Knitting for Peace by Betty Christiansen

Author:Betty Christiansen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2011-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

KNITTING FOR NATIVE ELDERS

For more information on the Adopt-a-Native-Elder Program, and to find out how you can contribute, contact:

Adopt-a-Native-Elder Program

328 W. Gregson Ave.

Salt Lake City, UT 84115

(801) 474–0535

[email protected]

www.anelder.org

IF YOU WALKED INTO DONNA BRUGGE’S CROCHETING CLASS BLINDFOLDED, YOU MIGHT EASILY MISTAKE IT FOR THE KIND THAT’S ROUTINELY HELD IN YARN SHOPS AND COMMUNITY EDUCATION CLASSROOMS. “NOW REMEMBER,” SHE ANNOUNCES, “EVERYBODY’S GOING TO STITCH AT THEIR OWN TENSION,” THEN LOWERS HER VOICE AS SHE GIVES SOMEONE ADVICE—“EVERY ODD ROW IS A RIGHT SIDE, SEE?”—AND SOMEONE ELSE PRAISE—“YOU SURE YOU NEVER CROCHETED BEFORE?” THE ANSWER SHE RECEIVES BEGINS TO REVEAL THE CLASS’S CONTEXT. “NO, MA’AM,” A MALE VOICE DRAWLS, WITH A LAUGH. UNCOVER YOUR EYES, AND YOU’LL SEE THE SPEAKER IS A YOUNG MAN WITH A CREW CUT AND THICK FOREARMS, BLUSHING THROUGH A DEEP SUNTAN, AND CLAD IN PRISON GREENS. Around metal tables in the cramped recreation room of the Jackson Correctional Institution, a medium-security male prison in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, sit a dozen men dressed in identical clothing and performing similar motions. At one table, a brawny man with tattooed arms delicately loops red yarn around his pinkie and a plastic hook. Next to him sits an imposing fellow with a long ponytail and thick, furrowed eyebrows, so focused on his work he scowls. Except for recreation leader Brugge’s encouragements, it’s dead quiet—the concentration is almost palpable. “Damn,” mutters inmate Brian Antonissen across the room, and inmate Russell Otto, whose mother taught him to crochet thirty-five years ago, comes to his rescue.

“You’re doing fine,” he assures him, “you’ve just got to relax.”

“I thought this was going to be easy,” Antonissen complains. “This is rocket science, man!”

“That’s the nice thing about crochet,” says Otto. “If you make a mistake, you can just pull it out.” His comment’s double meaning is lost on no one in the room.

Men and women in prisons across the country are a mixed lot. Among them are college graduates and check forgers, schoolteachers and drug dealers, business owners and sex offenders, musicians and murderers, parents and prostitutes. Some have made a life of crime; many have simply made one bad choice. All are paying the consequences, from a few months in a county jail to life without parole in a high-security prison. But despite their diversity, they have much in common. All have done some harm to society. All have been sequestered from their families and communities in a society composed of strict rules, few privileges, and difficult personalities. All have a lot of time on their hands.

Administrators at certain prisons across the country are discovering that these two things—time and hands—can be used in a manner that benefits everyone. In these facilities, convicted criminals are taking on the gentle pursuits of knitting and crocheting. Made with donated yarn and tools, usually plastic needles and hooks that must be checked out and accounted for at all times, their finished projects are used to warm and soothe the needy in the very communities they have harmed.

The tables in

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