Healing

Healing

TLDR from ChatGPT: The author reflects on their solo backpacking trip, seeking healing and headspace after a busy period hosting visitors from Cape Town. They recall interactions with Mimi, a forceful figure who embodies healing traditions passed down from her ancestors. Through Mimi's stories and teachings, the author learns about gratitude, commitment, and the transformative power of deep engagement with life. Mimi's approach to teaching and mentoring prompts introspection about the author's own role as a teacher and their future path. The trip serves as a journey of self-discovery, despite being cut short by rain, leaving the author feeling rejuvenated and inspired.

April 7, 2024

              I’m writing on a hiking journal I made for myself, sitting on a bear canister and looking out over a low-lying fog hanging over the treed hill on the other side of the Hoh River. I’ve been hearing this rhythmic guttural sound that has the arpeggiating crescendo of bird call but is chillingly resonant. Do bears make that sound? Elk?

              It was my desire to do a solo backpacking trip, despite the forecasted but fortunately so far sporadic rain I’ve encountered here, despite learning 30 years and 30 miles from here—when I fled a trip alone despite the beauty of Third Beach—that maybe I don’t fill my time as satisfyingly as I foresee. Hiking alone, yes. But backpacking? Check with me tomorrow.

              I want to do two things on this trip: recover from an extraordinarily breathless couple of weeks preparing, coordinating, and leading a fully hosted visit of sixteen students and teachers from Cape Town, and, to find headspace to write about some of the big things I experienced, hosting Mimi, in particular.

              I have been chaperoning trips to Cape Town since 2017, and from the start, I was awed by Mimi’s force of will. She is wise and loud, with as sudden a solemnity as with quick laughter, directing a crowd like a fifth limb, and, with a rebuke, wielding shame like a thunderbolt to the soul.

April 8, 2024

              Just slept eleven hours, from 7:20 p.m. until 6:20. It was mostly dry last night, with a light rain now.

              In 2019, our three high schools went for our closing retreat to a place new to us on the Melkbosstrand. The large, forbidding steel door between wings inspired rumors. Both Mimi and Polly—a sensitive and culturally unapologetic urban from Yakama Nation who came as chaperone and driver with my group—sensed something wrong when we arrived in this place. The two quietly went out in the dunes to introduce themselves to the ancestors and learn what to do for welcome, Polly told me later. She didn’t say what they did, but the place was put to ease.

              Since our visit, Polly had told me that Mimi’d put herself on the path to becoming a healer, and a Facebook post in isiXhosa—with many congratulations—confirmed. It’s a very big deal, Polly said. But it was not until hosting Mimi last week that I glimpsed what that meant.

              What does it mean? Finding cures—physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. Finding solutions to complex problems and ways forward from unhappiness. She finds these things through her ancestors, who also were sangoma in their time. They speak to her through dreams, and more intrusively, knocking about in her head when Mimi’s just trying to go about her day. Mimi says that people who have accepted and started on the path of the sangoma and then tried to leave it cannot stop the ancestors from trumpeting in their heads: they’ve ended up on the streets, broken and raving. And so this is piece of what Polly meant by a big deal decision—there’s no going back to a life inhabited by the narrow world of job and husband, family, friends, and holidays. The ancestors are insistent, and the mind and body are ever available in waking and in sleep, until Mimi joins them in death.

April 9, 2024

              Wet morning, wet night; wet evening, wet day. Everything I own is damp and marked by the forest rot on my wet fingers. It’s six in the morning and the river at least is louder than the rain against my brave tent. But I am reluctant to get up and put on the raincoat heavy with wet. I will hike the twelve miles back to the car today. I can’t stay when every pair of good socks burble in the sodden, impermeable shoes.

              Yesterday had much joy. The morning had writing and hope and a dry place under trees, and light rainfall through magical moss-strewn rocks and shining ferns and sturdy old spruce and cedar and hemlock, everything welcoming and soft and glowing. And then I found this spot, under the protective arms of a centuries-old Douglas fir, and a dry perch for the tent. Having made camp, I cheerfully left for a mountain lake another five miles up, observing the river turn more ice green and violent the steeper I climbed, encountering singing creeks over mossy stones in a blessing of green, and a bridge high over a turbulent channel cut through stone over a hundred feet below. But I told myself that I would turn back at four and did so, disappointing the lake by less than a mile. The rain had become harder and now I noticed; the way back to my site was long and wet, and my dry little spot when I returned to it was wet too. I stayed in my boggy socks and shoes to filter water and cook a welcome dinner and then be free of them; but I couldn’t ignite the waterproof matches. And so I went to bed.

April 10, 2024

              I am writing now from a dry coffee shop blocks from my home. Did I fulfill my two objectives, to recover and find headspace to turn over events of the past couple weeks?

              Mimi turned my thinking inside itself only a couple days after her arrival, during the open mic at the weekend retreat at Camp Killoqua. The oldest boy poured his heart out there, first in an existential poem he read in turns with his American host brother, and then, more sharply, in a poem about his father, solemnly and sonorously intoned by a classmate while the poet openly keened and wept in his seat.

              After the event was over, Mimi went and stood over him, and commenced to scold him a while and left.

              She returned to where the teachers were sitting and explained. He was sad about his missing father. I told him, Your mother does everything for you. Everything. Why are you crying for that loser?

