Reservations Lessons ii

(Continued from yesterday--an old essay originally written for and published in the Seattle Pacific University magazine.)         

Then I asked his wife if she too was changed that morning, the morning her husband came home and cried and claimed to be. Her eyes rose just for a moment, she looked at me, and simply she shook her head. The detailed story he'd just recited led me to believe that what had happened that night was a Damascus Road thing—once and forever. It wasn’t. I simply didn't realize there would be more stories, but there were.

I liked the man; he’d led the worship upstairs not long before. His eyes were fervent and honest, full of repentance. But those eyes must have been seemed just as trustworthy before, when, certainly, he was neither fervent nor honest—nor trustworthy.

Some of those who fall--most of them, I imagine, if they know the truth--know very well what they're doing. They understand that what they do will affect those who love them. This man had been reared in the home of a wonderful mother, a faithful believer, the real subject of the interview, the woman whose story I was assigned to write—and another of the women who sat beside him that night.

She was the matriarch. Navajo people tell me their families are deeply matriarchal. If that’s so, she was every bit the queen. With eleven children of her own and dozens of grandchildren, she told me that today, nearly seventy, she spends lots of her day in prayer, prayer she’d learned from parents who’d come to know the Lord by way of a mission with its own deeply flawed past.

Abiding faith lends a visible glow to what otherwise might be plain old stoicism, a glow of hope rooted in destiny. It seems to me that men and women of real faith convey a gravitas that strengthens all of us. In that way too, she was a queen. I was privileged to sit beside her.

That night, the stories had been real, heartfelt, no pretension. The hard fought lessons of faith had been a blessing.

Still, it was dark when I left the church and its people behind. It was dark, and I felt my own foreignness, and maybe just a bit of the hurtful legacy of what my people have done to those with whom I’d just been sitting.

Just a few miles down the road, up on the ridge to the west, flashing lights streamed through the darkness, signaling something painful still a mile away. When I came closer, smoke wafted across the four-lane highway. Something was burning.

Reservation homesteads have a certain consistent appearance. The Navajos carve out homesteads somewhat distanced from each other, even though they live in extended family clusters. Often there are trailers or pre-fab homes, sometimes a kind of contemporary hogan and even

So great is our need of a Savior. All we, like the sheep of the reservation, have gone astray.

It's a painful lesson in smoke and darkness and emergency lights, a lesson once again--once again--once again, especially for those of us who are repeat offenders. It’s nothing more than a basic lesson in sin and forgiveness.

Somehow all of that, or so it seems to me now, is a story in the tight weave of a tattered Navajo blanket, my grandfather’s, that hangs here on my wall, miles from the reservation.

Reservation Lessons - i

It wasn’t terribly late, but it was dark over the reservation that night, scattered lights here and there where Navajo homesteads glitter against the vast reaches of the uncluttered desert landscape. A ridge of mountains to the west was barely visible, and, I'll admit it, for a white man somewhat unsure of himself in Indian territory, I wasn’t feeling totally at home.

I was returning from an old church basement, where I'd been sitting with a half-dozen members of a large Navajo family, listening to them--mostly Grandma--tell her story, a story rich with love and grace.  I was on assignment: write stories about elderly Navajo Christians and their relationship to a century-old mission boarding school, Rehoboth, just east of Gallup.  And I’d been listening.

What Anglo Christians like me are discovering these days is that the story of any North American Indian boarding school, no matter how righteous in intent, cannot be told in triumph or joy.  Those histories are heavily burdened with real pain.  One prominent Navajo leader, a Rehoboth graduate, told me that the attempt to teach Native people a new way of life, as all boarding schools once intended, carried an unmistakable corollary.  Indian kids learned, even if it were never stated, that their culture of origin, in this case, the Navajo way of life, had to be left behind.  Kids learned, he said, that the values with which they were reared, and the families that taught those values, were essentially worthless.  That lesson was criminal, a sin.  Today, we call it a kind of abuse, cultural abuse.

My own grandfather was on the “Heathen Mission Board” of the denomination he served and of which I am still a member, the Christian Reformed Church in North America.  For thirty years in the early 20th century, the Rev. John C. Schaap, a deeply pious man of God, supervised the operation of the Rehoboth boarding school, a school that has—as do all Indian boarding schools—a deeply troubled past.  Here in my study hangs an ancient and tattered Navajo rug, a gift to him, years ago, for his long service on that Board.  I too am part of this story.  But then, it seems to me that all of us are.

