The New Trail of Tears

by Naomi Schaefer Riley

  Perhaps this sounds counterintuitive, and Hanson is only in his first summer here, so he may be proved wrong. He has a group of children from age 7 to 12, and he’s teaching them all third-grade math. “I’m drilling them with flash cards. Once you know these facts, there’s nothing more.” He says you can know all the basics of math by junior high. “The only thing you do in later years is more complex calculations.”

  Hanson is aware that the kids he teaches come from difficult conditions at home. But like the other teachers I talk to, he doesn’t ask about or encourage them to talk about their home lives. And he doesn’t put much stock in the idea that kids need more self-esteem, either. “Math is about being wrong,” he tells me. “To learn math, you are constantly wrong all the time.” And he says it never ends. “You can pass all your actuarial exams, be paid millions of dollars, and your boss will tell you you’re wrong and you can’t fall apart.”

  Perscilla Tovar, the budding marine biologist, tells me that her students often share details of their personal life, “to get attention they are not getting at home.” One girl in sixth grade recently announced to the class that her aunt is dating the girl’s ex-boyfriend.

  Tovar seems to care about the success of her students. It doesn’t sound as though she aspires to be a teacher – she says she likes the research aspect of science more than the classroom experience. But she feels a certain debt to Chavis. And it’s not just because he’s helping her with college tuition. Her older brother was at American Indian Charter before Chavis took over. So Tovar knows what the school was previously like – underperforming and dangerous. When she was in fourth grade, Chavis told her parents he’d pay for her to attend a tutoring program at a place called SCORE to improve her skills before she even entered American Indian in sixth grade. Still, when she started middle school, she was getting a lot of Cs and struggling to complete her work.

  But she credits the teachers and Chavis’s no-nonsense rules with her success. Her senior year of high school, she was taking seven AP classes – too many, she says in retrospect. But compared with high school, she says, college has been a breeze.

  Her first day of math camp was “definitely nerve-wracking,” Tovar tells me, while her students work quietly. But she made up lesson plans and followed them and fell into a rhythm. She wasn’t intimidated anymore, but “it was frustrating.”

  She recalls, “I gave them their first test and they didn’t do as well as I’d hoped. It makes me question whether I’m a bad teacher. I feel responsible because I’m teaching them. But this is a summer camp, and a lot of these kids don’t want to be here. I can’t force them to learn.” Things have improved even in the past few days. “They’re realizing, ‘I’m here. I might as well be doing the work.’ And it makes me happy when I ask them a question and they just figure it out.” Today she asked the kids how many feet were in a mile and one boy actually knew the answer. “I was amazed,” Tovar tells me.

  Jesse Hinson, one of the other teachers, grew up a few hours away and is now a fine arts major at the University of North Carolina. Her mother met Chavis on a plane one day and, after talking with him, encouraged Hinson to put her mathematical talent to use at the camp.

  Hinson doesn’t ask the kids too much about where they come from either. She knows that their home lives may not be ideal. “But just because they’re not from a nice area or because their school system isn’t great doesn’t mean they’re not as intelligent as any other person in the room. They all know how to do the work. Whether they want to try hard enough is a different matter.”

  And for what it’s worth, the students adore these teachers. Wyatt Bullard, a student who has been coming to math camp for four years, received 59 detention slips his first year. But he eventually decided it was worth it. Every fall, when he returns to school, he finds that he’s far ahead of his classmates. He likes the fact that the teachers at math camp are generally young – “They’re pretty cool,” he tells me. Even Anaiya had softened up by the time I met her. “I want to be a vet,” she told me. And when Friday afternoon came around, she asked Chavis whether she could stay at the farm for the weekend.

  Noel Evans, who helps out with maintenance at math camp, worked as a custodian at the local middle schools for 17 years and grew up with Chavis. Evans says that parents here “are aware of how bad the public schools are,” but they have no other options. One parent, Gloria Gibbs, whose son Nicholas attends nearby Carroll Middle School, says, “This is Robeson County. My hands are tied.”