              What a jolt—for all of us, and especially for Seattleites steeped in the pedagogy and activism of compassion.

              The next night, back at my house, Mimi told Stephanie and me some of her own story:

              Mimi grew up with both a mother and a father in the home, but having both parents was no great thing, she said. Her two older brothers would hand their paychecks to their father and then he would disappear for the weekend, leaving them with no money for their own needs and their mother to scrounge for their meals.

              When Mimi came of age and became a teacher, her father demanded her paycheck too. Mimi said, You don’t get one blue cent. You can have my pay stub to see how much money I’m getting, to see that my money is going to the proper taxes, but you get none.

              And she went to the store with her mother and they filled two carts with food.

              Later, her younger sister got a job and followed Mimi in refusing their father. He did not like that.

              Then Mimi came to her point, returning to what she’d said to the boy at open mic:

              So this student. I told him not to think about that loser but the mother who does everything for him, who feeds him, supplies him, supports his every opportunity, including a flight all the way to America, because she wants him to thrive. The father, what does he do? He does nothing. The mother, what does she do? Everything. But he puts his heart on the father, so the heart breaks.

              The student was mortified and regretted not appreciating his mother. She scolded him for this, too:

              No. She does all this not so that you feel badly, but so you go out and make a better life for yourself. What parents need most is for you to go and have a secure life, and that’s what they do it all for. So that’s what you need to do. Don’t feel bad for your mother, and don’t spend a second on your father. Put your gratitude in making a good life for yourself, and be strong in your mother’s love.

              As Mimi was telling us this, our daughter Maisie was up in her room. Mimi suddenly turned her attention to her: Maisie chooses to come home in her spare time. You did your job, then. She could be elsewhere, but she’s happy to rest here. She knows this home is love, so you two are done. You did your job as parents and now you’re done.

              For me, this was the beginning of a thought about a deep commitment and its relationship to gratitude. There is an aimless and lost purposefulness in myself, and to many who share my cultural heritage of self and bottom line—a scarcity of appreciation for all that elders and most of all family have done to stand us up and so a lack of urgency to live up to our own riches.

              Mimi continued to demonstrate such largeness of purpose as she described how she framed her approach to teaching art and to preparing the travelers for this visit:

              She tells her art students that no matter how poor you are, you can show the world your creativity. But you have to commit. You have to put everything you have into your work; and when you do, no one will be able to compete, no matter what money they have and you don’t.

              And she told her travelers, Think how much money has been spent to send you all the way to Seattle, and how many people raised it because they were excited to bring you here. You have to live up to this, she told them. Forty people didn’t get to go. You have to live up to them, too. So many people made this possible for you. So when you get there, and it’s time to perform, you have to sing. Sing like no one has ever sung this before. And then, Mimi described, she’d speak to students individually: You. You have to be this person.

              The student with the poems, Mimi charged him to forget his father and live up to his mother, and the next day, she said, his deep weight had been lifted. He had a miraculous realization.

              This is why I love Hands for a Bridge, Mimi said to Stephanie and me that night. That student, he was like a duck who goes in water and he comes out wet. The others, they’re still ducks who go in water but they come out, they’re still dry. But now his friend, he reads these poems and he gets a little wet too. This is the goal for every child, that they go on this trip and they come back really changed; they come back wet.

April 11, 2024

              At my high school, for the years since the Covid shutdown, our administration has embraced our district’s goals of inclusive grading, restorative justice, and particular thought and care for Students Furthest from Educational Justice—referred to as SFFEJ—by asking patience, grace, and frequent communication. But all this has somehow translated into a noticeable segregation in our building: Black students in halls, lunchroom, and library, and everyone else in classrooms. I know that’s an oversimplification. Still. When teachers last year demanded more support in getting students to our rooms, we were a) individually presented the same “wonder” [eduspeak turns innocent verbs into tools]—I wonder why your students don’t feel more welcome and invited in your space?—and b) collectively told by our principal that we were no longer going to rely on punishing students who have been historically traumatized. Good theories. But in practice, we’re a white staff knowingly allowing Black students to fail.

              Midway through the visit, the South Africans joined History classes in the library for a few periods. By the end of the day, Mimi witnessed the same group of jawing bodies return again and again to a corner of stuffed chairs in the corner.

              Mimi and her colleague went to these kids she didn’t know and started dressing them down. The librarian called a few other Black boys over to stand under their piercing heat:

               What are you doing? You are at the best school in the city and what are you doing? What is your mother doing right now? Oh, she’s working at the hospital. Is she a doctor? Is she a nurse? No? Then she’s a cleaner. And how much money are you carrying with you today? Who gave you this money? Show me your phones. What about these expensive phones? Who bought these for you? Your mother. Your mother gave you all this. Why? Because she wants you to be happy. She wants you to have what you need so you have the advantages other students have so you can succeed. And what have you done with all that? All she wants is for you to work hard. Is it so hard? You’re black, but you’re not dumb. But you choose to be cool and you don’t go to your classes. I see you coming to the library all day. Why aren’t you going to your classes? If you don’t understand the work, tell me, who you have asked for help? Who. Nobody? Look. Look at the pictures of our students. These are squatters’ houses, made out of zinc. These are not wealthy children. But they have flown all the way around the world to make their lives better. They are poor but they are working hard. You should know better. Your mother sends you to the best school in the city and makes sure you have what you need here so you can come and make something of yourself. How do you think your running away from classes all day makes her feel? Go to your classes. Learn your lessons. It’s not hard.

