Chief Little Wound became a peacemaker, devoting the rest of his life to helping his people deal with the many complications of living on a reservation. After he died in 1901, his son George became a prominent leader in the Medicine Root District, which includes Kyle. George Little Wound traveled to Washington, D.C., where he lobbied for the right of his people to have their own day schools to replace the boarding schools where Indian children were forbidden to speak Lakota. He believed in education for Lakota children, except that they should learn about their culture, not just European culture.
Unlike the wildly expressive African-American students I taught in Chicago, my Indian students were exceedingly shy; heads down, totally obedient. I found it hard to get them to talk, but I worked hard to pull words out of them. When they mumbled, I asked them to speak up, and kept asking them until they spoke loud enough for all to hear. It took patience and a lot of love, but after a few weeks I had the liveliest class at Little Wound. Once he came out of his shell, Norman Underbaggage was one of my more engaging students. Built like a bear with black ink hair, light chocolate skin, and, most unusual, near-perfect marshmallow teeth, he could be hysterically witty. One day Norman told me his family went to Rapid City for tacos, which he pronounced tay-cos.
“Did you know, Mr. Bunnell, that Rapid City is bigger than Denver?”
“No, I did not know that,” I answered, thinking that this poor boy had never been to a bigger place than Rapid City.
“Rapid City is nine letters, Denver only six.”
And then he laughed and laughed, and told me the joke a second time.
Tammy May, a classic redhead with freckles, was one of my few studious students; she sat in the back of the class endlessly reading. I had a hard time keeping up with her, which was scary because she did understand valence numbers. Tammy’s grandpa had bought up land piecemeal over many years, and the Mays lived in a modern two-story ranch house near Allen. They had several hundred head of Black Angus, a new pickup truck every fall, holiday trips to California. Tammy wore expensive Western-style clothes, got along with the other kids, and flirted with Calvin Fire Thunder and Cicero Two Crow. I wonder if Tammy still lives on the reservation; she seemed destined for greater things, a career as a doctor or lawyer, perhaps. I picture her sitting near a swimming pool in Beverly Hills reminiscing to friends about her days on the rez.
Ten percent of the students at Little Wound were white kids. I had a couple of white rancher kids in my class; they were not good students, but they were privileged, had futures to look forward to. I remember many of my Lakota students in part because they had intriguing names: David Black Bear, Charlotte Kills Straight, Theresa Old Horse, Earl Thunder Bull, William Bull Bear, Helen Red Owl, Amos One Feather, Joan Thunder Hawk, Bernadine Iron Cloud, Nancy Broken Rope. And of course Vernell White Thunder, his brother Anthony White Thunder, and his sister Patricia White Thunder. Suzy Justice, whose mother was a Kyle teacher, was another one of the white kids, a blond girl with intelligent eyes and a permanent smile—she married Vernell, and still lives with him.
During any school day, the population of Little Wound Day School is bigger than the population of Kyle itself, as students are bused in from as far as fifty miles away. The three bus drivers we had at Little Wound during my teaching days, Harvey Zephier, Rubin Clifford, and Art Lafferty, were sweet men who would do anything to help out the students. Walk right into their houses if they were not waiting outside in the morning, get them out of bed and dressed, knowing full well they would go hungry if they stayed home—no food in the house, their hungover parents sleeping—whereas at school they would get at least one meal. When they weren’t driving the buses, at the direction of Marvin Waldner they spent much of their time tending to the football field. They watered and carefully manicured the grass, freshly chalked the yard markers, welded new metal goal posts to replace the original flimsy wooden ones, built a new snack shack. And if this wasn’t enough, during downtime they went out into the community to knock on doors and remind people to attend the next home game.