  But why don’t more parents take advantage of math camp the way Gibbs is doing? Many of the kids at camp have siblings who don’t come, for example. When I inquire about these absent brothers and sisters, I’m told they just didn’t want to come. For the most part, the kids themselves make the decision.

  Gibbs tells me that the problem in the community is the parents. “They are lazy and indigent. They’re not going to get up in the morning to bring their children here.” Greg Bell, a superior court judge in Robeson County, agrees that “parents don’t care.” Bell’s son teaches at Lumberton High School and says that on parent-teacher conference night, almost no one shows up. Bell’s niece and nephew stay with him and his wife during the week so they can attend math camp. Their mother works on the assembly line at the Campbell Soup plant and is divorced from their father. She has had difficulty getting well-paying jobs as a result of not having a college degree.

  This year, because school got out so late, math camp has only about half as many students as last year. Only about a third of each classroom is filled. Which annoys Chavis to no end.

  Chavis is not a diplomatic man. He regularly uses four-letter words in the company of the kids and employs the phrase “lazy-ass Indians” when a tape recorder is running. The local school administrators are not fans of his. He has been called a racist by members of his own community. And there are many who question his teaching methods. Even if supporters like Ronald Hammonds carry the day, it’ll take a long time to change the downward trajectory of this community.

  But Chavis wants nothing more than for his community to succeed. He has spent years trying to figure out what makes other ethnic groups rise in this country and why his seems to have ended up at the bottom. A few years ago, he tells me, one of his sisters mocked his focus on education and economic success and accused him of “acting white.” “Honey,” Chavis told her, “you’ve got to be more specific. ‘Acting white’ is not enough. I’m acting Jewish. Or maybe Chinese.”

  When you ask him why the intense focus on math, Chavis says, “Math is objective. You can trust the numbers.” He cites the extraordinary percentage of PhDs in this country that are awarded to foreign students. You don’t need to speak good English to succeed. So if Native Americans know math, they can get jobs no matter what. It’s a strange inversion – Chavis sees American Indians as immigrants to the dominant American culture. They’re poor, just like immigrants, and starting from behind, so he’s proposing strategies that have helped immigrants succeed.

  In looking at the success of other countries in teaching math, he notes that they’re more likely to have longer blocks of time devoted to the subject. While it’s often claimed that kids today don’t have the patience to spend, say, an hour and a half on math, Chavis says the problem is that “teachers don’t want to teach. Schools are designed for teachers and teachers alone.” Indeed, he suggests that it’s “teachers who have short attention spans, not kids.”

  It’s true that as I sit in on the classes, most of the students do seem to be paying attention. The youngest ones will put their head down on their desks in the afternoon and take a short nap – something Chavis actually encourages. But the longer instruction blocks do seem to allow the teachers to go deep into a particular topic and give the kids enough practice so that they know how to do the homework.

  Chavis is also a big advocate of memorization. “Learning by rote is one of the best methods.” He looks around the farm. “I trained those cows by rote. Christi
ans go to church on Sunday by rote. Every Sunday it’s the same thing.” When asked whether he’s worried that the kids won’t like learning, he’s characteristically blunt. “I don’t give a shit if they enjoy it. I never think about it.”

  In addition, he worries that many adults in his community – indeed, the entire country – spend too much time thinking about what kids want. “If you listen to kids, if we’re going to play that game as parents, we’re going to have a bunch of dumbasses. America is going to be a third-world country in a hundred years.” Referring to one sixth-grader who gave her grandmother a hard time about coming here, he says, “I don’t care what she wants. I’m the adult. I decide what’s good for her.”

  Many of Chavis’s contemporaries recall going to school at a time when teachers commonly employed corporal punishment, and a few of them seem to think it’s not such a bad idea. Chavis, for his part, often uses manual labor as detention, but he’s not above other methods. He says he’ll put kids in the barn with the cows. How is that a punishment? Well, he knows the cows won’t harm the kids, but many of the kids don’t know it.