              What a dousing. I hope these are some ducks to come away wet.

* * * * *

              When Mimi describes her initiation into the sangoma, she strokes the string of turquoise and white beads that hang from her neck. She dreamed exactly these strands. The furred ends are from the goat sacrificed at the beginning of the journey, something that also signals her rank to others on the journey. Dreams are essential to the process and to the communication with ancestors. Everything she needs to fulfill this journey will come to her in her dreams, and it is up to the ancestors to put her on the path to encounter their manifestations in waking life. It is the reason her teacher says initiates must not sleep with their partners until their journey is complete: Another body in the bed interferes with dreaming. When Mimi goes to her teacher on the Eastern Cape, initiates sleep in the middle of the compound, her teacher on one side, and his wife, even now, well away in a room on the other. It is because Mimi stays with her husband at night that her initiation is now in its third year rather than third month.

              Nevertheless, her dreams have brought everything she has needed, and dreams put her on this path: Mimi originally rejected the whole process despite her inheritance, telling others that, no, she would not be a healer until both of her dead parents showed up in her dreams and demanded it. Then she did dream of her father. And she dreamed of her sangoma great-grandmother who was the one who revealed this particular healer and where to find him.

              Mimi dreamed of this man, this sangoma teacher, and she found him. She dreamed of the red cow that will be sacrificed to bring her the final connections and has learned where this cow can be found. She has dreamed of needed herbs and medicines. She has dreamed of the beads she wears now but also the beads she will need in the end. Those beads are the last thing Mimi needs to find.

              It sounds exhausting. When she’s on the Eastern cape every Wednesday and Friday night and Sunday, she hauls around hillsides gathering weeds and at night will be woken any time when the healer, who seems never to sleep at all, wakes the initiates to tell them ancestors need to talk to them. In everyday life, ancestors are always piping up: This one is lying. This one is a bitch. And Mimi will say, No! Why are you telling me this right now? And through all this, Mimi is still teaching full-time. Sometimes, ancestors will call her and she’ll go groggy and fall asleep in front of students. But they’re Xhosa too and know what it’s about. They tell each other: Don’t worry. That’s just Missus talking to people we can’t see.

              I witnessed it myself. On our final Saturday, we took our students to Bainbridge Island, first visiting the Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Garden and then to the Suquamish Museum and Chief Sealth’s grave. We visited the garden on March 30^th—the 42^nd anniversary of Bainbridge forced voyage to internment at Manzanar and Minidoka. We missed the speeches but not the extraordinary sense of community and power, laying the many cranes we were given against the winding memorial wall. But Mimi was halting. On the way to the Suquamish Museum, she told me the ancestors were angry with her: She hadn’t introduced herself and hadn’t praised the ancestors there. On Suquamish lands, where ancestors openly live among the people, Mimi kept to herself, communing.

              In some sense, Mimi was already a healer before she found her first beads. But I know from disruptions to my own sense of right and purpose and from the loose joy I feel today that Mimi is sanctified.

* * * * *

              This visit from the South Africans was very meaningful to me, as meaningful as any trip I’ve taken with students to Cape Town. Perhaps more.

              These last few years of teaching have been demoralizing and hollow. I know many workers have more distant relationships to their jobs since Covid. I know that teachers around the country have faced the new stresses of our jobs and come up short. And it’s true for me, too: For the first time in my career, my work has become a job I go to, and I have studied how to leave it.

              This visit, I knew, was likely to be my last big thing. And I spared myself nothing. Preparing for hosting and coordinating all the field trips and other necessaries—the exponentially expanding red tape and encounters with fussy, admonishing, soul-defeating bureaucrats—propelled me to announce this would be my last year as a teacher in the program. When our visitors arrived, I was coordinating assemblies and class visits and speakers and open mics and trips to other schools and the retreat and field trips and potlucks and the hosting families and student-groups in clubs and setting up the informal gatherings. I was the go-to for all emergencies and disruptions to communication. I was the primary group teacher, the leading emissary outside our school. And I was conducting my own classes, still collecting essays. I gave up all my time before and after school and lunch to the visiting teachers. My own hosting responsibilities meant comforts at home and meals to take out. I didn’t sleep more than a few hours a night, weighing details, settling emergencies. One evening I set an alarm for ten minutes and woke up at the end of it bewildered. I lost eight pounds. All my moments were occupied. I put everything of myself into this visit.

              But by the end, I was joyful, deeply fulfilled in my work as a teacher for the first time in years, years.

              Mimi pushed an urgency into it all, into how I teach, how I live: Will I live up to others, will I demand others live up to all they’ve been given and all they face? Am I still the teacher I need to be and also the teacher my students need me to be? Will I move to something else, and is this something I can cultivate as richly, commit to as fully?

              I went to up the Hoh River Trail alone, to explore some of these questions, to think of what I’ve learned from Mimi, to comprehend the largeness of life she invokes, as a teacher and as a healer, to commune with my own whispers—in the bending trees and regenerative loam of their leaves and needles, their hanging moss and intermingling roots. Going there and sitting down to write gave me a start.

              I left because the rain overpowered me.

              And I came away wet.