Many of the kids came to school too hungry to concentrate, to even stay awake, and in those days, unlike now, Little Wound did not have a breakfast program. The cafeteria wasn’t big enough for all the students to eat in at the same time; lunch for grades seven to nine was at noon, but the tenth to twelfth graders had to wait another hour. As a newbie teacher, I was assigned to watch over the upper-grade kids in a mass study hall from noon to one p.m. Unless you have experienced this, you can’t possibly imagine what it is like trying to maintain reasonable order over a classroom packed with hungry, hormonally driven teenagers. You might think they would be tired, have their heads on the desktops—but you would be wrong. One student, Randy, usually polite and respectful, could not sit down; his chemistry compelled him to walk around and around the classroom picking up objects, pencils, notebooks, and hurl them at the other students. Nothing I could say or do—requests, threats, and bribes—modified this behavior. I quickly exhausted all the tricks I had learned teaching unruly students in inner-city Chicago and had to accept Randy’s bad behavior and that of several other students. They were starving! Lunch at school was their only meal. For all I knew, they had nothing to eat on weekends. When I brought up this matter with Waldner, he shrugged and bragged to me that he included prime T-bone steaks on the list of the food items he ordered for the school cafeteria. “I keep those fat boys in my freezer,” he said with a wink. “I’ll invite you all over for dinner and grill some up one of these days.”
True to his word, Waldner invited me and my wife, Linda, to dinner with several other teachers. His was the slightly larger house on the end of teacher row; it had a double garage that he’d converted into a carpentry shop stocked with screwdrivers, mallets, hammers, a hand drill, various power tools, a sawhorse, and stacks of lumber. There was also a stack of cowhides, which he used to make the miniature teepees he sold through a Rapid City tourist shop under the name Marvin Plenty Horses.
I suppose Waldner wasn’t all bad; he established a Kyle Boy Scout group, and he liked to take his son and some of the other boys fishing and hunting. (Vernell earned an Eagle Scout badge.) Until his life in Kyle unraveled, he looked the other way when I completely ignored the curriculum I was supposed to teach. Dinner could have been a dull affair, but perhaps sensing that Linda and I were part of some anti-American subculture, he invited the other rebel teachers: Lawden Heller, Leonard Running, and Mrs. Justice.
I did not expect to see any books in Waldner’s house, so it was no shock that there weren’t any. It was surprising, however, to find that he was an ardent collector of rocks, beautifully polished agate that he said he found in Buffalo Gap and Railroad Buttes—translucent purple pegmatites, black and pearly white mica, cobblestone, flint, and rose quartz. He was proud of and very knowledgeable about his collection. A funny realization I had about Waldner that night was that if he weren’t the racist principal of Little Wound School, where I happened to be a first-year teacher, I might have liked him. I knew plenty of racists growing up in Alliance, and as long you steered clear of topics such as black people, Mexicans, Indians, or homosexuals, they were jolly good folk. They would help you if you had a flat tire, bring soup to your grandma if she was sick.
I don’t remember much of the conversation that evening except for Linda’s attempt to get the rest of us to gang up on Waldner, which seemed inappropriate as it was his house. Linda is the only one I know who called him Marvin; even his wife referred to him as Mr. Waldner.
“Marvin,” Linda said, “don’t you think it’s about time you let people have powwows in the school auditorium?”
“No, I don’t think so. Ninety percent of the men and half the women will show up drunk. They’ll sneak in moonshine, let the kids drink it too.”
Lawden weighed in. “You’re out of line, Waldner. People are respectful at powwows.”
“Are they now? I wouldn’t know. I never go to them.”
“Doesn’t matte
r,” I said, trying to diffuse this conversation. “They have their Lakota community center for powwows.”
“That’s right,” Leonard added. “Let’s forget the parents and focus on the kids; we can’t do much to help the parents.”
We thankfully went on to safer topics, such as whether Rapid City or Chadron was the better place to buy groceries, how bad it had been the previous winter when people were snowed in for several days, and when any of us had last been to a movie. And, of course, we all remarked on how delicious the steaks were.