    That Sunday night, I’d worshipped in an old church, the very first my denomination had built on the reservation, almost a century ago.  With twenty people or so, we’d brought praise and thanksgiving to God, prayed and sung old gospel hymns—in English and Navajo.  Then, along with just a few of the folks, we’d retired to the cool of the basement, where for three hours or so, I asked questions and listened to stories.

I don't know that I've ever heard a man's confession of adultery before and then turned to look at his faithful wife, who, it seemed, wouldn't address me or him or even what he'd just confessed with her eyes.  It was a moment I won't forget.  He’d told me a long and tearful story about coming to terms, a few years back, with what he’d become—too much drink, too many drugs, too much unfaithfulness.  It was an immensely moving testimony. . . . .

(finish tomorrow)

 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“. . .sing, all you who are upright in heart.”

 My father once gave me the end of a novel.  I was struggling along, trying to figure out where that story was going, when he and my mother came to visit, went to church one Sunday, and sang, with the entire congregation, the old Fanny Crosby hymn “Blessed Assurance.”  The image of him, face aglow, became the last scene, the one I was looking for.

 So when he died, just a few years ago, something in me wanted that hymn sung at his funeral.  I wouldn’t have asked for it, because I was afraid that the reasons for me wanting that hymn would have been more related to my work, my writing, than who he was, even though part of the reason I was so taken by him that Sunday was his effortless joy in affirming that Jesus was, in fact, his.

 Miraculous?—I don’t know how to gauge miracles; but when I talked with my sister about the shape of Dad’s funeral, she said she’d told Mom that the hymn we ought to sing was “Blessed Assurance.”  There had to be some divine intervention there, don’t you think?

 So we did—at the memorial service for my father we sang “Blessed Assurance.”  Well, most people did.  I didn’t.  I couldn’t.  But I loved it, even though I’d never been particularly taken with the way it swings, well, tediously, through the chorus.  But you don’t have to like something to love it—and to feel heaven and earth moved.

My father had died rather quickly.  He wasn’t young, and when he fell carrying a box—he and Mom were planning on moving—a wicked series of cause-and-effects eventually took him, no more than a month later. 

But it was only then that I came to believe what my mother told me—that Dad had been in the early throes of Alzheimer’s, that his condition had manifest itself in many ways, some of which we discovered when going through his things.  He was a banker who prided himself on keeping books, but his checkbook was a disaster, corrections scratched in monthly, sometimes for outrageous amounts.  He couldn’t keep it anymore. Must have been very vexing for him, but he never mentioned a thing.

Some boxes he’d packed were a jumble.  My wife looked at one of them strangely, and said she was sure she could see he was losing it—kitchen utensils with socks and clothing items.  Made no sense.  My father was always organized.

But my mother’s stories were most convincing.  He couldn’t sing anymore, she told us.  My parents had sung together as loyally as they’d daily meditated on the Word.  When I was young, they used to face off and play table tennis, Mom usually winning.  Eventually they grew out of that and into Rummicube, but no matter what else they were doing, they always sang together, my mother at the keyboard.

That he couldn’t—that, in those last weeks of his life, he lacked the wherewithal to put word and voice together—had to be immensely painful.  Millions of people die everyday in more difficult pain, perhaps, than my father ever felt, even in dying; but I can’t imagine how he suffered, not being able to sing.

So this verse feels like my father, today.  “Sing,” David says.  Sing.

I’m not sure my father looks much different today than he did that Sabbath when he gave me the final scene of a novel.  But I’ll grant you this, there’s even more joy on a face that just won’t ever stop shining. 

 

The bottom line of this historical highway marker claims the sign was placed there in 1956. I was nine years old. As I remember, it was south and east of town, closer to Cedar Grove than it was to Oostburg, along what was once state highway 141, but what has been blessed today with a more historical name--the Sauk Trail. 

Some Sauk, some Fox, some Pottawatomi, some Ho-Chunk or Winnebago--they were all there on the lakeshore in 1847, at least remnants thereof, most of them by that time reduced to begging, indigents, according to my great-grandfather's obituary, victims of a rapacious western movement of Euro-Americans, many of them, like my ancestors, immigrants.

The first book I owned I bought from Prange's Department Store in Sheboygan. Most likely, that was close to 1956. That coffee-table sized book cost all of three dollars, I think, but it documented and described Indians, Native Americans, not just the tribes that were on Wisconsin's Lake Michigan shoreline, where I grew up, but all kinds of Indians. I loved it. Paid for it myself--I think my parents were proud really. 