Professional Development to Start the School Year

                This summer, I went hiking, running, walking, bicycling, met with friends, spent time with family, and discovered joy was still possible. After the indignities of post-Covid teaching, I was delighted to realize it. This is not depression; this is not a midlife crisis: this has become a demoralizing job that has been taking a dump on my state-of-being.

              I’m back at school and have just completed three days of professional development. The gist of all back-to-school teacher training and this year too is ice-breaker, ice-breaker, work harder, care more. This year, same urgency: Ice breaker, ice-breaker; if you really cared about SFFEJ—that is, students furthest from educational justice—you would do more and work harder.
              The theme for this year is “Authentic Inclusion.” Inclusion refers to the integration of general population students with those formerly set apart in dedicated Special Education or multilingual classrooms. When I saw “Authentic Inclusion” as the year’s theme, I sparked with the phrase, because, for the first time, I’m going to be co-teaching a couple of ninth grade English classes with a Special Education instructor and an especially high concentration of Special Education students, in what our building is calling an inclusion block.
              Here’s how the school has supported authentic inclusion so far: I’ve never co-taught an inclusion block before; neither has my Special Education partner, who was given the assignment yesterday. Neither has the Social Studies teacher, who also has never taught Social Studies before. So, we’re new to the model, but we will have no training and no guidance and no word from administration. We will have no common planning period during the day and no dedicated collaboration time, and neither will there be any expectation that we should, in fact, meet to collaborate. Meanwhile, both 5th and 6th periods of the ninth grade block have the chockfull 32 students, of which a quarter have substantial behavioral and learning needs. This is just to say the inclusion block is no less packed than my other classes (which add up to 160 students). My co-teacher will also be co-teaching a tenth grade class, but the students on her additional case load are eleventh and twelfth graders. She coaches too, and will need to be at games on Friday afternoons.
              For these reasons, I was feeling nervous about the school year and prickly about the year’s theme before I arrived at the professional development days this week.
              Session one: MTSS. Multi-tiered Systems of Support. This included all the ways that we should be intervening when students are not successfully engaging—building routines, welcoming culture, then conferencing, communicating with families and school support teams, and warehousing each step as “data.” All this is fine. And here’s the data that show how we’ve been failing SFFEJ—students furthest from educational justice. The session devolved into pleas from teachers who last year tried asking for help from school support teams—administrators—but received no response nor follow-up communication.
              Session two: CSIP. Continuous School Improvement Plan. Roosevelt’s plan for improvement is to improve attainment and belonging among SFFEJ—students furthest from educational justice—especially in 9th and 10th grade. Seattle’s superintendent has added language called guardrails, which are marked by the phrase, “The superintendent will not allow,” as in guardrail number 5, “The superintendent will not allow any district department, school building, or classrooms to provide unwelcoming environments.” One teacher responded, then several more, about “inclusion,” and specifically the way our school has been ramping up inclusion blocks without forethought or training: If we really want to support our improvement goals of SFFEJ in 9th and 10th grade, then show care for these new blocks. Give their teachers training and time to meet.
              Session three: RP. Restorative practices. Restorative practices seem to mean building healthy communities and trust, and that, when harm falls within a community, starting with such trust to address the harms together. I believe in this. We were shown a chart with four quadrants falling along a Y axis of action and an X axis of empathy: Bottom left, low action, low empathy: Neglectful. Bottom right, low action, high empathy: Permissive. Top left, high action, low empathy: Punitive. Top right, high action, high empathy, the sweetest of sweet spots: Restorative. With restorative practices, we should care and we should push—what had previously been called warm-demander.
 
Punitive             Restorative
 
Neglectful          Permissive
 
              A teacher asked, Are you saying we should do this in the classroom, and in the building as a whole? The administrator said she had to think about that one. But for us teachers, much of what has changed in both the culture of students and administrations’ demands to it are plain: They have not been “restorative”; they’ve been permissive at best. And teachers think and feel this administrative permissiveness—occurring in action and explicit policy—has made our jobs more difficult, often oppressively so, and has degraded habits of communal behavior.
              Last year, a group of students gathered in the lunchroom for hours at a time, and we pleaded with administration to help us get them to come to our classes. All-staff emails piled on; and in a faculty meeting last December about teachers’ responsibilities to MTSS—multi-tiered systems of support—a teacher was cry-shouting from the back of the room, saying, What will you do? We’re just letting these students fail. The word from our principal was that these are students who’ve been traumatized by school, and that we must turn to restorative justice over models of disciplinary punishment or alienate them further. This is excellent, heartful mission thinking—except that restorative justice and effective dialogue didn’t seem to be happening either, and those students continued wandering the halls and staying for hours in the lunchroom all year. High empathy, low action. It’s little surprise that Black students’ surveyed sense of belonging fell once again.
              And the district policies are likewise permissive: Students, by policy, can retake any test or redo any essay for full credit; and if they cheat, likewise, see retakes and re-dos. There are no longer zeroes. Participation and absences in class are not permitted to affect class grades. All of these are rooted in an idea of “grading for equity,” where mastery of skills is the focus and anything that translates as behavior is bias-skewed. The theory is okay, but it means that community engagement and readiness aren’t skills or institutionally demanded of our graduates. Teachers suspect that the people who will most use the equitable grading practices of retakes and rewrites will be white, privileged students who further learn that they can bumble forth and other people will adjust to their ease in service to a customer-is-always-right bottom line—in this case, the grade.
              Administrators talk about restorative justice. But they’re talking about it as though their own permissiveness is simply equitable and just policy, even as they call for us to dialogue towards accountability. Teachers have been harmed by the lack of support coupled with the you’re-not-doing-enough message, as a result of which, teacher’s climate survey was so low in the Fall and worse in the Spring. We need to address the harms within the teaching community, too.
              Here’s how I think this professional development should have started three days ago: With an apology.
              We have so much we need to do to serve our students, and it’s especially important that we address and counteract systemic inequities within and outside of our schools. And you don’t have all the support you all know you need to do this work near effectively. Your class sizes are too big. You have too many demands on your very limited time, which we administrators tend to treat as a vast and generous resource. But we come together as a teaching community before school starts because we know this work is important, and together, we’re going to do what we can.

