Children of Crisis

by Robert Coles

  Indian Children

  Pueblo Children

  on the Boundary Line

  In a pueblo between Albuquerque and Santa Fe, Rose, a girl of nine, talks to herself. From a distance her mother watches and smiles. Overhead a small, single-engine plane slowly approaches. At first it is a silent object in the sky, a welcome addition to exceedingly sparse terrain. But gradually the plane becomes something immediate, noisy, commanding, intrusive, distracting. Rose does not hesitate to register her disapproval, her outright annoyance. She gestures impatiently; she waves off the plane rather than waving at it. Almost simultaneously her mother also expresses how she feels: a frown upon her upraised face. Soon the plane recedes from view, and the girl resumes talking; the mother’s face again shows a smile.

  Ten minutes go by. The mother withdraws. She has chores to do. Rose keeps talking sporadically to herself; a minute or so of words, a couple of minutes of attentive silence. The girl’s sister appears; she has been playing elsewhere but has become bored and curious: where is Rose? Sally, aged eight, picks up a stone and throws it. The stone lands where it was meant to — near, but safely not-too-near, the older sister. Rose acknowledges the kind intent, but appears upset — as if Sally is an airplane that has been moving along the land, preparing for a long takeoff, and now has chosen this spot, of all places, from which to lift up toward the sky. Soon Sally finds out why Rose has looked so impassive, surly even. An injured jay, able to hop, skip, jump, but not to fly away, has been chirping nervously, incessantly around Rose — neither leaving her altogether nor coming close enough to warrant a rescuing grab.

  Rose wants to feed and care for the bird. She has been intermittently talking, singing an improvised song, standing rather still, hoping that the bird would get the message: here is someone friendly but not pushy — someone without ulterior motives. Rose’s mother has been delighted that her daughter can feel such concern, can demonstrate restraint, such a continuing and respectful sense of control. When Sally learns — rather quickly, in fact, and without any instructions — what has been going on, she too takes her position and tries to be, at the very least, an impassive, earnestly neutral figure. For several minutes longer they split roles — the older sister actively beckoning, the younger one almost transfixed.

  Finally the scrub jay is enough won over to stand still and be silent — at a distance. The three of them now form a triangle. For another few minutes there is not a movement, not a sound. Then, Rose gently signals Sally with her right forefinger to edge over. Gradually, step by step, with periods of stillness in between, the younger sister moves toward the older one. When they are together they say not a word; they stand still, then slowly sit down. The bird is by now interested in them. It does not move away. It stares at them, and they at it. An impasse, it seems. But the bird relents, moves toward the girls, and soon is busy eating. Rose has been furtively surrounding herself with small amounts of grain, and the bird could not resist. Finally, Rose swoops and catches hold of the bird. With great skill she seems to persuade it — most likely by the assurance her hands convey — that she is up to good rather than harm. The bird has not frozen in the girl’s hands and does not make a lot of noise — but rather, nibbles some food that is offered.

  Like a skilled but tender and respectful surgeon, Rose examines the bird; it continues to be strangely compliant, quiet. The girl talks to the bird, reassures it, tells her younger sister what the problem is: a damaged wing, most likely. They must go home, the two of them, and find a place for their newfound friend. The girls walk silently toward their house. They are ordinarily capable of, prone to, continuous chatter. But they worry that their talk would frighten the bird. When they reach their house they have second thoughts. Without saying a word, Rose starts to make a detour, and Sally not only follows but registers a knowing look: what will their mother say if she sees them entering the house with the bird but with no resting place prepared for it? Soon they are ready for their mother’s possible objections; they have some of their pony’s hay, are fashioning a nest, and smiling at the bird — and, with a certain satisfaction, at themselves.

