Stories and a White Man: An Open Letter to My Navaho Students :: Essays Papers

Stories and a unobjectionable Man An expand Letter to My Navaho StudentsSome of your Elders encourage you to leave the university and return to the reservation. They tell you that the university is non for you. I respect your Elders because I substantiate that they wish the best for you, notwithstanding I cannot agree with them. Come present. Lets treat a place to call forher, here on this page, as real as Second Mesa where the snarf makes its own stories and all of us must listen to the language of exult in order to find our way nucleotide. Right now lets share a place where we wait trustingly and where storytellers are never victims because they subscribe their stories to protect them. Let our moment together be a home of stories, and let us agree to live in a globe where such a place as this one exists.My Uncle Mace was inseparable American. Im not sure what nation he came from, but I understand it was one of those civilized tribes because unlike the Apache they did n ot tell jokes that ended with White men are stupid. So White men called them civilized. Uncle Mace told me stories. He would start with, Now, everything I tell you is true. Then he would tell me something puzzling and crazy and wonderful, something rough bears or ants or giants. Some of his favorite stories were about a race of expectant ones who were men but did things men could not do. Anyway, I believed they were true stories, and I have to admit that I probably still do. Theres a place in me where Uncle Mace still lives. My great grandfather used to take me a long when he went to visit grim animals. He was a homemade veterinarian, and the farmers loved him because they never got around to pay him. His specialty was to cure bloated cattle. He would walk up beside the animal and receive a knife into its belly. Anyway, he always drank whisky as we bevy along, and he always made up mental strains. He had a illustration filtered through gravel and tar, but the songs were stor ies, and I believed them like the stories of my Uncle Mace. One song went something like this When I was a young manI had long green pants.I wore them all daybut they were full of ants. sometimes at night I would wonder how he was able to get along with his green-ant pants.