Visit to Yakama Nation

               Yesterday Hands for a Bridge and Roosevelt’s Native American Club climbed aboard a bus before seven in the morning. We’d return just before ten that night. The bus driver, Marvin, knew he was taking us to the Yakama reservation and mistakenly thought he could leave us and return at the end, but Polly disabused of him of this as we rolled away from the building: he’d be with us all day, through the numerous stops she and Lucy—the director of the Yakama Nation Peacekeepers—had planned for our group of thirty students and seven adults.

              Hands for a Bridge students were nervous. I’d passed along Lucy’s concerns that our group would come with stubborn preconceptions: she said she didn’t have time or energy to sooth feelings of guilt or discomfort. And Polly had told the group Monday that she was spending family status, bringing this group onto the reservation for a cultural tour.

              I’d prepared students with readings about the confederated tribes and bands, the 1855 Isaac Stevens treaties and the Land Allocations Act, the Fish Wars of the 1970s, some cultural values of Yakama peoples as told by a grandma, the Indian Child Welfare Act returning to the Supreme Court, missing and murdered Yakama women and children, the story of the Inaba family farms sold to Yakama Nation, and quick tours of and questions from tribal websites.

              Ultimately, students on the way home last night spoke of learning more on this day than in years at school—about the history where we live, about our relationship to food and land and people, about sustainability and stewardship, and about community and resilience.

              Our first stop was at fisheries in Cle Elum, where the Yakama Nation flag proudly waved. We learned that this fishery, among the several others run by the Yakama Nation, is funded in part by the Bonneville Power Administration—as a form of reparations to replenish the flow of salmon that suffers the seven dams constructed down the Columbia on traditional Yakama villages and fishing and spawning waters, including the Dalles dam that turned the sacred Celilo Falls into a lake.

              This first fishery was devoted to the Spring Chinook, and the second we saw, a newer facility, to Coho. Both were fed by well and river water, but the newer one used a sophisticated technology to re-oxidize water recirculated to draw less from the river. One of the students noticed the fry would excite near the surface when our guide stood near the tanks. Owen’s astute observation was correct: At the Coho facility, they drop feed on top of the water though it habituates fish to rise to the surface where they’re more vulnerable to hunting birds and other predators: in the Spring Chinook facility, fish are given their food from a belt that runs the bottom instead.

              Charlie wanted us to know, despite conceptions we may have had about Native Americans in harmony with nature, that he was a scientist, too. A student reflected afterwards that if settlers hadn’t encroached on traditional ways, we wouldn’t need fisheries to replenish and protect the salmon.

              On the bus, we discussed this close connection to the food that went in the body while we snacked from colorful plastic Costco pouches filled with snack cookies and processed fruit shapes not really recognizable as anything we see grow in the world.

              We thought more about our foods as we visited Inaba / Yakama Nation Farms. In the twenties, when people of Japanese descent were outlawed from leasing land, Yakama families invited them to farm on the reservation; and in the forties, before the Inabas were sent to an internment camp in Utah, Yakama held their land in trust. The Inabas returned; and over half a century later, they had a thriving farm. Now, just last year, the Inabas sold the farm back to the Yakama Nation—a joyous story of peoples’ resilient support of each other. And what we learned from Jonalee is that it is also a story of food sovereignty: when so many on the reservation have relied on commodity food, especially through Covid, access to healthy foods was scarce; and here, on this farm, they have a steady source of good produce, providing to the food bank Northwest Harvest before they ship it to market.

              Central to the whole visit was our stop at the Toppenish longhouse, where we ate a feast prepared by five cooks, in a place we were pointedly told was a sacred home to the people. We ate a chicken barley soup, and fruit and vegetable salads; we were told how the women gather root vegetables during parts of the year, and Polly told us of the day or two each year that the military war-games land is re-opened to women elders for gathering—despite toxic leaching from artillery. Here we were served potatoes and camas bulbs and bitterroot, the latter of which was unpleasant going down but full of nutrients; we ate salmon and fry bread and elk, and finally huckleberry sponge cake. Before we started, Diane offered a prayer that welcomed us and awakened our gratitudes. She told us the most valuable thing we can give someone was their time, and we had come to them openly giving that; she told us if we take care of our relatives, they will in turn take care of us. She said that we must be humble before our creator, who has brought us to this place today. And she hoped that we will take what we experience into our hearts and be changed by it, and to be blessed by the laughter at our tables, because laughter is nourishing too.

