For Cal Nez, it’s all in the journey

Posted on November 16, 2008 by comm5775

by KATHRYN JONES

Cal Nez says he didn’t like the six years he spent in boarding school, that it was more like a prison than a school. He says it didn’t make him angry even though he was forced to leave his grandparents when he was 5.

He describes his Navajo beginnings in Tocito, N.M., the beauty he knew there as compared to the loss of childhood via harsh treatment at school. He talks about today, living in Salt Lake City as a successful business owner.

But he asks, “What do I call home?”

And he wonders, “Is home a physical place, or is it inside me? Is home where my clan is? Am I Navajo or American?”

Today, Nez appears to be living the life of both.

A business owner since 1986, Nez works as a graphic designer at Cal Nez Design as well as on the mountain tops of New Mexico. He enjoys his business and will tell you this is how he does a portion of it, “with a laptop in the middle of nowhere.”

“We have a right to fill our space as human beings here on earth,” he says. “We’re not history; we’re not what you see in movies or on book covers. We are people.”

We are Native Americans who must move forward, he adds. There must be a reconciling between the past and the present. Those who have reconciled, while still maintaining their Native American heritage, can make significant contributions. And that means owning a business over working as an employee.

But the journey is not an easy one, nor is entrepreneurship for every Native American., says Sandy McCabe, Navajo, and owner of Sandy’s Kitchen, a catering business located in Salt Lake County.

“Living in a white society, is a new world,” she says in a phone interview, and not every Native American is able to make the shift. “If not for my husband, Samir, I wouldn’t be where I’m at.”

McCabe calls herself a “worker,” a quality, she says, not every Native American thinks they have within them. “A lot of us are afraid to make that next step, that next challenge. It was so true with me.”

She describes her East Indian husband’s motivating power in getting her to go to college to obtain her business degree, something she says she did “kicking and screaming.”

Years before, she was a high school drop-out as well as a single parent raising a son she’d had at 17. “I had to earn my bacon and come home and make the bacon,” she says.

Today, McCabe runs her own catering business. The idea came from the question, “Do you cater?” by a fellow Wal-Mart employee requesting help for a 300 person catering job.

After that, “one thing led to another,” says McCabe, who counts her business a success. She caters two weddings a month and organizes at least three catering jobs a week – all out of her home and at a “little place” she rents out at the Jordan Landing center in West Jordan.

Despite the pain of the past, McCabe counts her life blessed.

“I had to go back and take a look at myself. My hardships. No money. Now I have a house that I can call home,” she says.

The detours haven’t always been easy, but the journey has definitely been worth it.

“I have to work,” McCabe says. “It’s hard, but it’s easy. You just have to put your heart into it, and it will come to you. You will have it.”

As for Nez, he seems to echo McCabe’s words with a direction he hopes other Native Americans will not only consider but take on as part of their own journey: “There is nothing we can do about the past. The future, that’s where I think the answer, lies.  My journey is not so much a Cal Nez journey but a journey of the Native American.  Home is here. It doesn’t matter where I’m at.”

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Expert wants to expand Native American education in Salt Lake

Posted on November 16, 2008 by comm5775

by LANA GROVES

Forrest Cuch said he was lucky to have parents who could afford to give him a private education.

Unlike other American Indian children, Cuch learned English at a young age, stayed in school and finished his undergraduate degree by 25 years old.

He said many children growing up on an American Indian reservation are not so fortunate.

“The only reason I can speak English with you right now is because of the education I received,” said Cuch, executive director of the Utah Division of Indian Affairs, in an interview.

After 25 years teaching and acting as an administrator at a private school in Utah, Cuch has plans to reform Utah’s educational system.

He said that teachers require all children to follow lesson plans and learn at the same pace, which is not conducive to a learning environment.

“There is an effort to reform the school level, especially through higher education teachers,” Cuch said. “Colleges need to be altered to change (those ideas).”

Cuch is not the only person working to change the educational system.

Buffy Sainte-Marie, a teacher and songwriter in Utah, organized the Cradleboard Teaching Project in the 1970s.

The program is designed to help Native Americans receive a broader education than what they can receive in an average classroom.

