An Awakening in Valentine 01-02

Preface

This is a story about a trip I took in March 2020. For many reasons, I consider it the most exciting vacation I have ever been on. Every day was busy from early morning to late at night. I got to visit places such as the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park that I had wanted to see my entire life. It was a joy to finally experience these natural wonders. I also learned a great deal of history that I had had little knowledge of before these travels. There was an intensity to this journey, no doubt bolstered by the daily progression of the urgency of the coronavirus crisis. On our arrival in Las Vegas, everything was up and running. When we returned to the airport to leave fourteen days later, Sin City was silent and still. To say that a lot was concentrated into a fortnight would be an understatement.

This account documents parts of the trip but centers mainly around unexpected events that rattled me into a deep self-examination with an effort to understand certain aspects of our society. I end up with more questions than answers, as often happens when dealing with difficult issues. Not everyone will accept my conclusions, but they are mine. This is by far the most extended piece I have ever written, perhaps partly due to an enforced quarantine upon my return to Alaska that lasted a month, giving me a lot of time to think.

Part 1) The Incident at Valentine

Last November, I started to plan a trip to the Southwest. A fortunate set of circumstances had resulted in my receiving free round trip tickets to anywhere in the USA. I was thrilled! The freedom to choose the destination allowed me to fulfill a lifelong dream to visit the Grand Canyon. When I was a child, my father would give wondrous accounts of the scenic grandeur of the Canyon, which he had visited during his Army training days in Arizona during WWII. He had always wanted to go again, but raising a family on working-class wages made expensive long-distance vacations prohibitive. He made me promise that someday I would see it. So, when this opportunity arose, I jumped on it. Also, the tickets were First Class! I had probably flown near thirty times in my life, always sitting in cramped quarters in coach. Every time I boarded a plane, I would eye the precious legroom in the first few rows, jealously wishing I could plop down into one of the luxurious seats. This time I would be able to.

We decided that mid-March would be the best time to go. The temperatures would be warmer than Alaska but not hot enough to roast us. The plan was to visit as many National Parks as possible during our two-week sojourn. To be sure not to miss anything worthwhile, I meticulously researched the route in advance. Hotel and dinner reservations were solidified online weeks before leaving. We were ready to go!

Back in November, the word 'coronavirus' had not yet appeared in the news. The situation heated up a bit in February, causing a little concern, but the trip seemed safe. By the day of the flight to Las Vegas, we were washing our hands more frequently while being ever so cautious about coughing. These measures seemed sufficient according to the guidelines issued at the time. Vegas was open for business! The Strip was crowded with people, and the casinos were taking money from strangers. I lost $100 on five spins of a roulette wheel that refused to recognize that 17 is my lucky number.

After spending a day exploring Death Valley, we headed east toward the Grand Canyon. There was great anticipation to get there, but with three days allotted for the Park, we could take a little time to explore a few sideshows along the route. Hoover Dam was worth the two hour stop. Further along, we hooked up with Route 66, the history-laden road taken by many a tourist traveling west during the advent of car vacations back in the '40s and '50s. Many of the towns along the byway are now either rundown or abandoned, reduced to obsolescence by Interstate 40 a few miles away. A few, such as Hackberry, are considered ghost towns. We stopped at the one business there, the Hackberry General Store, to buy a Route 66 souvenir and meet Charlie the cat, who came out to greet us begging for a neck scratch.

Five miles down the road, we came to another ghost town, Valentine. There was no reason to stop because there is virtually nothing there, but I needed to get a jacket out of the trunk. I pulled off on the one side road, parking in front of an unmarked, boarded-up brick building, which I vaguely recognized from my research as an old school. As I was fanatically chronicling the trip in pictures (I averaged 500 a day), I decided to take a few pics of this nondescript structure just for the record. I snapped a photo but then decided I wanted a closer shot on a slightly higher level. There was a stone wall perhaps two feet tall in front of a chain-link fence surrounding the building. I lifted myself onto the wall using the muscle power solely in my left leg. I felt a burning sensation in my thigh muscles, which I interpreted as a symptom of aging combined with a lack of conditioning.