I never forgot the highway sign. Mom and Dad likely piled their kids in the car--an old Mercury--and went south down the highway, maybe on our way to Milwaukee, when Dad spotted that flashy new highway marker he'd read about and decided to pull over. 

I'm almost positive no school class ever taught me anything about the Phoenix disaster. When I was a boy in the Christian school, there were only two histories that really counted much: national history (the Tea Party, Washington on the Delaware) and Reformation history (Luther, Calvin, Knox, etc.). When I was a kid, I don't know if any teacher I ever had considered Sheboygan County history to be history at all. 

All I ever knew of the Phoenix disaster was from this sign. No one talked much about it as I remember, and while there were many in local communities who could trace their ancestry back to some long-gone Phoenix disaster survivor, I couldn't, nor did I lose a relative that cold November night in 1847. 

But the story stayed with me, found a permanent place in my heart and soul, and when first I was given the assignment to write a short story--I was a sophomore in college--the very first story I wrote was something about the Phoenix disaster.

Close to 300 Dutch emigrants had left the Netherlands months before, bound for rural Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. They'd boarded the steamship Phoenix for the last leg of the journey, stopped for a time, just north at Manitowoc, then departed, middle of the night, for the Sheboygan harbor. They were within sight of the city lights--that close!--when a boiler blew and set the wooden ship aflame. Most of those on board had one last choice--to drown or burn. The lifeboats were a joke. Who on earth cared for these people, after all? They were just a bunch of lousy immigrants. 

When, a few years later, I decided to try to gather a sense of my own roots (Alex Haley, Roots), I started on my very first book project. It was 1976. I was a college teacher. My idea?--to read local histories of Dutch Reformed areas, find stories I liked, and try to write them to learn to write fiction. 

The first story I wrote with that collection of stories in mind was the story of the Phoenix disaster. In a way, ever since I was nine, ever since I read that highway sign, I couldn't help but think that somehow, for someone like me, a kid with a Dutch name, who grew up on the lakeshore, that story in some mysterious way belonged to me.

A story in yesterday's Sheboygan Press claims that a local scavenger took a State Historical Society diver along to look over what he'd considered a log when he'd earlier taken a Dutch researcher to the place, a couple miles out, north of Sheboygan, where the Phoenix was thought to have gone down. The expert now claims that the log is not a log, but a smokestack, almost assuredly from the Phoenix. It's been lying there in cold Lake Michigan waters for 175 years. Amazing!--and wonderful.

I just hope some kid in the neighborhood will take notice of all of this, do a little homework on the story, and then allow it a permanent place in the library of his or her soul, which is where you'll find mine.

The story of the Phoenix disaster is bigger and broader, deeper and wider, than even a Lake Michigan horizon at dawn. It begs unanswerable questions, critiques our prejudices, puts us into the kind of stillness that reminds us to think eternally. 

__________________________ 

The story "The Heritage of These Many Years" appears in my first book, Sign of a Promise and Other Stories, 1979.

A circle of stories

An old essay from the time I put together a book for Rehoboth, a century-old Christian mission and school in Gallup, New Mexico. I don't have a picture of the picture--wish I did!--but the story is worth telling again.

An old mission institution like Rehoboth Christian School eventually accumulates a museum of cast-offs. Upstairs in the old Mission House, in a four-by-six library, itself likely a gift, a whole shelf of books are marked "Grand Rapids Christian High." Cast-offs.

For close to a century, supporting churches and families—even schools—have given away old books, old knick-knacks, unused furniture, and what not else, to the mission, designated for years to “our Indian cousins,” the description the denominational magazine used to keep white folks like my parents and me, “back east,” in touch with the enterprise.

Not long ago, I stayed in the Mission House, where I noticed a print in my room, a painting, the only ornament on the wide wall south, across from the bed. It’s a slightly impressionistic rendition of what appeared to be a country road in England or Holland, some exotic European country villa nowhere near the gorgeous Southwest backdrop that takes your breath away when you step out any door at Rehoboth.

An odd print for this place, I thought—a strange way to decorate. A room in the old Mission House really ought to feature some breathtaking desert landscape.

When I looked up close, I realized it was not a print. Run your finger over the canvas, and you’ll notice that someone painted it.

