Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part article. Part 1, “Rehoboth,” appeared in the January/February issue.
Not long before he was tapped to serve as secretary of education in the Obama Administration, Arne Duncan, then superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, unveiled a pilot program set to open in the fall of 2009: an urban boarding school, created to offer opportunities for the children of the homeless, as well as kids from troubled homes. Urban education in America, by and large, is in catastrophic shape; many inner-city schools are at risk, and no one knows it better than the residents surrounding those schools. “The proposal puts Chicago at the forefront of urban school reform,” the Chicago Tribune reported, “as cities struggle to raise the academic achievement of students hampered by dysfunctional homes and other obstacles outside school.”
These schools—in contrast to the Indian schools founded more than a century ago—will be located in neighborhoods the kids themselves know well. Furthermore, officials maintain that the intention is not to indict parents for their inability to provide their kids with an environment conducive to educational success. “This is not about doing something to parents because parents are bad,” says Josh Edelman, who has served for four years as the principal of The SEED School in Washington, D.C., the nation’s oldest and most successful urban boarding school. “This is about doing something in conjunction with parents and the community.”
It may well be easier for me, a white man, to say it, than it is for someone who is Native, but what seems clear is that the boarding school concept itself isn’t evil. In fact, the off-reservation boarding schools which still exist—whether under management of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) or faith-based organizations—today often have waiting lists. The first segment of a two-part story on National Public Radio, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” acknowledged the many failures of this project. But the second part, “American Indian School a Far Cry from the Past,” told another story altogether, a story rich with successes—like Seana Edwards, a Prairie Band Potawatomi from New Hampshire, who was failing badly in her public school classes before transferring to Sherman Indian High School in Riverside, California. Today, Edwards attends the University of California at Berkeley and frequently returns to Sherman to urge students to excel at what they do.
Charla Bear, the NPR reporter who filed the stories, says that while Edwards is well aware of the flawed history of these institutions, she also understands that boarding schools such as Sherman can offer much-needed help to at-risk students. “You feel part of that history and you get sad,” Edwards told Bear, “but at the same time, you realize that it’s so much better today and you get the opportunity to change it. You get the opportunity to make it better. Not just for you but for other people, for younger generations.”
Discipline is rigorous, typical freedoms are withheld, and students who would rather not live within the well-defined limits are dispatched back home quickly since many other young Native Americans are seeking enrollment at Sherman.
In Chamberlain, South Dakota, St. Joseph’s Indian School, founded in 1927 by The Priests of the Sacred Heart (SJC), similarly has a waiting list of students—150 at any one time—who would like to be enrolled. St. Joseph’s, which once was a typical dormitory-based facility, has changed over the years. According to its webpage, instead of housing its students in dormitories, St. Joseph’s offers “family living units offering a family/home environment.” It calls these living units “homes”: familial-type residences where a dozen or so students live under the care of the institution’s own “trained childcare workers.”
What’s more, St. Joseph’s is very clear about what kind of student can enroll: “Children who benefit from their present stable family situation,” says its own FAQ sheet, “are not accepted.” In its attempt to locate and enroll only those students from nearby reservations who they perceive to be most “at risk,” St. Joseph’s educational mission is clearly related to the changes presently being undertaken in Chicago’s public schools.
No longer do the few remaining schools work at “aggressive assimilation.” Both Sherman Indian School and St. Joseph’s deliberately educate their children in Native culture and history. The students are taught Native languages, and often Native arts are also offered, such as weaving or beadwork, even though—or so say some teachers at Sherman—those arts are rarely taught anymore in reservation homes. St. Joseph’s is clear in its emphasis on teaching Lakota heritage:
St. Joseph’s Indian School has a Native American Studies program that teaches the children traditional Lakota language, culture and traditions. The dance club teaches traditional Indian dances and songs and is dedicated to promoting a clear understanding and awareness of self. St. Joseph’s also holds a youth powwow on our campus each year.
In addition, St. Joseph’s Indian School is the home of one of the finest museums of Sioux history and culture anywhere in the state or nation: Akta Lakota Museum and Cultural Center, an institution which calls itself an “educational outreach” of the school on whose grounds it is located. It is clear that both schools have reshaped their curriculum and their day-to-day life to promote the beauty and the importance of Native culture, rather than deny, even outlaw, its character.
