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Eracism
Touching a touchy subject
"All the freaky people make the beauty of the world. "
- Michael Franti
Our first night was welcoming.
After we got our gear settled into the youth center, we drove down to the casino, where the tribe was holding a pageant and dance. This was not a tourist show. A log shelter covered a circular dirt dancing area surrounded by a ring of benches. Tribal members sat in the bleachers and on blankets spread on the grass outside the shelter. Kids chased each other while adults hunched and talked. A concession sold snacks and drinks. The casino blinked its neon luminescence over our shoulders, but no one inside gambled on leaving the gaming for this event. The big mountain that loomed over the little town faded to grey silhouette in the pastel sunset.
Our group of more than two dozen arrived in a string, weaving ourselves into the intimate gathering. Things were already underway. Up front, a table of judges sat watching a young boy in ornate "Fancy Dancer" regalia as he trotted a swinging, spinning dance to a deep drum beat. After that, a series of other dancers - several young women, another couple of children - did the same, each dancer with their own style and look, each dance with its own accompanying tune, pounded out by the four men seated around a big drum.
We were the only non-Indians there. The kids we were with - 26 8th-grade students from San Francisco - watched tentatively, some standing, some sitting, drinking it in, whispering to each other occasionally, pointing here and there.
After the performances, awards were issued - several of the dancers were chosen as that year's young ambassadors to represent the tribe. Then elders, sitting in a folding-chair row behind the emcee, were recognized, each individually named, followed by inside jokes that sparked ripples of chuckling throughout the crowd. The warmth of the community radiated like the desert releasing the day's heat back to the night.
"We'd like to welcome the students from San Francisco," the emcee said to the crowd unexpectedly. We hadn't told anyone here who we were. Heads nodded all around us, looking our way. It was obvious which were us. "They'll be staying with us for a few days." More somber nodding.
"Maybe later," the emcee continued, addressing us after a short pause, "you can dance like Indians."
The crowd laughed out loud, casting more glances at us. Jono, Fritz, and I, three of the five trip leaders, laughed, too. We'd been there before. We knew the desert-dry nature of Native humor - myself, I find it akin to that acerbic New England bantering that I had to curtail when I moved West because nobody got it out here. Not everyone got this joke, either. Three students standing near us, faces pinched as this was going on, turned to us: "Are they making fun of us?" one asked.
"They just welcomed us," Jono explained.
But their confusion only grew, I'm sure, when after a few more formal dances, the emcee invited the spectators to join in, again speaking directly to his non-Native guests: "Come out!" he implored. None of our students moved, which seemed only to challenge him. "Come out!" he entreated us again, "Come make a circle. It's just like circling the wagons when the Indians are going to attack!"
The Indian audience about fell off their seats laughing at this one, while our students stared, patently uncertain about what was transpiring around them.
But a few believed that what they were seeing and hearing was okay, and tentatively entered the ring. Several of the dancers already getting into place greeted and guided them into spaces in the two concentric circles that were forming. And when the drumming started again, we watched our students lose their initial awkwardness and soon find their stride, stepping and flowing with the rhythmic roll of the circles.
This, of course, was why we were there. This week-long trip around the Four Corners was a sort of rite of passage to prepare these students for that bigger, more challenging world awaiting them in high school. I was there as a guide for the tour company hired to lead this entourage on this combination of adventure and service work that, we hoped, would give them a quick but meaningful taste of the delicious smorgasbord of land and people that is southwestern Colorado.
On this trip already, they'd run a river, climbed a mountain, and done service work with the Forest Service. This visit to the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, though, was something new and alien, even for this group's cultural, racial, social and economic stew - as it was, I'm sure, for Towaoc's residents, which, aside from trolling for dollars with the Ute Mountain Casino, does not pander to tourists or visitors. And while other school and church groups visit and do service work with the tribe, this school group - this was the second year in a row this school has sent a group here - was, we had been told, the only group to actually stay in Towaoc.
The next day followed in the positive wake carved by that first welcoming night. Our group went into the Ute Mountain Tribal Park to visit the ancient cliff dwellings and to work clearing out two 800-year-old check dams that had filled with sediment after last year's fires. Our two Ute guides kept us entertained with history and stories and humor and spontaneous Ute language lessons. The students worked hard moving dirt and clearing brush and were appreciative of the history and their presence in this rugged, remote, silent canyon.
The next morning, the students spun off into teams to tackle more service projects. Jono and I took a group out to the end of a long and lonely dirt road at the base of Sleeping Ute Mountain to repaint the faded face of a tribal elder's house. Another team spent the morning at the Head Start school, where they did some maintenance work and played and read with the kids. A third group organized a series of games and activities for the community-wide gathering scheduled for the town park that afternoon to celebrate the last day of school for Towaoc's students.
This event would transform their experience.
It began well enough: our students ran around and played games with the little kids they'd met earlier that day. Meanwhile, we adults talked with the teachers, tribal staffers, and parents over hamburgers and hot dogs and sodas. Through the afternoon, more kids arrived - the middle schoolers, and, finally, the high school kids.