So, for a night or two, I simply assumed the painting was some Easterner's spare bedroom wall-hanging, something someone like me couldn’t gather the wherewithal to chuck, even though it was of little value to anyone. “Send it to Rehoboth,” he told himself, years ago. “Maybe someone there can use it. It's a real painting, after all."

That’s why it’s here, on this old wall, so out of place I told myself—it’s somebody’s cast-off gift.

There's a name in the lower left-hand corner. “M. Vander Weide - 51,” it says, the number, I’m guessing, a reference to the year it was painted.
Okay, someone sent a painting to his Indian cousins, a painting his grandma had done maybe ten years before she died. Couldn’t throw it out, I told myself, so he sent it to Rehoboth. Sure—that makes sense.

*

The next morning, in Window Rock, I prayed aloud over a breakfast I shared with three others—Mr. Herbert F. White and his wife Sarah, as well as their son, Fred. And as I did, Sarah White whispered grace like a soft alto line, as if my own words, my prayer, were the melody. It was beautiful. Then we ate breakfast—and talked, about life, about Rehoboth, about the saving grace of the Lord.

Mr. White’s own father was a Navajo medicine man, a good man, a loving father, his son says, remembering, even while he was apologizing for what he considers to be his fractured English. As a little kid, he says, he didn’t know a word of English until he came to Rehoboth Mission School.

Rev. Jacob Kamps visited his hogan one day in the mid-1930s. He says he didn’t remember any white man ever having come into his place before—not one; and even though he knew no English, this Rev. Kamps, in fractured Navajo, told his father—the boy picked up a bit of it anyway—that his son, his only son, should be going to school at Rehoboth.

Six or seven years old, this boy was, soon after, trucked—well, wagon-ed—off to the mission school—and once there, was left behind. “This was something totally new,” he told me, remembering that day. “I didn’t even have an idea what a school was going to be.” He was going to get an education, an education his father wanted for him.

“I went right away to the dormitory, and Miss Van was there—she was the matron,” he told me over blue cornmeal pancakes. “And the late Miss Van—she treated me just like a mom,” the mom he’d never had. “Her welcome was so great,” he said, it was as if she was saying “come to my house. I don’t care what color your skin is, you’re my child. And from there on,” he said— “I didn’t feel any harm. I felt welcomed.”

But there’s more. Miss Van, he said, used to spread her arms out and act like a train—he made a whistling sound just as she had so many years ago, mimicking her. “And all of the students would follow her,” he told me, as if they were boxcars following the engine all around the dormitory room where the boys slept. She was putting them to sleep.

And now, if you’re still with me, you’re likely already putting the stories together.

*

That afternoon I met an elderly white man who knows almost as much about this mission as anyone still alive. I was telling him parts of this great story, when I asked him who this Miss Van was.

“Why that was Marie Vander Weide,” he told me.

“M Vander Weide,” I thought, lights going on in the dimness, the woman who painted that odd little impressionist image of some quaint European village, the one that hangs on the wall in the old Mission house, the very place where Herbert F. White remembers, with joy, his very first taste of fresh cow’s milk.

All of that history sits beside me now, right here at Rehoboth, as I attempt to tell the story, the precious history of believers, in obedience, trying their human best to love as the Lord commands, to bring his saving love to kids who were, often as not, scared to death, far from home in an incredibly strange, whole new world, bringing the gospel in outstretched arms and silly train whistle.

Marie Vander Weide’s oil painting hangs across the room, where it shines a good deal brighter today, as if it were aglow in the radiant bronze patina of a perfect New Mexico dawn. That painting is nobody’s cast-off. It’s priceless.

And I feel blessed to have been the recipient of an entire circle of stories.

Farch again

It's a mess--the weather that is. 

Sunday, it was so awful that all around town church was called off. Northwest winds swept out of Alberta as if chased by ICE, and snow fell, three to five. Now listen, we've had 70-degree weather three weeks ago. To be assaulted/insulted by yet another weekend blizzard--we've had a few this season and they're almost predictably come on Sunday (the Devil's doing it!)--was hard to take. Yesterday, Tuesday, the high never cleared freezing, and the low shouldn't be spoken of in polite society. 

Now hold on to your seat. Today--Wednesday--the thermometer will supposedly climb to 50, Friday 60, Saturday 70, Sunday 80. Seriously. Sometimes you just can't help but wonder how on earth those sodbusters made it out here. Now you know why just seeing the buffalo herd far away over the hills at Broken Kettle makes me soul sing. Through the millennia, they figured out the way to live out here where the weather always comes in spades.

