Stealing Indians by John Smelcer

Author:John Smelcer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2016-07-09T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

NOVEMBER WAS ALWAYS a hard month at Wellington. The thin, white blanket of snow did nothing to hide the harshly institutional outlines of the school. If anything, it somehow made the institution look more colorless, more black and white, with intermediate shades of gray, as if the place were empty of life. The ground was gray, the roofs were gray, the barren shrubs and naked trees looked black or gray or some lifeless shade between, and the gray-black smoke billowing from the chimneys and smoke stacks was the only movement on the bleak, wintry scene.

Even the sky seemed steel-like and gloomy.

It was a sad and depressing time for many of the recently arrived children, who, traditionally at this time of the year, experienced their most intense bouts of homesickness. Only during the Christmas season would the gnawing pain be worse. It was the lonely month of abandonment when even the sports fields were forsaken—the football and baseball uniforms and equipment put away for the season, the track field and basketball courts buried under a thin mantle of crusted snow and ice. What little hope and happiness had risen from—or survived—this new life, for whatever reason, seemed to have deserted the brooding dorms and classrooms, the gray woods and sky.

Simon Lone Fight was homesick. He came from a reservation in the Four Corners region, that wide-ranging expanse of the American Southwest long the domain of the Navajo, the Zuni, the Hopi, and other Indian peoples. And what Simon missed the most, besides his dead mother and father, were his bent-over grandparents, his dog, and hearing the increasingly distant sounds of his Indian language spoken around the house, in the stores and gas stations, at the bingo hall, all over the reservation. Those sounds, coming from the throats of his family, the mouths of relatives, or the lips of perfect strangers, were part of him. The words tumbled inside his heart, ran the winding course of his veins. Unlike many of the students at Wellington, Simon still spoke his language, heard it clearly in his dreams of rocky, red canyons and soaring eagles, of cool, shadowy caves in steep cliff sides.

He had met some other students who were Navajo, though none of them were from his reservation. Sometimes, they would sit together whispering in Navajo, careful not to let teachers overhear them. If caught, younger children had their mouths washed out with lye soap, or were forced to lick the floor, or were paddled and sent to their dorm room without supper—sometimes a combination, sometimes all of the above.

The punishment for older students was of a different order. There were rumors of having needles pushed through tongues as discipline.

One morning at breakfast, Lucy shared a story she had heard from a girl her age, named Ada Lame Deer, whose room was across the hall from Lucy and Maggie.

“Ada told me about a girl named Franny, who graduated last year but who used to room with Ada. Franny once told Ada

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