Child discipline the original nations' way

Child discipline the original nations’ way in Montana. July 1975. 

A thunderstorm was brooding over the Wolf Mountains off to the southwest that July evening of 1975. It was my first summer after a year of teaching children of the Testsestahse, the Cheyenne nation in Montana at Busby School. I had arrived at a field south of Lame Deer where lots of cars were parked around an open arbor with a pole in the center.

Ke’éehe (grandmother) of one of my students had invited me to a sun dance. I agreed to go with heavy questions on my mind. There were crises I barely weathered through my first year teaching in this formerly Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school. So many children in my elementary, middle school and even high school classes were undisciplined, wild, and uncontrollable through that year. I could not see a way through the new requirement that we teachers stop using consequences, not post rules, stop marching drills, and no longer make students recite “I will…”  to motivate them to learn or behave. This was the new policy of the new local school board. To my consternation, the administration supported it. The parents had cited years of abuse and mistreatment by BIA teachers and was determined to find a better direction grounded in their own way of child upbringing and discipline.

This was before the UN charter on the “rights of indigenous peoples.” But many of the Cheyenne nation, led by my friend Ted Risingsun, were tired of sovereignty loss over child upbringing, and successfully voted in a local school board. BIA teachers and administrators left. The loss of BIA oversight meant the loss of discipline for learning, as I and many colleagues saw it. I had no experience then of indigenous discipline training, nor could perceive any problem with the European caste expressions in Montana connected with race and color, blinding me then to see a better way to learn discipline.

One expression was that Cheyenne children were raised with latent immaturity.  I mistakenly agreed they just lacked parenting skills. Sometimes I heard words deprecating Cheyenne culture as the reason. Evidence I saw was that parents did not train children to obey. Even worse, as I saw it, children came to school with a nonchalant disability to obey a teacher's authority, learned at home. They grew up rebelling against many of the dominant culture’s ways. This was the cause, in my frame of mind, of the abominable rate of incarceration and alcoholism. It did set up frequent conflicts in my classroom, especially in middle school grades.

It took decades for me to see how wrong I was. And it remains a frontier of opportunity for re-inventing schooling among American first people’s families. Montana still lags in this awareness.

The sun dance “Ke’éehe” (grandmother) was seated on a folding chair in the light of the fire, near the dance arbor, as I approached.  She was already speaking slowly in Cheyenne. Her voice had a clarity and strength that amazed me, easily unencumbered by occasional low rumblings of thunder over the southwest hills.  I had no idea she had this voice. There were no microphones. There were many more children and adults together than I could image being quiet and actually listening, knowing the lack of discipline to listen demonstrated in school. Smaller children were seated in the grass, with elders on lawn chairs right behind them, and much of the crowd was gathered standing quietly behind this circle. How could young children remain quiet through these increasing flashes of lightening and louder thunder? Could I learn and practice some of this discipline in my classes and summer’s end?

My discomfort rose with the storm bearing down. Subconsciously I took a cue from the quiet confidence in the entire gathering that everyone and everything remained OK. There was already in my heart a sense of spiritual confidence at this time and place impinging on our reality there.
Mostly it was the discipline of the children to stay put, quiet, and attentive in apparent danger I sensed from the coming storm. Transfixed, I couldn’t move.

During that half hour or more she continued speaking, she did not raise her voice above the thunder.  Toward the end, with louder thunder claps she just stopped, patiently waiting until it was quiet again. Her rising and falling slow, careful speech in Cheyenne language drifted up and over into the darkening of the cloud and the descent of the sun. As a gentle breeze began moving, the dim outline of the arbor and pole brightened in pink light.  I turned around to look opposite the storm. The setting sun was lighting a spot of rising clouds ablaze in the sky above the east ridge. Those clouds built, and the first lightning and thunder began on the other side of our gathering. The light dimmed and went out. Thunder intensified. A few drops disturbed the dust under my feet, and immediately stopped. The storm regrouped and moved off farther east. Only then she announced "hinne ha'ena"  (that's it; completed). Immediately her learning circle dissipated and the dancers and drummers began the after-sunset ceremonies. The afterglow from the sunset broke through the remaining clouds in the west, and lit my path to my car. 

 

In Crow Agency School Public School 2004, many years later, I fell in love with teaching music with kids K through 5. It happened because I invited Evelyn Old Elk, and later her daughter Dora and friend Joy Brien, to come into my music classroom. Along with Ted Risingsun many years before, they taught what remains largely missing to this day in teacher education and inservice classes: the heritage way of child discipline among the Apsáalooke and Cheyenne. I was very slow to learn their respect for children’s learning, and how to invite their respect. 

 

Some parents and providers are joining in an online class, meeting once a week and with mentors through the week, with Lifeways North America. This is beginning March 3 to April 3 this spring. Most of the cost will be covered by a scholarship for people who are caring for or teaching Native American children in our area of Southern Montana. Look up Lifeways North America, and contact 406 665-5714 or graberdb@gmail.com


David Graber, January 15, 2021