              While we ate, Mersaedy spoke to us in a steady, unstopping flow of story and speech, of pain and resiliency, and of what these longhouses mean as churches to the people for gathering, and dance and prayer. People dress in ribbon shirts and often in regalia, formerly requiring moccasins to be permitted on the wash—the sacred earthen grounds running the length in the center of the carpeted walk of the longhouse. There was an unblinking intensity to Mersaedy’s manner and teaching, as she told us we were welcome, even when the Yakama people had come to harm by outsiders; how there were foods they’d share with white people, but not the bitterroots which were nevertheless ribboned across our plates; and how, in the sacredness of a longhouse, a community had to face each other.

              Perhaps this is why, when men lined up on one side of the longhouse and women on the other, and when we walked around each other —counterclockwise, Polly said, to rebalance the energy of the mechanistic clockwise—to shake hands twice with everyone in the tall room, we faced each other, very literally. We were told that if someone is hurting by someone else in the community, shaking hands is a way of bringing things close: if it is time to speak, it is time to hear—we look each other in the eyes and don’t escape those things that trouble our community but give them voice. A community faces and honors each other.

              Fort Simcoe is a place of pain and scarring. So when Diane gathered us in front of the captain’s quarters built not long after Isaac Stevens’ aggressions, and she gathered up in the blanket her son had earned as a dancer and wrapped herself in her son’s protection and began playing a wood flute, we took comfort and grief from the music. She introduced her sister, Robyn, who told us how long women, children, and people have gone missing or been murdered from the reservation—from the start, from the moments white men came to denude the lumber and mine the land, and mistreated the population left vulnerable by it; and then, ever since, as white and Native men continue to take advantage of the jurisdictional muddle that exists between Yakama and the feds, especially when the feds for these 150 years haven’t chosen to care. Robyn and Diane’s grandfather went missing. Their cousin went missing. And these cold cases have simply remained cold. Now Robyn and Lucy produce the War Cry podcast, exploring “stories, issues and historical connection about Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Men and LGBTQ 2 Spirit community members.” Robyn told us this: I’m here to tell you we have, as a people, gone through it. I as a woman have gone through it. I can wear my son’s protection but also know I wouldn’t want to burden him if something happened, and that I carry my fear around me like a blanket. But I am not a conquered woman. I have community, and friendship, and family, and our people and our land. I come to you in strength. I am not conquered.

              She was soon sitting beside her sister, laughing.

              Accompanying Robyn and Diane was a man in a large face mask who’d kept himself small. We hadn’t yet heard about the boarding school that was also on this site, though Robyn had explained how her grandparents had attended such schools, and had their practices ripped from them. Suddenly Mike emerged from his mask, telling us he wanted to play a game: These are cards. They’re what? Cards. Oh, they’re cards. These are scissors. They’re what? Scissors. We were to pass the questions and answers down our two separate lines in a race. Then he circled us up, began the cards and the scissors down two different directions, and then, dramatically, they both reached Makayla, who became lost in the four chains of communication she needed to speak and send two suddenly opposite directions. This, Mike said, was like the cultural demands being made at boarding schools. Then he asked us if we trusted him, as he snapped on two blue surgical gloves; he said if we trusted him, to close our eyes, leave them open if we didn’t. Then he started around with scissors: behind our heads, loudly, near ears and closed eyes, he’d SNIP SNIP!, and move on to the next person. When done, he said, This is a small hint of the boarding school experience. Finally, he told us the story of skunk, who lived in a city suddenly beset by fire. On his way fleeing the city, he saw the smallest of them all, hummingbird, flying off to the river and returning with a drop of water in his little beak. Skunk said, You can’t put out a fire with a drop of water! Hummingbird said, I’ll do what I can, because I don’t know what else to do. And skunk decided to join in, soon recruiting the other animals, who in turn, put out the fire. Mike asked us to process the story. Some spoke of the hopeful message of our small part; others spoke of the importance of coming together. My favorite response was from Olive, who said that we often celebrate the first leader, but the first follower is just as important.

              At our final stop, Yakama Forest Products, Polly introduced us to Steve, her youngest brother. When he spoke about being rejected as a half breed, one student, Theo, felt this especially deeply, and thought back to a Hindu story about Krishna choosing between the god of thunder and the mountain: he chose the mountain, because it was always there, a home. Steve reinforced the idea of what a sacred careful thing it is to take a life—a tree, or a plant, or a fish, an elk. We must care for our relatives as they sacrifice for us. We have a duty to those who nourish us.

              In the end, this was resounding message: replenishment, sustainability, responsibility, and care, Students realized they’d walked in with preconceptions about reservation life looking like alcohol and despair; but what they were shown was embracing community and industry, spirituality, strength, and welcome.

              Marvin our bus driver accepted a dinner from us at the burger joint where we’d stopped, and in the end, accepted too the pendant a student made for each of our speakers, tamarack bark against cedar in a resin, holding the piece of life precious against the skin.

With thanks to our hosts: Thank you to Charlie and Simon of Yakama Nation Fisheries; to Jonalee of Inaba / Yakama Nation Farms; to our gracious cooks at Toppenish Longhouse, and to Mersaedy, Diane, Robyn, and Mike; and to Steve of Yakama Forest products. Special thank you to Janine of Hands for a Bridge, Lucy of Peacekeepers, and Polly of the Burke Museum, for the planning, coordinating, and wrangling that made this event possible. And a resounding thank you to Polly for sharing so deeply and with such pride, and guiding us through the experience towards our own reflection and heart.