The outdoor basketball courts and the football field at Little Wound look much the same as they did when I was teaching there, except the football field now has a grandstand. Forty-three years ago, it was just a field. Spectators—teachers, parents, and family—stood on the sidelines. We cheered on the Kyle Mustangs in their pursuit of Waldner’s state championship dreams, only they did not win a single game that first year, and the scores were lopsided: 68–13, 56–0, and so forth. Waldner’s son, Jerry, was the quarterback, and while he was a gifted athlete, other than Norman Underbaggage, who was a bear of a lineman on both defense and offense, the other boys simply didn’t know the rules of the game. They frequently lined up offside and didn’t know which way to run if they recovered a fumble. I especially felt sorry for Jerry Waldner, and tried not to imagine the conversations he must have had with his dad when they got home after the games.
Before traveling on to Vernell’s White Thunder Ranch, I make a quick pass behind the Little Wound football field through the teacher housing section: at two blocks long, a tiny slice of suburbia plopped down in the middle of the deprivation. This conjures up more memories. Indian students were discouraged from walking through this neighborhood. Some of the teachers didn’t feel safe having them around, but that’s all changed now as nearly half the teachers at Little Wound are Native American. They even teach Lakota language and culture, first grade through high school. I would not be so out of place teaching here now—or would I?
Slowing to a crawl, I pass Waldner’s old house, remember that Mr. Dyer, the math teacher, lived next door. The kids called him “Mr. Stinky Breath.” He was constantly ducking into the teacher’s lounge for a cup of coffee and a cigarette. Two doors down from Stinky Breath’s is the house I lived in forty-three years ago with Linda and our infant daughter. Linda and I grew up in Alliance, went to Cornhusker U (University of Nebraska), got married, and were teaching in Chicago public schools when we were both offered jobs in Kyle; but after moving here, we learned that there was actually only one open position. This turned out to be a good thing for us because Linda could stay home with our baby girl, Mara. The rent for our government-subsidized house was cheap, and I could walk to work. On weekends, we drove to Alliance, mostly staying with Linda’s parents so I could eat copious amounts of her mom’s homemade Lebanese food: baba ghanouj from char-grilled eggplant; kibbeh lovingly hand molded, baked or raw; the world’s best tabbouleh and hummus; flat sheets of unleavened bread; homemade goat’s-milk yogurt with fresh mint. When we didn’t have Lebanese food, Linda’s dad, John, brought home prime New York steaks that he grilled in the backyard even if it was minus twenty and snowing. I loved hanging out at their house, watching Nebraska football games and drinking shots of Old Crow with John, flirting with Linda’s three younger sisters. I visited my dad too, mostly at the newspaper office, where starting at age twelve I learned everything I know about journalism. Sometimes I hung out with my brother in his massive garage, marveling at his talent for building hot rods and dragsters, his scary collection of assault weapons.
When we didn’t go to Alliance for the weekend, like most of the other teachers we went to Rapid City, where we could see a movie, spend the night in a motel, and buy groceries the following morning. I loved teaching at Little Wound School, in spite of Marvin Waldner’s clumsiness, the racist teachers, the stupidity of the BIA—which everyone said stood for “Boss Indians Around”—the poverty and sadness, the blowing snow and icy roads. My Lakota students had a certain carefree resilience, a love of life; they lacked the meanness I had seen too much of in the Chicago schools. There were no fistfights, knives, or guns. Some of the students were depressed, but luckily, I never experienced any of the teenage suicides that happen all too frequently on the Pine Ridge reservation.
One morning just after the first holiday season, I woke up feeling horrible. We bundled Mara into the car seat and Linda drove me to Rapid City Regional Hospital, where we checked into the emergency room. The doctor took one look at me and said, “You have hepatitis A.” I’d probably been infected by contaminated food in the school cafeteria.
I spent two weeks in the hospital, so tired it was hard for me to get out of bed. Linda took our daughter to Alliance to stay with her grandmother, and then returned to Kyle as the substitute teacher for my classes.
