Tekst 33: Sun Elk om at vende tilbage til stammen

Sun Elk fra New Mexico var i 1883 den første dreng fra sin stamme til at blive sendt på kostskolen Carlisle i Pennsylvania. Han vendte tilbage efter syv år på skolen. Han beretter her bl.a. om, hvordan det var at vende tilbage til stammelivet efter at have levet som ’hvid’ amerikaner i syv år.

Fra Peter Nabokov: Native American Testimony. Penguin Books, 1999, s. 221-224.

When I was about thirteen years old I went down to St. Michael’s Catholic School. Other boys were joining the societies and spending their time in the kivas being purified and learning the secrets. But I wanted to learn the white man’s secrets. I thought he had better magic than the Indian. […] So I drifted a little away from the pueblo life. My father was sad but he was not angry.  He wanted me to be a good Indian like all the other boys, but he was willing for me to go to school. He thought I would soon stop. There was plenty of time to go into the kiva.

Then at the first snow one winter ... a white man – what you call an Indian Agent – came and took all of us who were in that school far off on a train to a new kind of village called Carlisle Indian School, and I stayed there seven years. […]

Seven years I was there. I set little letters together in the printing shop and we printed papers. For the rest we had lessons. There were games, but I was too slight for foot and hand plays, and there were no horses to ride. I learned to talk English and to read. There was much arithmetic. It was lessons: how to add and take away, and much strange business like you have crossword puzzles only with numbers. The teachers were very solemn and made a great fuss if we did not get the puzzles right.

[…]

They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get civilized. I remember that word too. It means “be like the white man.” I am willing to be like the white man, but I did not believe Indian ways were wrong. But they kept teaching us for seven years. And the books told how bad the Indian had been to the white men – burning their towns and killing their women and children. But I had seen white men do that to Indians. We all wore white man’s clothes and ate white man’s food and went to white man’s churches and spoke white man’s talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed at our own people and their blankets and cooking pots and sacred societies and dances. I tried to learn the lessons – and after seven years I came home. […]

It was a warm summer evening when I got off the train at Taos station. The first Indian I met, I asked him to run out to the pueblo and tell my family I was home. The Indian couldn’t speak English, and I had forgotten all my Pueblo language. But after a while he learned what I meant and started running to tell my father “Tulto is back…”

We chattered and cried, and I began to remember many Indian words, and they told me about an uncle, Tha-a-ba, who had just died, and how Turkano, my old friend, had finished his year’s fast and was joining the Black-eyes to become a priest and delight-maker.

[…]

I went home with my family. And next morning the governor of the pueblo and the two war chiefs and many of the priest chiefs came into my father’s house. They did not talk to me; they did not even look at me. When they were all assembled they talked to my father.

The chiefs said to my father, “Your son who calls himself Rafael has lived with the white men. He has been far away from the pueblo. He has not lived in the kiva nor learned the things that Indian boys should learn. He has no hair. He has no blankets. He cannot even speak our language and he has a strange smell. He is not one of us.”

[…]

I walked until I came to the white man’s town, Fernandez de Taos. I found work setting type in a printing shop there. Later I went to Durango and other towns in Wyoming and Colorado, printing and making a good living. But this indoor work was bad for me. It made me slight of health. So then I went outside to the fields. I worked in some blacksmith shops and on farms.

All this time I was a white man. I wore white man’s clothes and kept my hair cut. I was not very happy. I made money and I kept a little of it and after many years I came back to Taos.

My father gave me some land from the pueblo fields. He could do this because now the land did not belong to all the people, as it did in the old days; the white man had cut it up and given it in little pieces to each family, so my father gave me a part of his, and I took my money and bought some more land and some cattle. I built a house just outside the pueblo. I would not live in the pueblo so I built outside a house bigger than the pueblo houses all for myself.

My father brought me a girl to marry. Her name was Roberta. Her Indian name was P'ah-tah-zhuli (little deer bean). She was about fifteen years old and she had no father. But she was a good girl and she came to live with me in my new house outside the pueblo.

When we were married I became an Indian again. I let my hair grow, I put on blankets, and I cut the seat out of my pants.

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