According to the web site for the Cradleboard Teaching Project, Sainte-Marie tries to bring important, educational issues to students through music.

“As a teacher who was also a songwriter, I had brought Indian issues to the attention of my own generation through my records,” she said. “Then, in the late 70s, I became a semi-regular on ‘Sesame Street’ for five years. I wanted little kids and their caretakers to know one thing above all: that Indians exist. We are not all dead and stuffed in museums like the dinosaurs.”

Cuch has been trying to demonstrate that same fact for years.

He said American Indians have been paying federal income taxes and working in North America since the mid-1800s but still don’t always receive the same benefits as Anglo-Saxons.

When American Indians signed treaties with the federal government in the 1800s, they were promised protection, food and land. They received poor food that ruined their diet, Cuch said. The federal government also continually made treaties with American Indians that other European settlers would rescind.

Elementary school students don’t hear these facts, he said.

“Ninety percent of the history you’ve received in school is not entirely accurate,” Cuch said. “It was only after I got out of college that I understood.”

Universities and colleges train teachers to relate to students, handle arguments and teach students in a productive manner. Cuch said there isn’t enough emphasis put on teaching students about American Indian history. He said they also need to teach according to each student.

Many American Indian students drop out of school before graduating because the educational system doesn’t always help students who have been raised on an American Indian reservation and can’t speak enough English, Cuch said.

“(The school system) has failed to educate my people,” he said. “Right now, American Indians are at the bottom of high school drop out rates. (The) better way is to teach kids in small classrooms and encourage them to work as a group.”

Cuch plans to approach higher education institutions such as the University of Utah to discuss ways to prepare teachers to educate all students.

“I’m going to challenge them to make some changes,” he said.

 

 

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Educators concerned about Utah American Indian dropouts

Posted on November 16, 2008 by comm5775

by JAMIE A. WELCH

During the 2003-04 school year, just 377 American Indians in Utah graduated from high school while 26,976 white students graduated. According to the 2005 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Common Core of Data, in the 2003-04 school year, 6.4 percent of Utah’s American Indian students in grades 9 through 12 dropped out of high school before graduating. This contrasts with Utah’s white students, whose dropout rate was 3 percent.

Because American Indians comprise just 2 percent of Utah’s population, this dropout rate raises concerns for the educational and occupational future of American Indians. Among those concerned is Forrest S. Cuch, director of Utah’s Division of Indian Affairs.

Cuch, born in 1951 on the Uintah and Ouray Ute Indian Reservation, is a member of the Ute Indian Tribe. He studied at public schools until the 9th grade, when he enrolled in Wasatch Academy, a private college-prep school in Mt. Pleasant, Utah. He then attended Westminster College and graduated in 1973 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in behavioral sciences.

He supports private schools and credits his educational background, private schooling, to his earned occupational position. Cuch knows why American Indians have a high dropout rate. It is because “we [American Indians] come to school illiterate.” Illiterate in the ways outside of the American Indian lifestyle, that is.

Cuch’s concern is that Utah’s public school teachers don’t know how to teach American Indian children. There is an important difference in the way America’s majority is taught and the way American Indians are taught. Cuch explained that when American Indian students attend public schools for the first time, they are taken from a nurturing environment and expected to perform exactly as their peers of other races do. This causes frustration in the part of the educator and also of the student.

Cuch describes the typical classroom’s learning styles as patriarchal, analytical, competitive, controlling of nature, detail-oriented and ultimately scientific. In contrast, American Indian ways are matriarchal, holistic, cooperative, dedicated to living in harmony with nature, focused on a larger scheme and very spiritual. He emphasized that American Indian children are raised in a different world – one in which they are given the freedom to learn in their own style. When these children are placed in this unfamiliar environment, their performance levels will differ from other children. Cuch noted that the American Indian students gradually lose interest in a world that confuses them and places pressure to compete.

He suggested, “The better way to teach our kids is in a smaller classroom where they can work in groups.” He also said each child needs more individual attention. Having witnessed firsthand the way public schools handle the specific needs of American Indian students, Cuch observed “there is an effort but it is not enough.”

