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TI: Well, let's, we'll get into that a little bit more. I'm curious; so after you graduated from the University of Idaho, you decided to go into teaching. Why, why teaching?

RM: Well, I, I went through a progression of ideas when I was in college. I went, I originally wanted to be a foreign correspondent; I wanted to write the truth. I was impressed by a book by Walter Duranty called I write as I please. And, and I, at this time, I was reading the New York Times. I started reading New York Times when I was a senior in high school at the library, and I liked it because you got a different viewpoints on the war and everything else. And so I, as I developed that idea, I thought, well, and I can write. I had a feeling that I could write, and my themes were, I was doing quite well on writing themes and English comp. and that sort of thing. Anyway, I fell in love and decided, "Well, maybe I should be a lawyer and give up this idea of travel again."

TI: A lawyer because you thought you'd make more money? Is that, is that why?

RM: No, that I would stay at home more. That it would be, accompany this, and I thought history... and then, then I taught a couple of times at the University of Idaho for a professor. I can't remember now exactly how that worked. And I liked it. I liked the interplay between the minds that we were talking about, and the issue was marriage and the family, I remember that. Or issues. And, and the discussion and that kind of thing. And so I, I then switched to teaching. And I took a couple of education courses on how to teach, and I was appalled at this, this formalistic way of getting across ideas to students. It just, just boggled my mind. Anyway, that was about the time I was a junior. And I had one more quarter to go, I went out mid-senior year. Got the job in Orofino. Orofino was a town of Caucasians and Indians, I was back to the Indian theme again. How do you get the Indians to go to school?

TI: Was there like a reservation near Orofino?

RM: Oh, yeah. The Nez Perce Indian reservation came right up to the town of Orofino.

TI: So this was located just, what, east of Lewiston?

RM: Yeah, 35 miles. And right on the edge of the Nez Perce reservation, and they went to school in Orofino. There were -- and here, I got to know the Indians far better than anywhere else. And some of them were good students, some of them poor students, some of them had ambitions, some did not, they were wonderful. They treated me, they taught me how to teach; that's really what they did.

TI: The, I'm sorry, the Indians did, or just the, just being that small town?

RM: The Indians did. The Indians did, they were a challenge to teach. The white man's gospel, the idea of assimilation of Indians, this is where I first ran into that. And they had their own culture, and the harder you pounded, tried to pound say a Caucasian culture in, the deeper came the Indian culture. And I, I saw that clearly, right, right from the beginning. And I never tried to say, "Hey, you've gotta learn the white culture." And I was very interested in the Nez Perce and the, read books on it, in, on their way of life. And knew that, hey, the concept of assimilation, forced assimilation was wrong. Totally wrong. That there was room for both cultures. Three years at Orofino I came up, I knew that.

TI: So in a classroom, roughly how many were Indian and how many were Caucasian?

RM: Oh, I'd say a third Indian. Samuels family, I remember, George family. They, they were wonderful people. They didn't associate with the Caucasians at all. Lorraine had contact with them more than I did, outside of school.

TI: From their perspective, why didn't they want to associate with Caucasians?

RM: They didn't want to associate with Caucasians, particularly.

TI: They just didn't want to? They just...

RM: There was no, they sat in the same classroom, and I didn't care where they sat. I made it a point that in every, from the whole of my teaching career, "You go sit where you please." And that, you'll probably have to stay in that seat, but the point was, I wasn't going to dictate alphabetical order or anything like that. That was a point that I had in my mind when I began teaching. And the Indians sometimes, and depended on the class, interesting enough, if it were mathematics, they were in the back of the room. If it were history, they were in the front of the room. It was interesting where they would sit. There were people, Caucasians in the class who made overtures to them, they were good in sports, kind of thing. That, that world was taking place in Orofino. And I worked to teach them, I learned to work with individual students, that kind of thing there. And they, and they were, they led me down the path of, of appreciation. It was different than any textbook I'd ever read and I, and I'd taken the Western Frontier in class, had nothing, no resemblance to reality.

TI: Did you ever get any negative comments because of how you, how close you were to the Indians?

RM: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Sort of indirect. They were, a lot of 'em were poor and starving, and I didn't have much money, but I wanted them fed. I knew that they were having trouble in the classroom because they were falling asleep or they were, they were so thin, especially in the winter. And I said, "We ought to, I think we ought to take up a collection, say in the Lions Club or something, and help them to eat." "No, no, they'll become dependent on us." And I said, "Jeez..." and I remember we had all this food leftover from Lions Club meetings, and I said, "We should bring that to school or something." "No, we're not gonna do that." This is the principal. "You are to make Christians out of them, even if you have to put 'em on the cross." And he told me that and I, I said, "They're, they won't learn that way." He said, "We're not interested particularly in whether they learn or not. Just keep 'em quiet. You're in there because they ran -- " they ran the teacher that they had before out. That was part of the problem.

And I had one Indian who was, carved his initials in the desk. Well, everybody carved their initials in the desk. [Laughs] "Why can't I carve my initials in this desk? Look at this goddamn desk." And I said, I said, "It's destruction of school property." "So what?" he said. I said, "Gene," -- his name was Gene Broncho, I said, "You can't do that." I said, "Not in front of me, anyway." [Laughs] And he said, "Well, you go look out the window or something. Don't, don't bother me." I said, "Oh... no, don't do it." And so he, he quit, but I had to plead with him. And my principal is telling me, "You have to have iron discipline because they'll act out aggressions." I never had an Indian act out an aggression other than carving his initials in the desk. They would come to -- it was sort of interesting -- they would come by the apartment and house, actually, I lived in the fire hall the first year, and they would come by on a Saturday and introduce me to their parents, this kind of thing. So...

TI: It sounds like it was probably unusual for them to do that with the teachers.

RM: Yeah, I don't know how many other teachers they did that with. But I, and I, I don't think, I was never told Caucasians complained about they way that I worked with the Indians. I don't know. I worked with every student in the class. I tried to take those who could write a sentence to being able to write a paragraph, that kind of thing. And this is, these are students who never dreamed of going on to college. I think we had one or two who would graduate from Orofino, out of the fifty who'd go on. Not many. They were gonna go work on the reservation or in the logging camps or something, that kind of thing.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.