Why Are You Here?
By Derek Price
In Arizona's Painted Desert, Professor Derek Price and his psychology students discover as much about themselves as they do about the Navajo people with whom they live and learn.
The Motion of Songs Rising
They dance, moving back and forth.
Their bodies are covered with white clay
and they wave evergreen branches.
They wear hides of varying colors,
their coyote tails swing as they sway back and forth.
All of them dancing ancient steps.
They dance precise steps, our own emergence onto this land.
They dance again, the formation of this world.
They dance for us now˘one precise swaying motion.
They dance back and forth, back and forth.
As they are singing, we watch ourselves recreated.
-Luci Tapahonso, writing about Navajo Yei Bi Cheii ceremony
Five exhausted Wheaton students doze in the back of the van as Mae Peshlakai guides us on dirt roads to a remote ceremonial site in the moonless Painted Desert of northern Arizona, illuminated only by the Milky Way and our piercing high beams. On most January nights a perfectly silent chill complements the vivid galaxy, but this is the ninth and final night of a Navajo Yei Bi Cheii ceremony, unfolding nearby as it has for a thousand winters, when the Navajos called themselves Diné.
Mae finds it. Lights off, we park among the hundred heavy-duty pick-up trucks already ringing the floodlit hogan and dance area. Now alert and anxious, the students bundle up; three days into this on-site service learning course, "Child Development in the Navajo Nation," their cultural orientation begins to intensify. This morning they rose before dawn at the Peshlakais home to assist the family and neighbors in butchering a sheep, which we all ate for lunch. Then James, Mae≠s husband (whom Tony Hillerman wrote into his novel, The First Eagle, as a tribute to James≠ wisdom and leadership), guided us and his grandsons on a challenging trek up S.P. Crater, just north of the 12,000-foot San Francisco Peaks, sacred to the Navajos and to the Hopis, whose reservation lies within the sovereign Navajo Nation.
This evening only our six faces will reflect white from the bonfires ringing the smoky dance area. The students≠ request for social instructions draws only a smile and the gently offered, "Just mind your own business," from Mae. She is paraphrasing a Navajo dictum of "Be humble, be respectful" to all "people," a Navajo category which includes humans, animals, plants, and other entities far removed from the Western use of the term. The students already have learned this and much more in their preparation for this course, which included a November campus visit by the Peshlakais; in the next two weeks these students must live what they have learned.
The two patients of this healing ceremony seat themselves before the east-facing door of the hogan to receive the next of 33 groups of costumed and masked Yei dancers, who will sing harmony, beauty, and health back into the Diné universe, blessing the patients and all Navajos who are present. We are approached too, by a young woman who inquires, "Why are you here?" The students look to me, uncertain of her implication. I briefly explain our course; she replies that all of this tradition will be gone in a few decades because her generation is losing it. The gathering supports her point: Elders in traditional dress converse in Navajo while the majority of the adolescents present speak only English and dress like my students, who must grasp this and other Navajo cultural issues if they are to be effective in the classrooms of the Little Singer Community School during the next two weeks.
Amanda Dibble '02, Annamarie Dopheide '03, Jason Coscia '03, Katie David '02 and Natalie Seibel '02 are the fourth group of Wheaton students to undertake service learning with me in the Navajo Nation, but the first for whom it comprises a full-credit course of nearly three weeks. The rhythm of this January field course is: five days of travel/orientation; one week of service; a weekend of reflection and cultural activities; another week of service; two days of reflection, summation and travel; and a term paper to be completed on campus in February.
The evolution of this course began in 1987, when Professor Emerita Judy Rosenblith and I brainstormed about teaching developmental psychology in cross-cultural perspective, to build upon her course entitled, "Childrearing in Other Times and Places," first offered in the 1960s. Supported further by a new curriculum that encouraged courses in cultural diversity and guided by wise counsel from colleagues in anthropology who argued for focus on one specific culture, I identified Navajo culture as the ideal contrast. It fulfilled several key criteria: it's different from European-American culture in important dimensions (matriarchal versus patriarchal, collectivist versus individualist, Sino-Tibetan versus Indo-European language family, etc.); it is well described in rich social science literature; it is articulate about itself in print and on its own terms; it's physically and socially accessible; and it≠s replete with bicultural, bilingual spokespersons. The complex cultural intersection that is the Navajo Nation therefore became the focus of a new course, "Infancy Across Cultures," which uses the Navajo cradleboard as a starting point for inquiry into more substantial cultural issues in child development.
My own travels began immediately, to identify teaching materials and to gain firsthand experience with child development in Navajo culture. Students taking that course quickly began to ask how they could study in the Navajo Nation, especially after hearing my descriptions of Navajo ingenuity, dedication, and integrity in maintaining their culture while incorporating elements from outside, like school-based education and Western medicine. Given the problematic history (and present) of European American dominance and the current pressing economic and educational needs of Navajo culture, the most responsible way for Wheaton students to gain direct experience was through intercultural service learning. This reciprocal relationship focuses on addressing specific needs defined by the host culture through the employment of skills already trained in the visiting culture. Gettysburg College generously included my first Wheaton group in their established service program to the Navajo Nation in 1997. Then James Peshlakai suggested the critical link between Wheaton and the Little Singer Community School, a relationship that has steadily developed since.