Linda was a much better teacher than I could ever be. Just as compassionate about Indian students and curious about Lakota culture as I was, she kept my students on track with their Lakota language, plus she made an effort to add in a little science. She was friendly and more open than I could ever be, and the other teachers—and even Waldner—really liked her. If I’d had any sense, I would have stayed home the rest of that semester, let Linda do the teaching, and worked on that great American novel I’d always wanted to write. But foolish me, I went back to Little Wound just in time for Waldner’s downfall and the cascading events that followed.
About this time, 1973, the BIA stumbled into a new Indian policy that they called “self-determination.” After years of learned dependency, their native clients, it was assumed, were now ready to manage their own affairs. In Kyle, this policy manifested itself in the election of the first local school board: four natives and one white rancher. One of the Lakota was a full-blood named Cecelia Bull Bear. She was the grandmother of William Bull Bear—the boy in my classroom whom Waldner harassed about his long hair. Cecelia had outlived her husband by many years and was looked up to as one of Kyle’s most respected elders.
Linda and I were at the historic first meeting of the Kyle school board, along with Principal Waldner, most of the teachers, other administrators, several parents, and a couple of BIA bigwig observers from Pine Ridge. No one expected what was to follow. As soon as the meeting was called to order, Mrs. Bull Bear raised her hand. “I have a motion to put forward,” she said. “I move that we terminate Marvin Waldner as the principal of Little Wound School. He has no respect for Lakota culture, steals food from our cafeteria, and is abusive to our students.” Of course, all hell broke loose. Some of the older teachers, led by foul-breathed Dwyer and the mixed-blood football coach who seemed to loathe his Lakota half, threatened to resign.
“If Waldner goes, we go,” they said.
On impulse, I jumped up. “I’m staying. I’ll teach for free if I have to. We know some great teachers in Chicago who would love to come out here to teach.”
Linda raised her hand to gesture “Me too,” and looked at Waldner. “Marvin, you got Little Wound started, so why don’t you just butt out peacefully?”
At first, Waldner was too shocked to answer. His eyes switched back and forth from pleading to threatening as he looked about the room, for the first time realizing he had created more enemies than friends. After a few moments of silence, he said, “All these things are mostly lies. I would never steal anything, and Mrs. Bull Bear is getting back at me for disciplining her grandson.”
“Waldner, you have no respect!” shouted Lawden Heller. “You humiliated William Bull Bear by trying to force him to get a haircut. These kids deserve better.” And then he added: “If you leave, I’m staying. If you stay, I’m going.”
Leonard Running chimed in “Me too!”
The fifth-grade teacher for over twenty years, Harvey Weiland, who worked part-time as Waldner’s assistant principal and who avoided controversy, found a way to say no to Waldner without joining in the rebellion. He simply said, “I’ll be here with my students no matter what.�
�� Marvin Orr, the gregarious shop teacher who also loved his students, added, “I’m not going anywhere soon.” There was some additional back-and-forth, shouts, threats, a few tears, but Mrs. Bull Bear was determined to have her way, and in the end, though Waldner adamantly defended himself, the board voted four to one to fire him.
Waldner appealed to his BIA bosses in Pine Ridge, and fearing their paternalistic instincts, I figured Waldner would soon be back wandering our halls, waiting for football practice to begin. Letting the school board fire people, I imagined the bureaucrats thinking, will create all sorts of civil service entanglements and lawsuits.
Waldner likely would have been successful if it weren’t for Joe Mooney, the deputy superintendent I had met on Columbus Day at the Porcupine Day School. He spent a lot of time at Little Wound School, but his role was never clear to any of us teachers. Mooney watched Waldner very closely, wrote dozens if not hundreds of memos to Waldner about his shortcomings and the steps he should take to correct them. After Mooney presented his memos to the appeal board, they voted to uphold the Kyle school board’s decision. Not actually fired for real, Waldner, like a deviant priest, was transferred to North Dakota to head another BIA school. Linda and I stood in our yard when the Waldner family left Kyle in their packed-up Jeep Cherokee with the cat they called Custer, who would be missed, as he was very diligent about controlling the neighborhood mouse population.
Good Friday on the Rez Page 12