At Rehoboth, the dormitories closed two decades ago. Today, a recently completed Middle School includes a beautiful new computer lab, officially designated as the Navajo Code Talker Communications Center, “a place to honor our Elders and our language,” says the Rehoboth website. Just a year ago, the entire first grade, which includes white as well as Native children, went to the council chambers of the Navajo Nation and sang a few songs in the Navajo language.
Nonetheless, according to Charla Bear’s NPR reports, at the BIA there is no consensus whatsoever concerning the legitimacy of such schools—or whether the federal government itself should even be running Indian education in the 21st century. “You can talk to 20 people in our organization, and 10 people will say we shouldn’t have off-reservation boarding schools, and 10 other people will say there’s a need for these kinds of schools because of the at-risk students,” one official in the BIA education department told Ms. Bear. I encountered the same sharply differing perspectives in conversations with Navajo people who had been students at Rehoboth or who’d had family members there. Some are deeply grateful for the experience; some wouldn’t come near the school they attended as kids; still others have memories that stir gratitude and bitter pain in equal measure.
Probing the Mystery
From such memories of Rehoboth, I began to fit a few pieces together, pieces of a story that includes the long lines of white crosses over the unmarked graves at the Rehoboth cemetery. My grandfather, the preacher, plays a part in this story too. After all, he was a member of the Heathen Mission Board for thirty years at the start of the 20th century, and his ideas surely contributed (both for better and for worse) to the manner by which the mission undertook its work. I’m sure he prayed for the work frequently—maybe daily, maybe even unceasingly. In all likelihood, he valued the Navajo rug that hangs here beside me today.
When I asked Mr. White, a Navajo man whose memories brought him to tears, to explain why his father sent him to Rehoboth, his answer was simple: a tradition of goodness. “He [the man’s father] went to the hospital—and people there were so friendly and so ready to help the Navajos,” the man told me. “That was in the back of his head.”
But what had drawn his father—who was himself a medicine man—to trust the hospital? “My dad’s older sister is buried at Rehoboth. She probably died in the hospital. The Indian Health Service probably didn’t exist in those days. But Rehoboth hospital—our people, at least my family, got their medical treatment there. That was the open door.”
And more. “My dad’s mom could have died there too. We don’t know where she is buried. They could have gone there for their medical needs. The Rehoboth hospital was there for years already [before the late 1930s].”
The kindness, the love of the hospital staff, persuaded Mr. White’s father, who was not a Christian, to believe that what would go on at the school would be as beneficial to his son as the medical services had been to his family, in their time of real need, at death.
The Navajo regard for death is uniquely their own, a view not shared, for instance, by Great Plains tribes. According to Raymond Friday Locke, in The Book of the Navajo, “Death and everything connected with it is repulsive to the Dineh and dead humans are buried as quickly as possible.” Locke says that, traditionally, the Navajo people had no vision of heaven or some sweet afterlife. Once departed, the dead are met at the bottom of a mountain trail by relatives they recognize, who then guide them toward the underworld.
What remains, the corpse, was horridly repulsive to many traditional Navajo. In Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West, Hampton Sides says it is somewhat ironic that the Navajo people were feared as greatly as they were by their neighbors in the Southwest—the Zuni and other Pueblo dwellers, as well as the Mexicans—ironic because “the Navajos avoided killing whenever possible because theirs was a culture that had a deep-seated fear and revulsion of death. They wanted nothing to do with corpses or funerals or anything connected with mortality.” As Sides explains,
When a person died inside a Navajo dwelling—the round, windowless, dome-roofed hogan made of mud and timber—the body had to be removed from the structure by bashing a hole in the north wall [the direction of evil] and pulling the corpse through it. Then the hogan had to be destroyed. The taint could never be washed out.
Early Rehoboth missionaries obviously understood something of the traditional Dineh views of death. Already in 1910, in her Indian Mission Sketches, Cocia Hartog tells her white readers, “Great fear of death exists among the Navajos. When one is about to die, the relatives usually forsake him and leave him to die alone … . The hogan in which some one has died is henceforth a devil’s house and is shunned and feared as much as the graves over which evil sprits [sic] are believed to hover.”