However, when I stood upright on top of the wall facing the school, I experienced a sudden rush of heat throughout my body; only this time, it was not physical but emotional. A feeling of dread came over me as if something awful were about to happen. I wanted to step back off the wall, but I could not, as an indefinable apprehension paralyzed me in place. It was as if I were being forced to look at the building. It now seemed to me that the barbed-wire fortified fence, the bleak red brick walls, and the tightly sealed windows were designed not to keep trouble out, but to contain something within. I hope the reader does not feel I am exaggerating when I say that I perceived an evil emanating from the structure. Frozen for the eternity of a moment, I stood there with an iciness, a sickening of the heart that made me shudder in weakness.

At length, I was able to break free from the spell. I jumped off the wall. What was it ... I paused to think ... what was it that had so unnerved me in the contemplation of this architectural mediocrity? There have been rare instances in my life when I have had prescient flashes in which it felt like I was receiving a signal. Once, upon starting a new job, I shook the hand of a manager who had introduced himself to me. When our hands touched, I immediately felt a sense of utter despair come over me. It shocked me, but I could not attach a reason to it. The next morning the man committed suicide. Now, here I am experiencing similar feelings from an old abandoned building. What could it possibly mean? I am not one to fall for ghost stories, but this was a mystery I could not comprehend without many shadowy fancies coursing through my mind as I pondered it. The one thing I did not want to do is shrug it off. I needed to understand what had just occurred.

My search for meaning began with a look around the area. The fence surrounded the school, but its playground was accessible off to the side. It contained a decaying basketball court with several small trees growing out of the cracks in the concrete. To the side stood a stone drinking fountain that no longer worked. There was an old merry go round type device in the far corner of the yard. I tried pushing it around, but it quickly ground to a squeaky halt. The tallest tree in the schoolyard appeared dead, its naked branches reaching up into the grey sky. Except for some faded blue paint on the merry go round and a few patches of green grass, the neglected grounds were immersed in a drab brownish tint. The entire area radiated a gloominess that added to my perplexed state of mind. I found no answers, but I was not giving up. I felt a message had come across; I just didn't know how to decipher it.

The stop lasted longer than I expected, but eventually, we got on the road again. While driving, I kept thinking about my experience at the school, but the first views of the Grand Canyon from Mather Point refocused my mental energy to the beauty of the Park. I cried a bit, thinking that it was every bit as incredible as my father had told me. The sun was breaking through the clouds with spectacular lighting that brought out the deep reds in the canyon walls. It was raining to the east, producing a rainbow when the sun's rays hit the mist in the gorge. I was in awe!

That night though, at the hotel, my thoughts returned to the school at Valentine. I did a Google search to find some information. I discovered that the building was an old Indian boarding school with several sources describing its purpose and history. All of them served to support the doleful vibrations I experienced at the site. It was not a pretty picture.

Relations between Native American Indians and European colonists have been contentious, beginning with the first steps Columbus took in the West Indies in 1492. There is a 500-year trail of troubling history in which the Indians were, in essence, subjugated and turned into serf-like citizens. The results of this clash of cultures serve to verify the truth behind Mao's maxim that "Power derives from the barrel of a gun." The settlers overwhelmed the tribes with swelling populations, modern technology, and superior weaponry. When the dust of the battles cleared, the victors herded many tribes onto reservations, which often consisted of land that the invaders deemed to have no value. In addition, the federal government established the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a bureaucratic entity that Congress empowered to rule over the reservations.

After the 'Indian' wars had ceased in the late nineteenth century, Washington enacted an Assimilation Policy to deal with the 'Indian problem' further. This policy consisted of absorbing indigenous people into the norms of white society without regard for their political or cultural rights. One of the tenets of this policy was that Indian children should be separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools to help achieve this blending. The children were required to go, often against their will. From the start:

'' ... off-reservation boarding schools instituted their assault on Native cultural identity by doing away with all outward signs of tribal life that the children brought with them. The long braids worn by Indian boys were cut off. The students were made to wear standard uniforms. The children were given new 'white' names, including surnames. Traditional tribal foods were abandoned, forcing students to acquire the food rites of white society, including the use of knives, forks, spoons, napkins, and tablecloths. Most importantly, students were forbidden to speak in their Native tongue, even to each other. Some schools rewarded those who refrained from speaking their own language; most boarding schools relied on punishment to achieve this aim.''