  Jesse Hinson initially had trouble getting the kids to pay attention to her. She had given plenty of detentions, but it wasn’t having the intended effect. Finally she decided to take the large plugs out of her earlobes. It made the kids so uncomfortable to look at her that they started listening. Another time, she just moved one boy’s desk right across from her own so that when they did independent work he was under her nose the entire time.

  Perhaps the biggest sign of Chavis’s confidence in this method of teaching is that his own three children attend not only the charter school in Oakland but also math camp here. “I want them to know they’re not better than these people here. They just have more opportunities.”

  But three weeks a year, Chavis has realized, is not enough opportunity for Lumbee kids. In the fall of 2016, Chavis says, he plans to open a charter school on the farm. He shows me another barn and explains how it could easily be converted to a school building.

  There’s a charter school not too far away, with a long waiting list. Until recently, North Carolina had a cap of just 100 on the number of charter schools allowed in the state, and in 2011 the National Association of Public Charter Schools ranked the state 32 out of 41, in part because of its low cap and inadequate funding of the schools.4 But things are looking up. The current governor, Pat McCrory, is “procharter,” according to Todd Ziebarth, senior vice president for state advocacy and support at NAPCS. Indeed, North Carolina is now 16 on the list, and Ziebarth says there’s good reason to think that Chavis could get a charter, given his successes in Oakland.

  Ziebarth does say there’s cause for concern because of the accusations of financial malfeasance against Chavis. “Whether that’s perception or reality, the state will want to vet that stuff.” But he says that the state board of education, the body responsible for approving charters, has been particularly sympathetic to applicants in rural counties, since parents there truly have no good options.

  Some of the kids at math camp come from mostly working-class families, which have fallen on hard times due to the disappearance of both farming and textile mills from the area. There are few jobs for unskilled workers anymore. But many of the boys and girls here are the grandchildren of the middle class. In almost every interview I conduct, I detect a similar pattern. Every extended family has middle-class, working-class, and very poor members. But over and over, it seems as though older family members are the best educated and the most likely to be employed. For a time and for a certain population of Lumbees, education was clearly a priority.

  Maxie Maynor went to college, and now his son is studying engineering at UNC Charlotte. But his niece is struggling as a single mother. So Maynor has become a “father figure” to her sons, his great-nephews, bringing them to and from camp and trying to get involved in their education during the year as well. He says the education problem has been present since his son was young. One year, his son didn’t have books for the first eight weeks of school. When he asked the principal why not, Maynor was told, “We’re waiting to make sure all the kids are enrolled before we order books.” He transferred his son to school after school in an effort to get him away from the “chaos” that seemed to reign in the classroom.

  Maynor was very active in his son’s education, going to school regularly to talk to the teachers and see what was going on. But he says that now principals increasingly tell parents they’re not welcome in the schools, something I hear from a number of parents and grandparents.

  Nadina Elleby, the wife of an army officer, didn’t care what the principals and the teachers thought. Elleby, whose two sons are grown but who volunteered to drive other kids to math camp, tells me that the teachers were thrilled when her kids graduated because they wouldn’t have to see her anymore.

  Maynor says the leadership of the schools used to be better. Back when his son was in school, a couple of children died in a house fire after their mother, who had no one to watch them, left for work early in the morning. Because it had happened before school hours, one principal decided to open the building at 5:00 A.M. each day so that parents always had somewhere their kids could go. The principal told Maynor, “Those were my children.” But Maynor says you don’t see that kind of attitude today. “This county is in terrible shape.”