The heart of this course is the service in the classrooms of a community-built school that aspires to educate Navajo children within the embrace and wisdom of their own culture. The educational vision of Little Singer himself arose in the 1970s from the sense of loss experienced by Navajo families suffering through generations of their children being forcibly transported to distant schools hostile to Navajo ways. The current generation of Navajo educators, including principal Lucinda Godinez, president of the school board Thomas Walker Jr., and board member Benny Singer, son of Little Singer, has expanded the original vision to incorporate programs in family literacy, community wellness and community service into a curriculum unique in American schooling. Their work has been facilitated by Dr. Mark Sorensen, director at Little Singer, who for decades has provided local and national leadership in the administration of tribal education.
With this year≠s orientation successfully completed, we move to Sorensen≠s ecologically self-sufficient ranch, overlooking the Painted Desert and Roden Crater, soon to be a famous and art installation that promises to let visitors "listen to starlight." For the next two weeks each student will assist in a classroom where the needs of the school have been matched to the Wheaton students≠ skills.
As is always the case in field courses, the unexpected occurs. Sorensen is invited to Washington to attend President Bush≠s announcement of new education legislation, so we must look after the ranch on our own for several days. And the Little Singer School schedules an opportunistic in-service for their staff during our first two days, effectively closing the school. We improvise by offering our service to the nearby STAR school for those days, a new multicultural charter school just opened by Sorensen, Walker and Kate Sorensen. My students rise to these challenges as they have to those presented in the orientation, providing valued assistance. I, too, must meet an unexpected challenge when asked to substitute for a STAR teacher and teach poetry to fifth graders. Fortunately, two Wheaton students are elementary education minors and can help me with the lesson plan.
Once at Little Singer the Wheaton students and I quickly settle into our work. Each student eventually is temporarily in charge of a classroom, too. I spend part of a day in each of their classrooms and also work toward developing other service opportunities for future Wheaton students. One day is spent introducing an associate from a nonprofit library support organization to Sorensen and Godinez. Both are interested in collaborative programs that may also interest my library colleagues at Wheaton, including archivist Zephorene Stickney, who already has consulted with the Tuba City, Ariz., Navajo public library during a previous trip with me. Another day is invested in meeting with the Flagstaff environmental justice officer of the Sierra Club, who identifies two important projects˘one involving the provision of hogan building materials for displaced Navajo families, the other the reclamation of a salt lake by the Zuni tribe.
The students' learning occurs around the clock. On a typical day we all rise before dawn at the ranch, have some breakfast, review plans, gather our things, and get in the van for the 45-minute drive to school, slowed some days as herds of wild antelope or Navajo sheep cross the dirt roads to the ranch and the school. The van rides are invaluable as conversational spaces to address concerns or questions any of us might have. We might stop for sundries at the general store on the paved road through Leupp (pronounced loop). By late afternoon we are on our way back to the ranch, where our chores will include water management, gardening, solar and wind power maintenance, feeding the chickens, composting and recycling, preparing dinner for the household, managing wood piles and wood stoves, and basic home maintenance. Dinner typically includes dialogue with Sorensen about our experiences, but the Peshlakais stopped in one evening and Walker stopped another night. After dinner we write in our journals and chat about the day, and quickly fall off to sleep.
The weekend is organized to provide mid-course reflection and a different view of the Navajo world. We repair to Tuba City to stay in town at a vacant home next door to the Secody family. Mary Secody spoils us all with food and help with our laundry. Lloyd and his sons give roping and riding lessons in the family corral, then he takes us to see dinosaur tracks and the petroglyphs of Newspaper Rock. Our hours-long reflective meeting is quietly attended by a Secody middle-school son, who finds us quite interesting. We sample local restaurants and the century-old trading post before the Secodys launch us on back roads to the Leupp area.
By Monday morning the students are back in their Little Singer classrooms. Annamarie helps guide kindergarten children through early reading experiences, and at the same time she learns about the clan system. Katie teaches a first-grader a new mathematics concept, and also learns about the self-direction entrusted to Navajo children. Amanda teaches an entire day of third-grade curriculum, and during recess discovers the importance of peer relationships on the playground. Natalie works one-to-one helping seventh-graders with ecology projects, and observes the power of Navajo language in transforming the students≠ behavior. Jason assists eighth-graders preparing for a spelling bee, and experiences Navajo social norms as students gradually relate to him over time.
As if in a blink we are back in Phoenix, but our bursting field journals testify to the daily intensity of the experiences we review on this last day. It has gone better than I would allow myself to hope, as the students have fully engaged all of our hosts and have been welcomed and mentored by the teachers in their classrooms. As we revisit exercises begun at the start of the trip, the students≠ learning crystallizes as they teach themselves through dialogue. The cultural metaphors that were generated for European American culture at the outset of the trip can be compared to the grounded Navajo cultural metaphors that the students now can generate. Students≠ self-assessments of intercultural competence from the start of the trip are revisited, with insights about overestimates of one≠s own knowledge and abilities. A service learning exercise also is revisited and reveals a new awareness of the teaching and learning partnership between service providers and recipients.
The students≠ new knowledge about culture, themselves and service allows them to go on to discuss substantial questions about child development and cultural context, fulfilling my course goals. But then those goals may have been too modest for this group of students who have since maintained relationships on their own with staff and children at the Little Singer School, with the possibilities of further collaborations at their own initiative in the near future.
