Customer Reviews

Geronimo's Kids: A Teacher's Lessons on the Apache Reservation (Elma Dill Russell Spencer Series in the West and Southwest)

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I came across this book by accident at the local library, looking for contempary books on Native Americans. This one caught my eye, as I am a teacher-in-training and also a lover of all things Native American.

Ove took this job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1948 because he needed a job. Not quite a college graduate from southern Illinois, but anxious to get started, he got talked into taking this one-room school house job in south-central New Mexico.

The Apache children, who seemed estranged by his lack of the Apache language and culture, took to him faster than the elders on the reservation. They respected him, but kept their distance from him. Poor Ove fumbled after one misstep after the other, with no real experience as an elementary teacher. He and his new bride were lost in the world of the Apache.

But he never gave up. Even before his two-year stint was over he learned to appreciate the Apache for everything they offered, ideas that the European culture didn't (and still doesn't) offer. The racist policies of the BIA and of white people of the post-WWII era ("The Greatest Generation" that was also one of the most abusive to Native Americans and Blacks), the bureaucratic red tape of government regulations, and the manipulation of young college kids all come out in the open in this book.

This is a great little book for new teachers who want to go out into the teaching world and do the right thing, a book for young hearts who also want to do their best in a strange new world.

The writing style is symplistic but the inspiration, faith and even sorrow prevail in this book.

The author wrote his memoirs 50 years after leaving Whitetail Reservation, yet the story reads like something that just happened yesterday. I have to wonder how much more detail he could have provided had he not waited so long to write this pleasant memoir.

The second half of this book is mostly interviews with some of his former students 30 years later. Most, sadly, remained on or near the reservation and many had succumbed to alcoholism. A few had already passed on.