Dunluce Castle, Giant's Causeway, Dark Hedges, Dublin

   

    

 

Final Day at School, Derry/L'derry

               On the last day of February, we rushed to Oakgrove’s Tuesday morning assembly in our five taxis—well, six, because the first driver wouldn’t clear his newspaper for a fourth passenger, so we had to wait an extra forty minutes for another cab—most of us arriving just in time to see John honored before the gathered body with a congratulatory cake and speech for becoming the permanent principal.

              Over and over again, our students were awed by his care and laughter and enormous kindness, and wondered what it would be like to have such a principal. We would see this in full force over the course of the day, especially in the evening, when John would juggle between playing the generous host to our students, confronting a student, his parents, and the police in his office for a full hour, guiding staff through various other emergencies that had occurred through the day, and welcoming Oakgrove Hands for a Bridge alumni for the evening’s potluck, interspersed with his ridiculously disarming whale sound that he called out in equal parts to focus attention and to enjoy himself.

              This would also be our day of farewell at the school.

              Roosevelt students recited three poems before all the students seated on the floor of the hall, two by Seamus Heaney and one by Gwendolyn Brooks. They got through it in the morning, but when called upon to do it again before the HFB alumni that evening, some had to laugh their way through their contributions. That’s okay—John had said his students had been intimidated by the confidence of the American students, and a stumble would reassure Oakgrove, show it all possible.

              But how our students did lead, with marvelous poise and such joy later that morning, as we met Fountain Primary School across the fence and just the other side of the city’s 17^th century walls, in the Protestant neighborhood and its Tory red, white, and blue kerbs. For decades, they’d been joined by Long Tower Primary, the elementary school on the nationalist side. This morning, the children were in the gymnasium together when we arrived, watching a video about dirt and butterflies. When they turned around and their teachers cleared the tables, Roosevelt students led raucous games in a big circle before splitting into smaller groups, which is when I cried a few times, more than the night before: watching Taylor lean back on the wall and laugh as he took such full-bodied delight in the little ones (wee ‘uns), watching Karen pat-pat the floor in gentle, lovely encouragement, and above all, watching face after face—ours, Oakgrove’s, Long Tower’s, Fountain’s—share unadulterated delight in one another, an entire room enchanted by the moment.

              At the Hands for a Bridge alumni potluck and final evening with Oakgrove friends later that night, students pulled each other into a single tight hug on the stage. Two alumni from the very first class summoned them to the front of the stage to acknowledge their sorrow but to show, their laughter and physical closeness the signal of it, that enduring friendship is here.

Theater of Witness

               Yesterday ended in the upstairs sitting room of St. Columb’s House, everyone crying, one after the other launching into more. It’s that time in the trip, feeling close, getting moved, missing home but also not wanting to leave.

              And today was the day we met with Ann and Kathleen, an event we knew in advance would greatly affect us all. Students had seen a ten minute Ann and Kathleen's Theater of Witness video, knew how they had collaborated with an American to create a narrative of their experiences to be staged, knew that Ann was with the IRA the same time the IRA had killed Kathleen’s husband, and that night after night they nevertheless shared the stage to tell of it.

              But it was one thing to see segments of their performance on Youtube (here's the full 1:22 show, I Once Knew a Girl), and quite another to be in the room with their stories and be enfolded in their laughter and enduring friendship. They left us open-hearted and exposed, and, later that night, reach out to each other in a precious vulnerability.

              Before Ann and Kathleen arrived, Theater of Witness sent us Kieran and Fionnbar to warm us up with theater and drumming workshops. The energy of the twelve years with ours half again as old is something very sweet, the younger ones squirrely and energetic, looking up to the doting older ones and their willingness to try something new and goofy. This collaboration and play is part of the politics; the reaching the ears and hearts of audiences in a darkened theater is another.

              Ann, Kathleen, and one longer to Theater of Witness, James, joined us in an English classroom for that part of it. Ann told us to be part of our journey; it might be a bit challenging for yous, but you’ll be all right in the end.

              James was a former UVF terrorist, he said in his video segment—with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, it’s death or glory. He looks back on thirty friends murdered. But Teya Sepinuck of Theater of Witness chased a story out of him that even his family hadn’t known, and then, it was a tremendous weight gone.

              As Ann’s video played, she herself sat directly below the screen, one ear towards us and eyes cast down, explaining that she had been a twelve year old dating an eighteen one—how he’d showed her a gun and she’d thought it exciting, joining the IRA herself at eighteen. The night she was supposed to engage in a violent action, she’d had a brain hemorrhage instead. Soon she’d replaced the IRA with drugs, then an abusive marriage, existing within the damage of a culture that doesn’t get talked about here, she said, and back then, I didn’t know better. The narrative she told, and retold, again and again on stage, and that now replays before her as she attends the workshops where she listens again and again to her narrative on video, was multiplied by her stoic sitting presence before us, eye contact withheld.