  Their mother, who had gone inside to prepare food before the bird was caught, stops cooking and joins their silent company. She motions with her head toward a corner of the room; the girls go there so that they can attend to the nest. The mother examines the bird, lingers attentively with the wing, thereby concurring in the diagnosis her daughters have made, and walks over to them. In a minute or two the bird is in the nest, with some water and grain nearby, and the mother and her daughters are outside the house, their eyes eagerly searching the sky: is there another bird up there circling, circling in vain? Satisfied that such is not the case, the three feel free to resume the rhythm of their lives. The mother has her cooking to complete, her washing to do. Rose and Sally want to help her, but she says no, they have been very helpful to the bird, and now ought to play.

  Sally spies her cousin and runs to say hello. Rose is feeling a little reflective and nostalgic: “My father told me once that his uncle used to ask him a question: ‘Do you know whether the sheep were put here for us to use, or whether we were put here to be of help to them?’ My father would kill a coyote, then he would think of his uncle’s question, and if one of us was with him, he’d ask the question again. I would say that I didn’t know, and my father would always say that I was right, and he hoped I never answered any other way. Last year a coyote killed one of our sheep, and we killed a coyote later, and my father said it was probably the same one, though he wasn’t sure. Then I asked him about the coyote: Why is he here? My father said he didn’t know, but he was glad I was asking. Then when I was in school I decided to ask the teacher. She said it was a foolish question. She said that coyotes are a nuisance; they kill our sheep, and they should be shot on sight. She said animals are for us to use; that’s what the Bible says. Then she told the class that sometimes the Indians worry too much about animals and birds and plants; and if you keep on worrying all the time, you’ll never build a country, like the white people did here in America. When I came home and told my mother what the teacher said, she was very sad. She told me to feel sorry for the white people and for that teacher of theirs. She said there’s nothing we can do to change the way white people think, but we at least can shake our heads and think to ourselves that coyotes aren’t always as bad as we may think they are when we see a dead sheep. She told me to tell my father what I told her, the story of the teacher, when he comes home later in the day. I did, and he looked very serious, and he thought to himself; finally, he called me over and he told me that long ago our land was a young sheep, and then the white people came, and they built the country up, like the teacher said, and now we are living in a pool of the sheep’s blood.”

  She looks upward, notices a large puffy cumulus cloud racing across the sky, predicts that it will narrowly miss the sun, is proven right, feels pleased with herself. When she was younger her father and an older cousin would stand with her and watch intently as the sun struggled to break through a cloud. Sometimes they would venture predictions: yes or no. She would always say maybe, until one day her father with some seriousness, and a touch of disapproval, indicated that henceforth she ought to stop hedging and risk a choice. She remembers how afraid she was to do so. She remembers her cousin trying to let her know the basis for his decisions — the size and thickness of the cloud, the speed of its movement, the heat of the day. She has never really taken those various considerations into mind as she makes her predictions, at least consciously, but she has made a lot of them, and apparently with a good deal of success: ‘I look at the cloud, and I may decide right away that nothing, not even the sun, will break through. So I say no. Or I may be unsure; then I say yes. I’m never really positive, but if I’m doubtful, that means the sun will probably shine through to us. I worry about the broken clouds — all the pieces scattered. My grandfather heard me asking my mother if it is painful. He said no, there is no pain, there are no good-byes.
The small clouds are on their own, and they just keep moving.”

  She decides to draw the sun, the sky, a cloud (Figure 45). She starts with the cloud rather than, as white or black or Chicano children almost invariably do, with the sun or the sky. She works very carefully with a pencil; she is anxious to convey a mixture of fragility and strong presence. When she is satisfied with what she has done, she takes a black crayon and goes over the pencil lines ever so gently. Then she is ready for the other crayons. But the sky, too, is a demanding task for her. Unlike American children of different ancestry, who tend to draw skies quickly, often as an afterthought, she works slowly, painstakingly. She muses aloud as she works her way across the paper: “I hope I am being fair. The sky never stops watching over us, and I want to show my appreciation.” As for the sun, it is, as she often observes, “the mother of the earth.” She uses a pencil first, slowly makes one circle after another, until she produces a size that strikes her as right. She wants the sun to be prominent, but not too prominent.

