Slipping Through the Cracks

By Kara Briggs

Spring 2004

Kara Briggs is a reporter at The Oregonian newspaper and past president of both the Native American Journalists Association and Unity: Journalists of Color. She can be contacted at kara_briggs@yahoo.com.
(Photo by Patricia Cordell)

I left high school with a whisper, not a bang. I was 15, and the year was 1981. I told my dad I was burned out, and needed a break from the world. He said kids don't get burn-out. But he'd learn.

For a couple of weeks I put on the charade of being sick. Then I simply caught up to the low expectations I found for myself, a half-Yakama girl in an all-white high school in Spokane, Washington.

In grade school, teachers encouraged my advanced writing and reading skills. But in a high school of more than 1,000 students, I hung close to the walls fearing the tidal wave of teens would sweep me under. The one time my French teacher noticed me was when I sneaked out of a pep rally — which bored me — to go to the library. He roared, "We expect you to go where we tell you to go."

I felt more isolated than the average bookish teen misfit. After years of my white classmates dissecting my features — a prominent nose, full lips, and coarse brown hair — I felt ugly. The kids at school called me whatever variety of brown was down. To them I was a "wetback" one week and an Iranian the next.

But I was never something so mythic as an Indian. Native Americans didn't exist in my formal education, except for world-weary men sitting on the sidewalk outside the Union Gospel Mission. Any time I asserted, "I am a Yakama," someone was sure to look at my pale skin and add, "Just a little bit," and in so doing take another bite out of who I was.

In this atmosphere, I could not explore my growing pride in being Yakama. Even when I did venture an idea, someone would correct it.

In eighth grade I won second place in a speech contest with a talk about Native American rights. But one judge, who was white, told me that he was friends with Native Americans, and that I wouldn't get any "brownie points" for criticizing the white man.

That puzzled me as a child because I reasoned I had been in the Campfire Girls, not the Brownies. But the white man's criticism ate away at my win. Would his impact have been different if he'd talked with me about tone and style, rather than presuming that he had the right to tell me how I should talk about my race?

Native American teenagers slip away every day. Many of us will check out of school mentally, if not physically. We retell the stories of how the government beat our languages out of our parents and grandparents.

Some of us will drink to escape the pain, only to wind up in car accidents, alcoholic, or dying from alcohol poisoning. Others will have babies, who run the risk of growing up as skeptical of schooling as their parents. Some will stand up to teachers, only to be kicked out of school. With those odds, we'd rather gamble on making a living fishing the Columbia like our cousins do, like we will do even if we graduate.

We wonder what the white man has to teach us, anyway. It's a fair question.

Indian educators in the Portland Public School District reported in 2002 that one-third of the district's 1,100 Native American students were at some time in their schooling labeled as having learning disabilities. When tested, though, they were found to be learning able. What did these students learn under the emptiness of low expectations?

Leaving high school was surprisingly easy for me. No one ever called from my high school to find out where I was. No matter how many times my dad told me that a truant officer would come after me, none appeared at our door.

My dad, who was white, had raised me since my Yakama mother died when I was four. My parents, Greg and Evelyn, had been high school teachers together in Seattle, Honolulu, and California's San Joaquin Valley in the 1960s. I was their only child.

Looking back, I realize my dad didn't know what was happening to me, and neither did I. I know now I was suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Native American health providers identify these as the leading mental health issues for Native Americans. Researchers say we may even sense in our bones the trauma endured by generations before us.

The loss that has defined my life occurred when my mother was killed by a runaway bus before my eyes. She was 31. My father and I lived with her ever-present absence. As a child, the memory of her accident replayed in my mind like film footage. We never grieved; in fact we didn't know how to, in either my mother's Yakama traditions or the mainstream culture's psychological treatment.

For many of us, school isn't nearly as compelling as our internal pain, which only grows as we come to realize the enormous personal loss resulting from 500 years of genocide. We need educators who are Native American to guide us through these realizations. We also need educators who will shake off their racial preconceptions. We all carry them. Students need you to face them one human being to another.

For me, it took only a few weeks to find something more resilient than my pain. It was my intellectual curiosity. The girl who was written off by teachers took to reading the classics.

Wandering the moors with Heathcliff and Catherine was an antidote to my depression. I voraciously moved on to Anna Karenina's suicide, and figured that's no way to go. I crossed the Atlantic with the suffragists. I traveled in time to the Civil Rights movement, the women's movement, and as far as the collection at the Spokane Public Library allowed. Only one topic, the Native American rights movement, was absent from the shelves.

Meanwhile, my dad—my first and greatest teacher—spent evenings teaching me the genres and styles of 20th century American music, and the finer points of newspaper reading. When he was diagnosed and died of cancer in 1984, I was 18. He was 47.

I looked to Jane Eyre for guidance. She made a life for herself, and I determined I would, too. I found Whitworth College and an English department that would take me. I moved on as if nothing unusual had ever happened. Until my 30s, I never breathed a word about having dropped out of high school.

Now I've been a journalist for 15 years. I can't help but wonder how the Yakama girl I was, with all her academic interests, could slip through education's cracks. And if it happened to me, how many more talented Native American students are falling through the holes in America's schools every day?

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