This building I accidentally stopped at in Valentine was part of this effort to assimilate the tribes of Arizona. I learned that it was built in 1903 and functioned as a schoolhouse until 1937. During this time, it had three names: the Truxton Canyon Training School, the Truxton Canyon Indian School, and the Valentine Indian School. The stated purpose of the school was to segregate and educate Indian children per the government's policy; "to separate a student from his or her family and culture and to provide basic skills for earning a living away from the reservation." The school played an important role in educating primarily Hualapai but also Apache, Hopi, Navajo, Havasupai, Pima, and Yavapai children who were grouped despite the differences in language and cultures. These disparities didn't matter as the desired result was to have them all adapting to white society and speaking English. This quick study of the school history affirmed for me the extrasensory perceptions I had had when in front of it. My curiosity, however, was barely whetted.

The most detailed information I could find regarding the building was a 22-page application submitted to the United States Department of the Interior nominating the Truxton Canyon Schoolhouse for a spot on the National Register of Historic Places. This revealing document answered many questions I had concerning what went on at the school and the resultant energy it seemed to radiate. Let me quote a few examples:

''For many students, life at Truxton Canyon School was a traumatic experience. Separation from family caused homesickness, while diseases like smallpox, measles, influenza, tuberculosis, and trachoma caused physical discomfort." I cannot ever recall anyone classing smallpox and tuberculosis as physical discomforts. One must wonder how many times this 'discomfort' included death. (Indeed, I later found that: ''In December of 1899, measles broke out at the Phoenix Indian School, reaching epidemic proportions by January. In its wake, 325 cases of measles, 60 cases of pneumonia, and 9 deaths were recorded in 10 days.'')

The document also cites The Course of Study for the United States Indian Schools (1922), which stipulates: ''In our Indian schools a large amount of productive work is necessary. They could not possibly be maintained on the funds appropriated by Congress for their support were it not for the fact that students are required to do the washing, ironing, baking, cooking, sewing; to care for the dairy, farm, garden, grounds, building, etc.... an amount of labor that has in aggregate a very considerable monetary value.'' This is a clear statement that the Indian children in the schools were to be used for child labor to save the government from paying for their education and internment. This ruling even required them to make from scratch the bricks used in the construction of the frontage building. I should point out that there was a segregated white school in Truxton Canyon that was fully funded by the state. The white children learned the curriculum without being required to work for the privilege.

Furthermore: ''Conversion to Christianity was also deemed essential to the cause of assimilation; therefore it was inextricably woven into the curriculum; the children were taught to march into the dining room in an orderly manner, stand in their respective places, and in unison say blessings before each meal.'' So not only were they forced to speak in a foreign tongue and adapt to an alien culture, but they were also coerced into worshiping a god that wasn't theirs. The Bill of Rights, which guarantees religious freedom, did not apply to Indian children.

Even the appearance of the Valentine Indian School was used in the assimilation process for the style ''expressed the desire of the OIA(Office of Indian Affairs) to have Indian schools emulate white ones. The OIA's stylistic choices reflected the attempt to separate children from their cultures by ignoring the architectural heritage of particular Indian tribes.'' Thus the design of the building itself was used as a brainwashing device on helpless children.

What I learned from my investigation distressed me. As I have stated, I considered the feelings I experienced on the wall to be a communication. At the time, the message seemed to be one of horror. What I read supported that. I can only imagine the terror which these children must have experienced after being forcibly removed from their homes, families, and cultures to be placed in a draconian environment where their worlds were turned upside down; isolated in what was essentially a prison environment with no way out and nowhere to go for recourse; and subjected to a strict discipline with corporal punishment that no doubt at times crossed the line into physical or psychological torture. I felt my intuitive experience was a reception of their pleas to know their story. The information I found next strengthened this belief.