  For the kids in southeastern Montana, at least, there’s an alternative to public schools. The Saint Labre Catholic schools are a group of two elementary schools and one school serving kids in pre-K through 12th grade. Educating about 800 children from the Northern Cheyenne and Crow tribes, the schools are probably the best thing going around here. Named after the French saint, Benedict Joseph Labre, Saint Labre was founded in 1884 by a small group of Catholic Ursuline Sisters from Toledo, Ohio. The mission actually predates the reservation. A local homesteader contacted his bishop about the plight of the Northern Cheyenne, who had been forced off their land by settlers and were wandering what’s known as the Tongue River Valley. The bishop, John Brondel, purchased some land and put out a call for priests and nuns to come work with the Northern Cheyenne. Three Ursuline Sisters showed up, and for many years they lived, worked, and prayed in a three-room cabin on the land. In the years afterward, the mission underwent great hardship – almost closing altogether in the 1950s due to a lack of funding.5

  Today, Saint Labre runs a variety of programs for the community, including group homes for children whose parents can’t care for them, elder services, day care, and job training.

  But Saint Labre’s most significant contribution to tribe members’ lives has been its schools. They’re technically under the auspices of the Great Falls–Billings diocese, but they receive no money from it. They also don’t take most forms of funding from the federal government. The school’s budget is drawn entirely from donations. And the tuition is free.

  Saint Labre’s main campus – which serves 500 students – is located about 125 miles southeast of Billings. There’s no place for visitors to stay except the school itself, in bare-bones guest rooms that look as though they were last renovated in the 1970s. There’s no television, and students and visitors alike are blocked from accessing social networking sites or watching streaming videos. Cell-phone service is spotty at best.

  The town has a video store, a couple of bars, a diner, and a small supermarket – with a well-stocked beer aisle but a paltry selection of meat and produce. Saint Labre teachers who live on campus often drive to Billings on the weekends to do their grocery shopping.

  The campus itself is sprawling, with mostly single-story buildings. It is neatly kept, and the classrooms are airy and cheerful. On the opposite end of campus from the church – a pyramid-like structure with a giant cross that looks as if it has been sent crashing into the side of the building – is the cultural arts center, where students have the option of studying a native language – either Crow or Cheyenne – as well as drumming and beadwork.

  The schoo
l has a dual mission – “To proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Catholic Tradition by providing quality education which celebrates our Catholic faith and embraces Native American cultures, primarily the Northern Cheyenne and Crow Tribes, so that Native American Individuals and communities of Southeastern Montana are empowered to attain self-sufficiency.”6 Ultimately, Saint Labre’s function is to give Native children a decent education, something they’re not getting at the public schools on the reservation.

  At Saint Labre, the dropout rate is only around 1 percent. And each year since 2010, 100 percent of its graduating seniors have been accepted to college. Not all of them have gone on immediately to attend – 83 percent in 2010 – but the preparation provided by Saint Labre for whatever they want to do is clearly superior to the alternatives.7 (Of course, no good deed goes unpunished. In 2005, Saint Labre schools were sued by one of the tribes, which wanted a share of the funds that they had raised.8 Never mind that the money was being used to educate the tribe’s own children.)

  Not only do a much higher percentage of Saint Labre graduates go to college compared to graduates of public schools both off and on the nearby reservations, Saint Labre ensures that students understand the benefits of going to college. For one thing, Saint Labre exposes its students to life off the reservation. They attend math competitions in Denver and college preparatory programs at Princeton and Dartmouth. They meet kids from different backgrounds and start to understand the doors that are open to them if they can manage to get a decent education.

  Saint Labre even partners with Mount Saint Mary’s College in Maryland to offer one graduate per year free college tuition – Saint Labre pays half of the cost, and Mount Saint Mary’s pays the other half.

  Kurri Harris received this year’s scholarship to Mount Saint Mary’s College. Harris is part Crow and part Cheyenne. Her mother is an EMT, and her father is a heavy equipment operator. Her parents sent Harris and her siblings here because the local public school wasn’t safe enough. Harris says the biggest difference she notices is that the kids at Saint Labre turn in their homework on a regular basis. That doesn’t happen in Lame Deer. Harris says she plans to study physical therapy and would like to come back to the reservation to work someday.