  Why that struggle — the circular lines put down, then erased in favor of another broader arc, or smaller one? She is quite sure of what she has in mind, and why: “If you look at the sun when it is trying to break through a cloud, but so far hasn’t, you wonder how it will ever break through any cloud. But if you look at the sun on a clear day, you might be blinded. The sun is the most important part of our world, but you could forget about that and never remind yourself — if it wasn’t for your mother or your father. Once I brought a picture home from school. I was just learning how to draw, and I drew our house and the tree next to it. My father saw the picture and he didn’t like it. He called me over, and said that something was missing. I didn’t know what to say. I looked carefully, and then I noticed that I’d left out one of the windows to our house. He became even more upset. He told me that he didn’t care whether I had any windows in the small house, or whether I drew the house so that it looked like one of the big houses rich Anglos have in the city. It was the sun I’d left out! How could I do that, he kept asking. I stood there and wished I had crayons like those the teacher gives us to use, so that I could do something right away to make the picture look good to him.

  “I told him that I’d like to go buy some crayons, but I didn’t have the money. He asked me why I wanted to do that. I told him what I was thinking. He didn’t like me at all for saying that I wanted to please him! He was even angrier. He said that I owed it to the sun, not to him, to be more careful. We owe the sun our lives, and so does everyone else — he kept saying that every day for a week or two, until I could tell when he was going to mention the sun, by the look on his face, and I started saying what he was about to say before he opened his mouth. Then he decided that I had learned my lesson; and he was right, because I’ve never since drawn any picture without first wondering where I should put the sun, and how big it should be, and whether I should have the sky clear or cloudy.”

  When Rose has sketched the right outline for the sun, she is ready for her crayons. She does not quickly apply yellow, then go on to something else, as most other children from other parts of the country are likely to do. She works slowly, deliberately — with the same care some children give to pictures they draw of themselves or friends. When she is through with the yellow crayon, she takes the orange one, and gently touches the sun with the darker color. Still not completely satisfied, she uses a touch of red. Then she hesitates, considers whether she wants to do any more with the picture, and decides that she is indeed through: “I will call this picture ‘The Sky’; it is my favorite subject. It is my mother’s and my father’s favorite. My uncle likes me to draw the ground; he says I should show where the sun’s light falls. But that’s what I’ll do in another picture. I would rather draw two than one!”

  She is quick to prove herself a person of her word. She takes another piece of paper and picks up a brown crayon, as if ready to proceed, but looks at that paper’s emptiness for a minute or two, a rather long time for a child of nine — especially one who has a clear idea in her mind of what she intends to draw. When she does begin she again shows herself different from many other American children. She starts her view of the ground from well below its surface. In fact, she begins by outlining a rabbit’s burrow. Then she uses a heavy application of brown to illustrate some worms. The sandy earth is made light brown. She is very careful with the roots of plants and small brush, which she indicates with strokes of her black crayon. The above plant life also gets close attention. As she works along she reflects: “If this was the desert, it would be different. We’re at the edge of the desert here. We’re near enough to the Rio Grande, so there is a good water bed. I went with my father to Arizona a year ago, and there I saw the true desert. Even here we have cacti, and to someone from the city, who has never been to the southern part of New Mexico or Arizona, this looks like the desert. Our teachers at school say it is semidesert. My father said that before the white man is through with his tricks, all the rivers will flow to the cities, where the white people live, and on the reservations we will have no water at all. But the teachers say no, the government in Washington wants to be fair. The teachers work for the government, and they are sure they know what it’s going to do. My father says he knows the history of our people, and it’s not the same history they teach us in school.”