On my last night at the Grand Canyon, I discovered a two-year-old newspaper article from The Miner, a Kingsman Arizona daily, which described a ceremony which took place in front of the Valentine Indian School in early 2018. Hualapai tribal leaders had invited a local high school class to hear the history of the school. An elder described the school as ''a place of hardship to our tribe'' and told stories of relatives who had spent fifteen years separated from their families. He then performed a smudging, ''a sage burning ritual tool to rid a space of negativity, including past traumas, bad experiences, or negative energies from others. Burning sage has long been used to connect to the spiritual realm or enhance intuition, to achieve a healing state — or to solve or reflect upon spiritual dilemmas.''

I connected with this story on a personal level. I had experienced the feelings of ''negativity and past trauma'' while standing in front of the school, without knowing anything about what had taken place there. This article supported the validity of my feelings: proving they weren't some whimsy, there was an energy coming across, and others had felt it.

Part 2) The Second Incident

After three glorious days of exploring one of the most beautiful places on Earth, we left the Grand Canyon, barely scratching the surface of things we wanted to do. But the reality is I'd have probably felt that way if I had spent three months there. I would have loved to walk down to the Colorado River, but I had to give in to common sense, which dictated that even though I am still in reasonably good condition, the down and back hike would require two days, not one. My reluctant surrender to the realities of aging!

I was also satisfied that I had worked through the confusion about my experience at Valentine. I am an analytic thinker, expressing doubt about occurrences that do not fit the mold of provable science. I actually felt blessed that I had had a sixth sense experience that opened my mind to new possibilities. I was glad to find that my research about the school supported the perceptions I had when there. I didn't know how or why it had happened, but I believed that somehow, for some reason, spiritual energy was transferred, revealing a truth to me. At that time, I thought the experience had ended.

We exited Grand Canyon National Park through the east gate to head north to Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, Horseshoe Bend, and Lake Powell. It was going to be a busy day. Directly east of the Canyon, we entered the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation, the largest reservation in the country with more than 27,000 square miles that nearly 180,000 people call home. Even though we would be driving through, I knew little about it. Truthfully, I must say that until this trip, I had little awareness of the reservation system. I had grown up in New England, where I believe there are a few small reservations, but I had never come across one. I moved to Alaska, where there is one reservation on an island in the southeast that I have never seen in my forty years living here.

The Navajo Nation is in a desert zone, but the spring temperatures were mild, in the mid-50s. We took Route 89 North and drove through the town of Cameron. There were houses on gently sloping hills on both sides of the road for a couple of miles, stretching back a few hundred yards. I stared at them briefly before turning away to deliberately focus my attention on the centerline on the highway in front of me. I did not want to look to either side. But then, powerful emotions like those I had felt at the school in Valentine took hold. There was a burst of thoughts that were not my own demanding that I turn my head and look.

I did.

What I saw was stark abject poverty, the likes of which I had never encountered before. Homes for hundreds of people were nothing more than dilapidated trailers, many with holes in the rooves and walls, often patched with cardboard. A few front entryways had sliding curtains instead of doors. Many windows were missing glass panes. The buildings seemed chaotically positioned with little attempt to fuse them into a working neighborhood. Yards were strewn with trash, broken appliances, and junk cars with missing parts. Recent heavy rains gave the unpaved 'streets' a muddy, rutted look. Some houses were well-kempt, but the majority were in disrepair with little visible evidence of maintenance. I saw battered busses and truck campers mounted on concrete blocks serving as homes. Isolated on the peripheries of this impoverished township were plywood shacks in such pathetic conditions that I could not believe they were inhabited. But these doubts were erased when I saw adults sitting on porches watching children playing outside. These outliers were all without electricity or phone lines. Although the March temperatures were moderate, it was not difficult to imagine the toll the scorching summer sun would take, especially with no trees to provide shade. Occasionally a horse or cow could be seen meandering in the desert terrain grazing on the sparse vegetation between the buildings. Wire fences bordering the road separated the well-paved, well-maintained highway from the squalor on both sides.