Hartog recognized that a cemetery was a formidable threat to the established culture of the Navajo. “Our children have entirely conquered these superstitions,” she writes, speaking of the fear-driven rituals that normally accompanied death on the reservation. “They often visit the Rehoboth cemetery and decorate the graves. At the last funeral the boys assisted in the digging of the vault and lowered the casket.” Clearly, Hartog understood that when her students helped bury a dead body, they were rejecting traditional culture. “Many of the older Navajos, too, are losing their fear of death,” she wrote, “and undoubtedly the time is coming when the Navajo people shall say, ‘Death where is thy sting? Grave where is thy victory?’ When death shall be regarded not as a terror, but as a door opening into life everlasting.”
That species of traditional fear didn’t diminish as quickly as Hartog might have hoped. A quarter-century after she was writing, one of the men I interviewed came to Rehoboth school as a child and lived in the dormitory. He remembers an incident connected with the cemetery itself: “During my early years there, it was a sort of spooky. You know how boys talk about ‘skin man’ and all of that—the ghosts, and one time this boy came rushing in from way over there in the graveyard, [where they said they had seen] something white. I wouldn’t know if they were serious, but I was scared to death.”
What he remembers is a specific evil spirit with a long and storied history in Navajo culture: the “skinwalker,” a werewolf-like fiend who dresses in animal pelts, moves about on all fours, and often desecrates gravesites. “Skinwalkers removed the dead person’s flesh and ground it up to make a lethal poison called ‘corpse powder,'” Hampton Sides says, “which the skinwalkers blew into people’s faces, giving them the ‘ghost sickness.'”
How broadly and heartfully was the myth of the skinwalker accepted among the Navajo? I don’t know. What’s clear, however, is that one little boy was fearfully convinced the skinwalker was out there just south of his dormitory, skulking about in the cemetery, desiring to perpetuate his own horrifying brand of evil. He remembers more: “I covered my head with a sheet in my bed. And finally, Mrs. Van came out [and I told her] ‘so-and-so is telling us he saw a big old light over there tonight.’ ‘Don’t you ever think that way,’ she says, ‘—doooda, doooda’—’no, no, no.’ ”
That he remembers her speaking to him as she did is itself interesting. Obviously, there in the Rehoboth dormitory, use of the native language was not forbidden; in fact, even the white matron preferred to use Navajo with the children. That she would comfort this little boy, far from home, in his deep fear, by way of his native language, illustrates plainly her loving regard for the children she served.
Did she understand that the very simple act of comforting a little boy’s fears that night may have brought him another step away from his native culture? I don’t know that, nor does anyone a half-century later. Maybe what she did that night was nothing more than what any mother might have done. “She was just like a mom,” he’d told me earlier.
Today, years later, this old man is a radiant Pentecostal Christian who was baptized in the Spirit years ago, after he’d spent years battling chronic alcoholism. His son is on the Board of Rehoboth Christian School; his grandchildren attend.
Best Deeds and Filthy Rags
When I think about all of this—my grandfather’s work, his prayers, his deep faith that he was doing the right thing about “the Indian problem”—I can’t help but doubt my own grasp of what I consider to be truth. I can’t help but imagine where I too might be wrong, where even my blessed faith in God may well have led me in a direction that was my own and not his.
But I’m drawn to that moment, upstairs in a mission dormitory, a half-century ago: a shivering little boy, barely conversant in English, hiding under the very first sheets he’d ever known, scared to death of a skinwalker lurking somewhere outside his window, skulking through the Rehoboth cemetery just a half-mile or so south. And a woman who held him in her arms, much as any mother would, spoke to him reassuringly in his own language, and tried to take his burdens on her own shoulders.
I wonder sometimes if old Calvinists understood only half the truth of that Old Testament judgment about good and evil. “All of us have become like one who is unclean,” Isaiah says, “and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away” (Isaiah 64:6, NIV).
Maybe there’s a flip side to the injunction, something to offer comfort on stormy nights when all of us wonder who’s stalking in the darkness of death itself. Maybe that old line can be read as if in a mirror. Perhaps what I need to understand about my grandfather and his role in “the Indian problem” is not simply that our best deeds are as filthy rags, but that our own filthy rags may well be, in fact, our best deeds, when transformed, beyond our will to do so, by the magical righteousness of God’s own hand.