  As she concludes her drawing (Figure 46), she makes remarks about the land she has pictured, and she freely acknowledges their source: “My mother used to punish me. She would see me kicking the earth, or pulling up some brush, and she’d tell me to stop. We’d complain that we were just playing, but she didn’t accept our excuses. Once I brought some water out, and I was making mud-bread, I called it. She didn’t like that idea too much. She said I should be more careful. She told me to go in the house and think about what I could do that was better. I told her I didn’t know why it was so bad for us to make forts or cook food — with the mud we made by bringing water to the outside earth. She said it was the way we were playing; she had been watching us, and we were digging in one place, then another, leaving ditches and holes, and not bothering to fix up what we’d done to the land after we were through. Instead, we started a new game further down the path. She told us we were acting like white people. She told us that a lot of Indians learn to act like white people. They learn in school, and they learn in their jobs. She said we’d better watch out.

  “Then my father came home, and he told us off. He was upset with my brother. He told my brother that he’s thirteen, and he should have stopped us, instead of going along and helping us. My brother had an old tire from a car, and he’d put water in it, and was making it go round and round, up and down the path. My father made him return the tire to the car. My brother said the car was just a pile of junk; it had been left by some white man near the reservation. My father said the white man had been very successful; he not only spoiled the land, and got rid of something he had no use for anymore, but he managed to spoil us, too!”

  She stops abruptly. She looks out at the path that leads from her house and takes in her hands another piece of paper, as if she were about to make yet another drawing, this time of that path. But no, she puts the paper down. She has remembered her father’s remark. She has, she acknowledges, spoiled nearby land upon occasion — the path, for example. If left to her inclination and that of her brother or her sisters, the path would be even more rutted than it is. But she has learned. She has been told repeatedly that even if Indians are weak and vulnerable, with respect to the white man, they are a thoughtful and intelligent people, who treat with respect what they do own, what they have left. And what they own is, actually, not theirs. Rose is careful to distinguish between her own sense of property and the lessons she learns at school: “We are here, and we will stay. But a day may come when we leave. A day may come when the white people have to leave too. That might be in the future. My brother once asked a teacher if she thought America would change — if the white people would always be here. The teac
her thought he meant that someone would attack the country and drive all the white people away. She asked my brother if that’s what he meant, and when he said no, she decided that he was asking her a ‘stupid question,’ that’s what she told him. She said there are over two hundred million people in the United States, and most of them are white, and they’ll just stay here, and the country is changing all the time, because it’s a free country, but that didn’t mean it’s in any danger of disappearing.

  “My brother decided not to argue with her. He came home and told us that all he was trying to say was this: there was an ice age, and a tropical age, and there were the dinosaurs, and then they disappeared; and it could happen that people would disappear, too. And he was trying to tell her what our father always says: that the white man keeps on winning victories, but he may lose the war. He may end up turning his land into a big pile of junk. He spoils everything he touches, our father says — including us, the Indians! So it’s our fault; we’ve become like the white man. That’s what my father wants all of us to remember — that we should fight the white man right here, in our house and outside, on our land, by being different from him.”

  On the other hand, her father was pleased to be given an old television set by a white man he knew. The man was going to throw it out and asked her father whether he wanted it. Yes, of course, he did. The set works well; it has a small screen, however. Rose cannot fail to wonder about that set — and the pleasure her father and mother get out of it. Not that she, too, doesn’t like very much to sit and watch one program after another. But it has been her teachers, the whites who are at the school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), who denounce most television sets — in the same vein she hears her father speak of other gadgets. Once she talked with her brother Tom about the apparent incongruity. Ought they not talk with their father? No, the boy said; if they were going to anyone, and he recommended against it, they should approach their uncle, their mother’s brother, because he is more outspoken and tends to influence their father. Moreover, he knows white people quite well. He worked for a time in Albuquerque for the Bureau of Indian Affairs; he was a clerk, a person who ran errands, and later he was in charge of a pool of cars. Now he works for the state of New Mexico; he helps maintain and protect a series of irrigation ditches and helps with plans to develop the state’s roads.