I cannot say how or when or why the fabric of the event deteriorated, but unravel it did. Suffice to say that by the end of the day, words had been exchanged, slurs had been chalked onto a picnic table, and even a couple of us adults had been thrown the universal single-digit anti-greeting by some of the older local kids. A somber mood fell over the picnic, and soon everyone moved on, and we corralled our students into the youth center.
Damage control. The chaperoning teachers held a debriefing circle with the students to deflect the retaliatory anger, to defuse the confusion and cheap categorization, to deconstruct the experience and wring out some significance. And on the outside of our enclave, we knew the Ute adults were doing something similar with the other kids.
And myself? Listening to this meeting, I was thinking ... This stuff happens.
I know that's not very reassuring, or sensitive, or creative, or liberal, or assertive, or profound. But that's how I feel about this: that this came to pass is not a surprise. It's not what I wanted to have happen, or think should have happened; but it also is not a surprise. This is not meant as any kind of judgment against the Ute kids or the San Francisco kids or kids in general or anyone else. Because ... this stuff happens everywhere.
Here's what I wanted to prance around and blurt out like some whacked street-corner preacher at the debriefing: We all have our favorite graven image of who's going to give us grief, whether that portrait is painted in to highlight a skin color, income level, social situation, or cultural category. But the fact is, in my four-and-a-half decades of traveling around, I've had run-ins with someone, some people, in damn near every group I've ever encountered. Not just those obviously different from me; I've been hassled by prim college professors, businessmen and professional women, mountain bikers, river runners, college students, and pasty-white trust-fund skateboard punks in downtown Telluride.
Jono offered a story to illustrate this point at the debriefing: "Look, I am as heterosexual as they come. But when I first moved to San Francisco," he said, bringing his point literally home to this group - and who, it should be noted here, had bleached-white hair and sported two large silver loop earrings - "one of my first experiences was to get called 'fag.' In San Francisco!"
His real point came after, though, when he laughed, hard, and just shrugged.
This stuff happens. These people exist. Everywhere. Is this the way we work? The way humans are wired? I don't believe that, either - not individually, anyway. But as I see it, within the bell curve of any population, there are cooperative, curious, welcoming people; and there are mean, defensive, aggressive people; and there are hurt, suffering, confused and abused people. And we cannot know, or pretend to know, the backstory that has led any person or group of people to where they lash out in the way they do or for the reasons they do.
This may not be part of being human, but it is part of the greater human landscape, as much as thunderstorms or floods or droughts are part of the land. Just as random. Just as predictable. Just as unavoidable. And sometimes just as dangerous. We're not going to change that. Or understand that. Or deconstruct that. But: we can control how we react. We always, no matter what, control our own attitude.
I never jumped up and offered my lecture though. The meeting ended, with a fair share of tears and grumblings, but overall everyone seemed better for it.
As the kids filed out of the room toward their sleeping bags, Jono stood next to me. "We wanted to expand their minds," he said, "and they got exploded."
The next day, before we left, several people, adults and kids, came by to see us, to talk, to blow on the coals of our friendship. One woman, a mother of one of the local kids involved, gave one of our involved students a necklace so she'd remember what was and should be honored as the true experience there.
"It's going to take time to earn their trust," Fritz said as we were loading the vans. "Until then, I can see why they'd see us as a bunch of tourists come to gawk at the Indians."
Meanwhile, a half-dozen of our students were over hanging with a dozen or more kindergarten-age kids on the swing set, laughing and yakking and chasing each other around. They weren't, I was thinking as I watched them, exhibiting mere "tolerance," or even practicing Zen-ish "acceptance"; they were fully appreciating each other. Sharing. Exploring. Just being with each other.
Fritz pointed at them. "They'll have good memories of us to start with, if nothing else," he said.
The students were returning to San Francisco the next day, so we had one more stop on their Four Corners cultural journey. We drove the two hours from Towaoc to Ignacio to spend the day at the Southern Ute Bear Dance Powwow.
This event would transform our experience, again.
Colors. People wearing a dizzying, dazzling array of colors, cut and worn in infinite variety. Spinning and moving and flowing. And drum-pounding so pulsing and penetrating that it beat my heartbeat into step.
I don't come to a powwow to gawk. I come to be there.
The students were fully there as well, visibly soaking the drumming, swallowing the splash of colors - how could you not? They stood enthralled. And more: they went up and talked to the performers, other kids their age, and were given gifts of stories about the costumes and the dances.
Then they found us: A group of girls decked out in beads and leather ran up to a pack of our students. Hugs all around. Smiling and chatter. Then I recognized the Ute Mountain dancers from our first night in Towaoc.
And then, again, between songs, the emcee addressed us - even though I had no idea again how they knew who we were.
"We'd like to say hello to the students from San Francisco," the emcee's amplified voice bellowed as he pointed over our way. It was obvious which were us. The crowd and dancers and drummers applauded.
A pause. Then the joke: "Hey, why don't you all come up here and do a two-step or something?"
Everybody there got it this time.
Ken Wright, a self-described "paleo-dad," is the author of two collections, A Wilder
Life: Essays from Home and Why I'm Against It All.
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