Ten years ago this early morning I drove out of Shamokin PA en route to South Dakota. I’d just graduated college that previous May, and was off to teach on an Indian Reservation.
How did this happen? In the late 90s common knowledge was that teaching jobs were in the south, and not in my home state of Pennsylvania. This didn’t bother me, as I wanted to get out of Shamokin anyway. I’d wanted to live in or near a big city, and preferrably somewhere warm, so lots of applications went south.
One day in June I was at the Benton poetry festival with some friends from my college poetry group. One of them, a South Dakota native, spontaneously suggested I teach on a reservation. Looking at a map of empty South Dakota I didn’t really think I’d go, but pursued it anyway.
The end of July I interviewed at a dream job just outside of Charlotte, North Carolina. Nice school, upper middle class, good kids, and it was just about mine. I’d have been set for life, but I swear on my comic book collection some part of me knew this wouldn’t be.
Coming back to PA late that night there was a message from South Dakota. The next morning I called them back and had a phone interview and a second job offer. Still at first I thought “No way, I’m going to North Carolina.” That afternoon I was driving somewhere, and I felt the presence of god telling me I needed to go to South Dakota. I remember almost the exact moment. Skeptics can say it was my own subconscious desires, but I had no desire to live out in the middle of nowhere, and I wanted to get away from winter. I guess that part of the story is sort of my testimony.
So off I went. What was it like? White people always say “Oh cool,” or “Oh that’s neat!” when I tell them I taught on an Indian Reservation. In short a lot of the kids just didn’t come to school, and they partied so much they put frat boys to shame. Once and a while a student came to school drunk, and occasionally older people would knock on my door selling Buffallo skulls and other things for booze money. Plus it was really isolated and the winters could be fierce. I figured it would be good for me to stay there two years, but was happy to leave after that.
Looking back on it now, it wasn’t that bad. I mean it was that bad how the kids were so into drinking and pot, but from a kind of self centered point of view it wasn’t that bad living out there. The reservation didn’t have much of a social life for me, but I had a job. Plus the administration was happy to have me there, was happy to have me for a second year, and would have been happy to have me stay longer if I’d wanted to. At the time I was suspicious of a lot of things, but the admin never second guessed me about anything with the kids, and I admit that I appreciate that more now than I did at the time.
The other thing is I don’t pat myself on the back about it anymore. When I first came back to PA I’d go to coffee shops and read poems about it or at least mention that I’d been there, kind of exploiting it in a way. As if someone was going to give me a million dollars to write poetry about it. One poem I wrote was Rez Baseball, about one time when I played ball with the kids. This past year I’ve thought about that a lot. When I play ball with my kids every day in Korea, be it Korean ball games or soccer or especially basketball, I think about how I needed to be doing that with my Indian kids. Basketball is life on the rez, that’s how you reach them, and a tall thin guy whose not good at basketball must have seemed strange. A white person going out there has a lot of strikes against them, and that was one strike I didn’t need. Four years of being a super geek in college didn’t help me relate to them, and I wasn’t helping anybody sitting in my room writing poems or reading a book.
Still I know that I did some good there. If I had it all over, I might have done a third year. When I left at the age of 24, I thought my life was going to be a lot better, and it’s mind boggling how much worse it got, and how it didn’t improve until just 3-4 years ago. So South Dakota seems totally different looking back on it. It was the experience that defined my 20s, and I’m a better person for it.
Peace out.