This complex story—which belongs to all of us who live on the North American continent—has one more mysterious angle, one that brings us back to cultural attitudes the Navajo people once carried toward death and dying. The duties that attend the death of a relative and loved one were so repulsive, Locke says in The Book of the Navajo, that earlier in tribal history, the job was assigned to slaves. Later on, he says, “white traders were often asked to bury the dead.” If white traders, why not the first Protestant missionaries to the reservations of the Navajo and Zuni? That’s what I’m thinking.
Today in the Rehoboth cemetery there stand several long rows of wooden crosses that show their age. Some are already down. None are lettered, nor do any of them mark a particular grave. Together they stand like sentries, but no one seems to know exactly why they’re there.
I asked around, and the daughter of a 90-year-old ex-maintenance worker at Rehoboth mission spoke to her father, who today is in a rest home a couple thousand miles away. Here’s how she explained her father’s answer:
He says that the maintenance department placed the crosses there in an attempt to mark where the graves were. During his time, there already were numerous graves for which there were no records, so the cross idea was to mark (if not identify) the individual graves. The cross idea was an effort to make the place neat and pretty. Dad said that the graves are probably Navajo Christians or students who died.
And then this. A retired college prof, who’s been trying to shape up the Mission’s own archival materials, came across some old notecards recently, three-by-five, that document something of what went on in the earliest years of the hospital, “listing the patients that came to the hospital, how long they were there, and noting the ones who died and (usually) where they were buried,” he told me in an email note. “It is interesting that some people were brought to the hospital dead because it was assumed that the hospital would take care of it.”
In its earliest years, it’s quite likely, in other words, that Rehoboth hospital acted as a kind of mortuary. I’d like to think that taking Navajo dead would have been consistent with the “holistic mission” of Rehoboth, those early missionaries and medical personnel who not only couldn’t refuse a suffering patient, but, if the notecards tell the truth, wouldn’t refuse people even when souls had already departed.
I’m unsure how those early missionaries qualified their acts of mercy, or on what particular Bible verses they might have relied, but I’m grateful that today—if the cards are right and my reasoning is sound—the Rehoboth cemetery holds many a mortal coil of Navajo folk who were brought to the mission for no reason even close to hearing the Christian faith, but simply because the men and women of the institution appeared at least to bring mercy to the depths of Native fears, the fearful urgings of their cultural heritage. Maybe they were being most Christ-like at that moment—even as they were being most considerate of Navajo culture.
It would be difficult to find any single place in all the open country of McKinley and San Juan Counties, New Mexico, that tells the whole story better than the Rehoboth cemetery. In its silence, it is a testimony to the dogged persistence of faith, Native and Anglo. Today, even here in a century-old cemetery, it’s vividly clear that not all of the efforts were as blessed as some white folks, good Christians, might have thought. Much of the story of Anglo missions is buried here too—and should be.
But someday, the Bible says—maybe soon, maybe not—a trumpet will sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. Someday, the desert brush will fall back and Rehoboth cemetery will come alive.
Stand out there yourself some morning, in the bright New Mexico sun—stand out there alone and marvel at what that day will bring. In the twinkling of an eye, graves—even the unmarked—will be opened triumphant for a host of witnesses stepping out of the desert dust in a blaze of colorful get-ups, a museum of turquoise, of cowboy hats and swallow-tail coats, of coats in many colors and hand-woven shawls and blankets as memorable as a desert sunset.
Just imagine them—men and women, boys and girls, ancients and stillborn, red and white, singing together in a chorus of Navajo, English, Zuni, of Dutch and Spanish, a chorus of multilingual praise.
From the new church at Rehoboth, from the brand new high school gym, it’ll take you no more than fifteen minutes to walk out there—maybe a half-mile due south of the old Mission House.
Go out by yourself some bright morning and wander through the plots, sift through the stories, take note of the love and care all around. Make it a pilgrimage, and dream of graves razed, the whole place suddenly opened with eternal dawn.
“Never again will there be an infant who lives but a few days, or an old man who does not live out his years,” says the prophet Isaiah.
Every knee shall bow. Every tongue confess.
That vision is the richest of many in the snakeweed and larkspur, in the eerie stony silence of an old mission cemetery.
James Calvin Schaap is professor of English at Dordt College. He is the author most recently of Sixty at Sixty: A Boomer Reflects on the Psalms (Faith Alive).
Copyright © 2009 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
