Volume 11 Number 2
January 1972

Jack Gregory and Rennard Strickland

We agreed we would undertake the task, purchased a tape recorder, and went into the field to gather impressions. Reels and reels of tape and dozens of letters later, the New York editor decided our Indians didn’t meet her stereotype of what it was like to be an Indian. And so, by mutual agreement, we called off the project.

Recently we came a cross that manuscript entitled "We Ate the Wild Things: Remembrances of a Cherokee Boy." In the book we had reconstructed hundreds of hours of tapes into a composite picture of the life of an Indian boy. Two of these unpublished chapters are eloquent testimony of the impressions of Indians attending public schools.

We believe that Indian educators will appreciate, and we hope, learn a little something from our labors. If nothing more, the narrative is a poignant reminder of the human aspects of Indian education

We got up early and mom put on the best clothes I had. I walked down to school. My dad didn’t go to school at all and mom had gone to the fourth grade. One thing that mom always said was that "we are going to have schooling for you boys." I didn't want to go to school.

I remember that those were the best clothes I ever saw, the clothes I wore that day. She didn’t buy them. She made them. She’d sewed them together for me. I was really proud of them.

I didn’t have any shoes to wear. School starts in August, when I was a little boy. This was so we would get out in time to pick some of the crops. So I walked down to school and didn’t have any shoes on. I had on this pants and shirt. I got down to school and walked into the yard. It was just before school took up. I remember over there in this corner a bunch of the white kids laughed at me for what I had on.

We had a recess during the noon hour and mom had fixed me some bean bread and I sat down by some kids and they laughed at what I was eating. My bread was brown like and corn meal and rough looking. It is kinda’ flat. I hated them and I hated school.

We had a white teacher down there. But I grew to love her. She understood us. She was with us for a long time. She brought us funny books sometimes. We loved to read the funny books because they had pictures. I loved to read Bugs Bunny and Donald Duck and I liked Superman, too. You didn’t have to know English to understand funny books.

There were a lot of English words, even in the first grade book. I didn’t even know what they were. My dad was always speaking Cherokee. He didn’t like to speak English. My mother was trying to force me to speak English. I didn’t even want to learn English. We spoke Cherokee to each other.

I remember the first grade primer, Dick and Jane, or something like that. I remember having so much trouble trying to read those stories. Talk about Dick and Jane and Spot and a red and white ball. And I had never seen a red and white ball in my life. Or any kind of ball except a stick ball down on the stomp grounds where we used to play stickball. They didn’t talk about stickball.

They talked about Dick and Jane going down town and going to the laundromat and riding an elevator. I didn’t know what a laundromat was. I didn’t know what an elevator was. I thought it was something to take you up in the sky. These words. I hadn’t ever heard them spoken.

And they talked about going out to the restaurant and eating steak. I didn’t know unless they talked about a seq-ah. A seq-ah is a hog. A hog or sasas, that’s a goose. I didn’t know what they were talking about eating. I didn’t understand that at all. I was completely lost. I didn’t understand school.

My grandfather was an old man. He could remember the old Cherokees. I walked down the road to see him a lot after school. He would sit on the front porch with his red dog and wait for me.

I know he loved me and I felt like an Indian when I was with him. He told me stories in Cherokee. He knew all about the animals and the birds. He could talk to all of them.

When I was a boy, I thought he was a witch. I think my grandfather was a witch. My grandfather was a witch, I knew he was.

Now Cherokees are different from most people--we have good witches and we have bad witches. My grandfather was a good witch, you would call him.

I remember one day we were out walking and we came to a clear spot between the trees and he disappeared. He just vanished. I started to cry real loud, you know. Of course, he did not want to frighten me. He came back. Now, I was a little boy and he might have been fooling me but I don’t know where he would have gone. My grandfather would not have fooled me. That was when I first knew he was a witch.

I can remember the first time we did a play at school. We invited all our parents in. I finally, after a lot of talking, got all of my kinfolks to come in.

It was quite a big occasion. We walked down to see the play that night. And even brought some of my older kinfolks in to see it and they couldn’t even understand English. But they came in and really enjoyed it.

We did a little play called "The First Thanksgiving." I guess I was in about the third grade. They choose up the parts and I remember, sure enough, the teacher chose me to be one of the Indians. I made a paper tomahawk and put a paper beaded thing around my head and came in and talked like, "Me heap big Indian, want to help out starving pilgrims." And I brought in a cardboard turkey. We practiced and rehearsed. The white kids played the pilgrims.

The thing that really embarrassed me so much--the teacher told me not to look out at the audience. You weren’t supposed to see the audience. I remember my grandfather came in and he would laugh at the wrong places and he would speak in Cherokee real loud. When he saw me come out with my tomahawk, he got so excited when I was gonna tomahawk the pilgrims, for the first time.

My grandfather wanted me to actually do it. He told me he wished I’d gone ahead. If we had killed the first pilgrims we wouldn’t have any troubles now.

One of the early legends taught to me by my old grandfather was that if you ever planted a cedar tree, you never plant a cedar tree, because when the cedar tree grows big enough to cast a shadow over your complete body, you will die. You know, today, when I am driving through the country and I see a tall cedar tree, I think somebody has died. The cedar tree is a tree of death to the Cherokees.

My grandfather knew when he was going to die. I was sitting on his porch and he walked out in the yard by an old tree that was there. It was not a cedar tree but it was old and tall and almost dead. A whole flock of blackbirds landed in that tree. And my grandfather looked at me and said, "I am going to die this year."

I was only about nine or ten but I believed him. He told me that the birds meant he would die. The blackbirds brought him death. He died the very next spring.

Surely this shows something of what it is like to be an Indian boy caught between two worlds. This should remind us when we become a bit impatient about progress in Indian education to ask: How does it feel to go to school and read of atomic scientists and return home to a grandfather whom you believe to be a witch? Where do you go when the buffalo are gone but you want to join the hunt?

The roads to cross are many. They are even broader when poverty and language are barriers along the way. But we should never forget the potential and the challenge of seeing and being in two worlds. For a boy, properly guided, it is wonderful to live in a world where you can reach for the moon and its treasures and yet retreat to the spirit world where little people are your guardians and thunder is your friend.