There aren't a ton of photographs in my files from Farch, in part (and I hate to say this) because beauty is hard to find right about now. Give the green an inch or two in a few weeks, and the awakening will be beautiful. New snow makes the world virginal, but by March bridal gowns have become a cliche.

You do what you can. These are from March 21, 2009, fifteen years ago. Given the circumstances, I think I did okay. I'm a couple of miles out of Hawarden on the banks of the Big Sioux.

And, sure enough, here's the dawn, the Big Sioux running like liquid gold.

 Tell you what--let me just drop a small herd of buffalo in here for your and my mental health. I know, I know--it's not Farch and there are no bison west of Hawarden. But sometimes they can be so wonderful. See 'em down there on the ridge of a hill.

All's well that ends well.

In praise of Minnesotans

 

You can listen to this on a podcast:  https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2021-10-04/the-nobel-cheese-prize-sinclair-lewis-in-minnesota

The birthday of Sinclair Lewis is now a bit behind us, but in his honor, I thought I’d sing the glories of a Sinclair Lewis 1/3 pound cheeseburger, served up with pickle and fries at the Palmer House, downtown Sauk Center, an old hotel that's not changed its features for more than a half century and fronts on Sinclair Lewis Street. I'm not kidding. Just down the way a few blocks, you can find the Sinclair Lewis home and on the south side of town, the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center. All true. Google it.

The Sinclair Lewis Cheeseburger

I can’t help but think all that glory is a bit ironic. Sauk Center's somewhat favorite son didn't much care for the codgers who peopled his hometown, or any Midwestern small towns, for that matter. The book that shot the moon for him, Main Street (1921), sold phenomenally and led, eventually, to Lewis's receiving the Nobel Prize (1930), the first American to win. Nothing to sneeze at.

In high school, I was forcefed Main Street. Hated the book. Not even sure I read it. Made no sense to me, largely because the book is acidic satire I wasn’t smart enough to see. What I do remember is how much "Red" Lewis despised his own, even people I knew in my own midwestern small town. He had reason, I’m sure: small towns can be death on individuals who are individuals. Lewis was tall, gangly, unathletic, and not much to look at. People say his father, the town doctor, never understood him. Those kinds of ingredients are not a recipe for success.

With weekly visits to a place called Lake Woebegone, Garrison Keillor celebrated his own Minnesota boyhood and Minnesota culture for years, and a audience from across the nation dialed in, belovedly. His 30th anniversary celebrated with a traveling show held in a bunch of small towns, to which he invited folks to bring picnic baskets and lawn chairs. Minnesota sweetness.

Mr. Keillor sports with his people, Mr. Lewis knifed ‘em.

The very idea of lawn chairs and picnic baskets would be anathema to Sinclair Lewis, Minnesota's Nobel Prize winner. He'd rip and tear at the backward souls who showed up. 

But today, this Iowan believes Minnesota can laugh at itself and love itself, almost simultaneously; and that's why I admire the place. Anyone who can be at home with a place called “the Gopher State" has to have a sense of humor. Minnesotans all buy truly Minnesota-thick winter gear--caps, jackets, vests from Bemidji Woolen Mills.

Not only that, but they wear all that Gopher gear with pride, arrogance even, whether or not their names are Olie and Lena. In the movie Fargo, the Coen brothers, great Minnesota filmmakers, worked the archetypes lovingly with a small-town cop named Marge Gunderson, who, in a cap with earmuffs, taught the nation how to speak Minnesotan, don’t you know?

So you’re wondering about that Sinclair Lewis cheeseburger—thumbs up or thumbs down? Listen, it wasn't half bad, served up on a hard roll too yet.

What's more, I can’t help but think there's some poetic justice in the fact that Sauk Prairie, Lewis’s home town, honors its Nobel Prize-winning novelist with a fat cheeseburger.

That is so Minnesotan. Got to love ‘em.

_________________________ 

The real reason I pulled this post out of mothballs is I wanted to extol a recent op-ed in the NY Times by Tom Friedman. It's very long, but perfectly wonderful and unflinchingly moral. If you want to understand what President Trump doesn't understand (and never will, read--or listen to--this convincing essay that explains "neighboring," something the world needs to learn. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026 /03/15/opinion/columnists/minneapolis-ice-trump-neighbor.html