Borderland

This week my fourth-graders visited the Alaska Room at Ladd Elementary. The Alaska Room is a special classroom in our school district, set up to teach students about Alaska Native culture.

Around the room there were 3 tables. At each table there was a woman working, busy preparing materials for the kids to use. All around the room there were cultural artifacts: furs and drums and carvings, posters about Native Americans, maps that showed where different Alaska Native groups live, and a glass case with Native dolls dressed in skin clothing. One thing that caught my eye was a harpoon with a barbed ivory tip that looked very deadly. There was a huge halibut hook made of wood with a nail lashed to it for a barb. It was tied to a piece of rope with wooden floats. It would have taken a very large fish to put that hook in its mouth. There was a giant bone, maybe a whale’s rib, under a table. Interesting things were all around the room, no matter which way I looked.

Mary said that she was going to teach the kids about 3 different kinds of respect. She talked about the importance of teachers. She said that when she was a girl, her parents were her teachers, and so were her aunts and uncles, her grandparents, and the elders in the Eskimo village where she grew up. She told us that these teachers were important because in the old days people learned how to survive from their elders.

Then she did an interesting thing. She said, “I want you to think about something – I don’t want an answer – I want you to think about what you would do today, this morning, if someone told you to go eight miles down the trail to check on a trap.” She pointed out the window at a cold and snowy landscape. When she said, “I don’t want an answer,” not a hand went up. No voice answered her. But each student spent a few moments with their own thoughts. She paused in the thoughtful silence that followed her proposition.

She continued, “Imagine you lived over a hundred years ago…with no roads, no stores. Our people didn’t even use money back then…” and she went on to recount all of the modern conveniences that were not available in Alaska until modern times. She told the students that her teachers prepared her to survive in the world. And she told them that their teacher now is doing the same thing, and that the world, having changed, requires new survival skills than it did before.

“Today I want you to show respect for your teachers,” she said, “by watching them and listening to them.”

“The second type of respect that I want you to know about is respect for yourself,” she said. “You show respect for yourself by working hard and getting your work done. Don’t think about what the other people around you are doing. Concentrate on what you have to do. That’s how you show respect for yourself.”

Mary told the kids that the third type of respect she wanted them to know about was respect for the space of other people. She said that in her village, they would go visiting and would knock on a door. When they were invited in, they would step inside but would not walk into the room until they were invited to come in. “It might be 30 seconds, or 30 minutes,” she told them. “When you go around to the learning stations in this classroom today, don’t walk up to the table until you are invited by the person who is working there.”

Then she introduced Ida, Molly, and Katie, the women who waited at the tables. The kids stood patiently and waited to be called. I was impressed. The fourth-graders were, too, apparently. They were models of respect. The kids worked hard at the 3 projects they had for them to work on. In two of the stations they had to sew some things. It was obvious who had experience and who didn’t. There was little chatter, and lots of focused effort. I was pleased with the way they conducted themselves. We seem to have come a long way from the beginning of the school year. This was an important lesson, and they passed this little test with pure grace.

I came away from this with a new appreciation for the value of reflection, and a deeper understanding of respect as a Native cultural value. When she said, “I don’t want an answer.” Mary was letting each student know that the most important answer to her question was the one that each of them imagined. She was showing respect for them by not allowing some to speak out and intrude on the thoughts of others who might be less vocal. I also saw that respect, as Mary defined it, means more than common courtesy. It can shape our relationship to the world, and the work that we are called to do in it. Later on, when I spoke with her and told her how impressed I was with her presentation, she said that she came up with that little talk a few years ago when she started in that position. She said that she doesn’t put those words up on the wall because she wants the kids to carry that message in their hearts.

This was a lesson for us all.