              Kathleen Gillespie told us how she’d met her husband at sixteen, married at twenty. Her story is a love story and a grief love story, where adoring kept on, and now Patsy still looks on—her parking angel, she told us, always there to help her find a place for her car. Mr. Gillespie had been a civilian worker in the kitchens at Fort George, just trying to support his family. In 1986, he was kidnapped for it, and made to drive a van of explosives into camp. That time, he got free. And he’d be forgiven for thinking lighting wouldn’t strike twice. But one day two armed men came into their home and said, If everyone does what we say, then no one will get hurt, and, Kathleen said, I was stupid enough to believe them. Patsy was chained to a van with a thousand pounds of explosives and it blew up, tearing Mr. Gillespie to pieces as well as five British soldiers. He’d yelled out to the soldiers, Kathleen told us: Run! The van’s fucking loaded! For years, Kathleen said, she wouldn’t go out of the house without makeup, because she knew those IRA men were still out there, and she had to be strong. But for the sake of her own physical health, I had to let go of my hatred and anger, deciding to give it to God. She joined peace and reconciliation efforts, sitting in the same room, at times, as the provos. But, she thought, if I can’t even sit and listen to their stories, how can I expect others to do this work?

              With their videos through, Ann, Kathleen, and James laughed together. Taylor had found that unnerving and somehow misplaced. But I didn’t feel that way at all, I’d told him: this is some hard earned laughter, and as much as their pain tells a story, so does their friendship and their joy, the victim of IRA, IRA, UVA together.

              Ann said that in order to sit in the same room with someone like Kathleen, she had to be nudged, because she felt Ann would hate her, and she also didn’t know she had a story worth anything. But now, she told us, I know my worth. She became brave enough to know she wanted a change.

Thank-you note to Ann

              Their work with Theater of Witness is about giving value to their pain, and it’s about making their stories heard. But as I saw Kathleen hold Ann’s hand, or watched the two of them quietly pat each other in support, I saw much more to what they’ve done, and continue to do, on stages and in workshops and in each other’s kitchens. This is true heart work, and storytelling, in a darkened theater or under the fluorescents of a church meeting room or class, does something different than a written word or panel. It hit us for that reason.

              One of us asked, How do you find it in yourself to continue to live?

              Oh, our hearts, to hear that.

              But they responded, each of them, without judgment and tremendous wisdom and grace, and each of us on the trip responded too, and did all day and night. I am who I am because of the trauma in my life, Ann said. What does it take to see the humanity in another person? It’s when you see yourself in your own pain: that's when you can start treating yourself better. Understanding what happened, James said, is a way of accepting others, and of accepting yourself.

              This is why we tell stories. And this is why we witness them.

              Later that night, we returned again and again to the moment we all opened, and we continued to let ourselves spill out, crying until we laughed.

Conversations we otherwise wouldn’t dare begin

              We were gathered in a circle in the main hall of St. Columb’s House today. John Harkin shared his introduction to Hands for a Bridge and we shared how the program has been meaningful to us.

              John has already explained why he doesn’t plan ahead, because plans go afoul whereas, if you go with the flow, things tend to work out.

              In 2006, in October, John received an email from Doug, a mental health worker at Roosevelt. He read it poorly but saw Seattle, students, February visit, and wrote back Yes, of course. Had he actually read the message and seen that Roosevelt was asking to visit for over a week and needed places to stay, John would surely have said, Sorry, there’s no way. In the next few months, Doug would call the school, but John would never make himself available. By January, Doug was more insistent: There’s a man from Seattle on the line for you, and he says he won’t hang up until you’ve actually spoken. When John spoke with Doug and realized what he’d actually agreed to those many months ago, he simply said, Yes, yes; it’s all arranged; I just need to work out the fine details. Then he rushed students into the library and said, Americans are coming in only two weeks and need sixteen homes for multiple days and I need volunteers and family permissions by tomorrow. Sixteen hands came up. And the next day, the sixteen permission forms.

              When things are meant to be, they will be.

              Since then, Roosevelt has come back every year, save the last three. And John has brought students from Northern Ireland three separate years—2007, 2009, and 2012. And in both schools, John said, things are done differently because of leadership and legacy of Hands for a Bridge experiences, similar to the trees we planted the other day in Ness Woods. Small changes are meaningful.

              For our part, many spoke about closeness and trust among an unlikely variety of students; they spoke about stretching their comfort zones and their confidence pushing out of them due to the program. Chloe spoke about the expansion of empathy she gained over the classroom readings by actually meeting people in the conflict zones we studied. It’s a wisdom she knows will extrapolate. And I spoke about what it’s meant as a teacher to plan readings and experiences for a class in collaboration with decades of experience and rituals and mission among people across three continents for whom they’re deeply meaningful.

              Halle asked John what value comes from Americans being included in these tense conversations that might have more meaningful dialogue partners locally. John told her that our presence provides an occasion to speak about subjects that wouldn’t come about otherwise. Students here who wouldn’t set foot in the Free Derry Museum do so because they’re going with us. And at Roosevelt, a visitor from Northern Ireland asked, Why is everyone here at Roosevelt so racist, pointing to the completely segregated lunchroom when an American objected: it provoked useful meditation and investigation that wouldn’t have occurred without the outsider. Halle further reflected that, for Americans included in conversations here—because we don’t have a stake in conversations—questions can safely be received from us. We come from a place of curiosity without an agenda, and this allows people to answer honestly.

              The program facilitates conversations people otherwise wouldn’t dare begin.

Below: John and Roosevelt students at the end of the day.