside of town. Mr. Young returned to the school a bit after 4 pm, during which time Ms. Bunting had washed the pots from lunch. They had about an hour to unwind before they cooked dinner for themselves (and me), cleaned up, maintained buildings or van or kept appointments in town, and began to prepare for the following day. The pace at which Mr. Young and Ms. Bunting worked was relaxed and deliberate but ceaseless. While students were in the school, the teachers’ focus never left them.
Monday is not a Lakota language day, so Mr. Around Him was not officially there, although he showed up at lunch time to discuss car trouble he was having. As soon as he walked throught the door, he was surrounded by, especially, the younger students. They clung to him and gazed at his face. (Mr. Around Him normally drives the van, but suffered a diabetic seizure a couple of weeks before I arrived and was awaiting a doctor’s clearance to continue this work.)
The day I observed was postcard-perfect, warming quickly into the 80s. Other days, the dirt roads are impassably rutted, or the van won’t start. Then Mr. Young cancels school and waits, or repairs the van. There is no set number of school days, and the schedule is extremely flexible. Mr. Around Him is expected on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, but lives far from town and does not have a reliable vehicle. The school runs on “Indian time,” something Mr. Young seemed more content with than did Ms. Bunting, although, often, neither has a choice.
I realized on this second visit to the Pine Ridge Reservation that, despite my attempts at a realistic view of, for example, Native American spirituality, I had romanticized it. I had initially taken, for instance, the prayer wheels on the school building and on the top of the knoll behind the school as evidence of a worldview. Come to find out that both are the work of German visitors, not of the Lakota people.
Before dinner on the first day of my second visit, Edwin Around Him held a small styrofoam bowl containing bits of each of the dishes we were to eat. We stood in a circle and he said a prayer in Lakota. Then he handed the bowl to Mr. Young and said brightly, “Now, go run up that hill!” I assumed the food would be placed at the top of the knoll as an offering to the spirits.
After dinner we walked up the hill to survey the school’s land and picture plans for developing the school when more money is raised. No styrofoam bowl in sight! A new, larger medicine wheel in a saddle between two small hills, however. I turned to Mr. Young: “You’ve got a new, larger medicine wheel,” I said. “Yeah,” he said, resignedly, “the Germans built it last summer.” “And where’s the bowl of food?” I asked. “Oh, around the corner of the school,” he said, which meant that it was in some undergrowth near the non-working vans. “You don’t take it anywhere in particular?” “No, just outside.” Telling Mr. Young to run up the hill had been a joke for my benfit.
Here I was, continually arguing against the improper objectification of things like Waldorf education that were not objects, coming to realize that I hadn’t given the Lakota credit for the same concept. Tops of hills, medicine wheels made of stone, and small dishes of food are not the point. The land on which we were standing wasn’t even Indian land until a bit over a hundred years ago when the Lakota were sent there, from more fertile and arguably more beautiful land in the Black Hills, by the whites. The Lakota could find a holy site, or make one, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, but if life took them elsewhere, as it had brought them here, they could do the same.
(Since I wrote this in 2002, Lemoine Pulliam died--he was diabetic--and Ulrike left the reservation, likely to return to Germany. The school closed briefly after Chris Young moved to New Hampshire, but it retained its Board of Trustees and then re-opened as a kindergarten only. Patricia Lambert is the current kindergarten teacher. The school's current website is http://www.lakotawaldorfschool.org.)
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