Nola Lodge, a clinical instructor and director of American Indian Teacher Education at the University of Utah, also has an opinion on the education of American Indian youth. In an e-mail interview, Lodge agreed with Cuch in that “teachers are not prepared to work with AI [American Indian] students.  Consequently they [students] do not reach their potential.” Lodge also worries that public school systems don’t give an accurate representation of American Indian history. The reason, she notes, is “teachers cannot teach what they do not know or understand.”

American Indians in Utah have a few alternative options to attending public schools. The Uinta River High School in Fort Duchesne is open for grades 9 through 12 where the student to teacher ratio is 10-to-1. Schools like this offer more one-on-one interactions between teachers and students, thus employing Cuch’s idea of smaller classrooms. Smaller schools are available, but are they enough? Cuch says no, that the teaching style is what should be stressed. “The best way to teach is out of love.” Lodge agrees that love is a key element. “To educate any child,” she says, “we must foster a love of learning.”

Until public schools offer better programs for American Indian students, Cuch recommends private and charter schooling for Native children, where class sizes are smaller and curriculum is more flexible.

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Cal Nez has found his home in Salt Lake City

Posted on November 16, 2008 by comm5775

by BRYNN TOLMAN

An old English proverb says, “Home is where the heart is.” Another variation says, “Home is where you hang your hat.”

The search for home is never simple, but it’s important to make peace with the answers that come from the journey.

Cal Nez is now content calling Salt Lake City home; this peace of mind, however, was not always the case.

Nez, a Navajo, takes pride in his Native American ancestry, but understands all too well the hardships that can be associated with his heritage. Nez has spent his entire life asking, “Who am I? Where do I come from? Where have I been?” In answering these questions, he has discovered what “home” means to him. Throughout his journey he has learned home is more than just the structure where one lives.

At the age of 5, Nez was sent to boarding school in Sanostee, N.M., where he describes his experience as “six years of prison.” After returning to the reservation in Tocito, N.M., he realized that his options for success were very limited.

An opportunity to move to Salt Lake City arrived and Nez took it. He remembers that saying goodbye to his grandma, who raised him, was the hardest part of leaving. Yet he recalls thinking, “I left because I knew one day I would make it and come back for [her].”

Nez made his way to Salt Lake City to participate in the LDS Placement Service Program. He was eager to live with a “normal family” and see what their lives were like. The next three years, attending South High School, were some of the greatest years of his life, but the joy and satisfaction of success at school made him question, “Is my Navajo life home or my Salt Lake life home, or is it somewhere in the middle?” At that point, he still did not have a good answer.

Several years after school Nez quit his job, got his portfolio together and succeeded in building his own graphic design company, Cal Nez Design, in Salt Lake City. After finding his success and realizing his dreams he returned to the home of his childhood, the reservation. When he got home, things were different. Shops were closed, people he knew were gone; this was not the home he remembered or the one that he came looking for. Was this still his home?

Nez remembers vividly the day when he finally was able to feel at home again on the reservation. He recalls sitting on a mesa as a young boy looking out over half of New Mexico. The day the feeling of home returned he had taken his laptop and stepped onto that same mesa. As he sat overlooking New Mexico, computer in hand, his homes connected and he linked his traditional life to his modern life.

Many other Navajo men feel similar to Nez. While they live modern lives, they love to return home to New Mexico and feel the peace of going back. Paul Lillywhite, a St. George stone mason employs several of these men. Lillywhite said that although they have very little money, they drive home every weekend to visit their family and their friends, “to go home.”

Lillywhite described home as “a feeling of a connection to a place and a connection to the people there, a place of shelter from the world, a place to re-group.” He understands there are differences in the type or location of home, but he also understands what Nez means when he says, “Home is here it doesn’t matter where I’m at.”

Nez said his biggest challenge in life is “finding the identity of … Native Americans.” The search for this identity is the search for home. Nez spent many years seeking these answers. Eventually, he came back to visit the reservation. This, according to Nez, is exactly as it should be.

“As Native Americans, the goal in the journey is to come full circle; to make it home,” he said. Nez found home on the reservation, at South High School, and in Sandy, Utah, where he currently lives with his family.

As Lillywhite says, “A home is really where the things that you love, and the people that you love are.”   

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