toe
Macy
MACY - The Movement in
Macy probably began last June.
Every veekday morning a
stream of elementary school
children would surge out of the
town's dingy, warped old school
house and converge on John
Mangan's apartment in the
teachers' quarters.
Mangan had already been
with Macy's Teacher Corps
contingent for two years, so he
knew how to handle himself
among the running, tumbling
Omaha Indian children.
His Teacher Corps duties
had been completed, and he
had his masters degree in
elementary education from the
University of Nebraska at
Omaha. He was 25 now, and it
looked like the Teacher Corps
had been a good way to get out
of the draft, as he had hoped it
would be.
HE COULD GO back to
New York any time now. All
the other student teachers had
lei i. But he was sticking
around for summer school,
putting up with bored, restless
children for 16 hours a day,
taking them swimming or to
the movies, feeding them,
answering endless questions
about mandolins and the
"Umpire State Building,"
teaching them and starting the
Movement.
There is nothing to do on
the reservation on hot summer
days. If you're a small child
you run around and get dirty.
If you're 12 or so you run
around with the same friends
every day. If you have a bike
ride it hard, a little harder
every day. If you have a horse
you ride him a little harder
every day, and sometimes you
hurt him. You throw rocks at
dogs and windows. Sometimes
you get caught sniffing glue.
IF YOU'RE A teenager you
hang around. You listen to the
juke box at Olafson's store
until the store closes at 6 p.m.
After that there is nothing
open in Macy. You can't get a
hamburger or a coke. Once or
twice a week there's an old
movie at the Community
Center, but you've seen the
Story and
photos by
Steve Strasser
Jim Thorpe story too many
times already. And the kids are
always running around you and
screaming. And the whole
town is dusty and dirty. At
the infrequent dances you
don't dance much, and the
tribal policemen shine
flashlights on you to make sure
you aren't drinking or doing
something naughty.
You get drunk whenever
you can. There's a lot of
marijuana growing around
town, and some of it is okay.
Whenever you are in a car you
drive very fast, as fast as you
can, and sometimes you try to
hurt yourself.
But on weekday mornings
in Mangan's apartment last
summer the fourth and fifth
grade children would crowd
into a stuffy little closet.
Mangan would stuff an old
sheet into the crack under the
door and the closet would be
completely dark until Mangan
turned on the amber light.
Mangan would work over a
strange machine in the corner.
A bright light would shine for a
few seconds, then Mangan
would give the children a sheet
of heaw oaner
THEY WOULD DIP the
paper into a pan of
strange-smelling chemicals, and
would see a hazy outline
appear in the amber light. The
outline would grow darker and
stronger, and before they knew
it they would be gazing in
wonder at a picture they had
taken in class that morning - a
picture of a smiling, blurred
face, or of a desk, or of a
classroom ceiling. And the
Movement had begun.
In September the scene
shifted to the old galvanized
quonset church across the
street from the school. It used
to be Our Lady of Fatima
Catholic Church. There is a
cross on top and a schedule of
services on a sign outside.
But today no church organ
gently sanctifies the building
with peaceful strains of the
"Hail Mary." Instead an
electric organ pounds out
"Proud Mary" accompanied by
,-. - --
Winded
f 'ft
ri' v
Mangan
electric guitars and a set of
drums. The beat is strong and
the voices of the fifth grade
musicians fill the rest of the
converted church, where some
children are air-cleaning a car
engine, some sand down
wooden boomerangs they
made themselves, and some
paint the plywood partitions
between Mangan's music room
and Gary Kruce's workshop.
KRUCE AND HOWARD
Pine are recent NU Teachers
College graduates working in
Macy for the first time this
year. Kruce set up the auto and
woodworking shop. "At least
it's not mass confusion
anymore," he says with some
pride now. "' t sort of
organized confusion."
Mangan set up the rock
music part of the shop, and in
another room is installing a
darkroom that will eventually
keep the traffic out of his
closet.
He teaches fourth grade in
the school and directs three
bands in the shop. He's "proud
of those damn musicians."
The whole program is called
"pre-vocational training". That
means doing something instead
of sitting around in a
classroom. The fifth through
eighth grade students work in
the shop now. The younger
children want to, but the
facilities can't handle them yet.
THE SHOP IS open five
student . . . pauses in fourth grade P.t. class.
THE DAILY NEBRASKAN
. . . "proud of those damn musicians
days a week, for an hour and a
half on Tuesday and Thursday,
three and a half hours on
Monday, Wednesday and
Friday.
The teachers don't give any
grades for shop work. "Kids
get what they make or do in
shop," according to Mangan,
"not letter grades."
And homework is no
problem in this course, Mangan
says. "They keep coming by on
weekends and asking if they
can practice. They're always up
for shop."
The whole idea of the shop is
to make school creative for the
children so they won't drop
out the way they do now. But
The movement is still growing in Macy. It's not too
well defined, and nobody's too sure what its results
will be.
the workshop is not even a
year old, and the teachers can
only hope it's working. "It's
harder to handle the other
kids, even in shop," Mangan
admits.
On the whole though, the
response from the children is
reassuring to Mangan. "The
kids think it's fun, but they
don't treat it as goof-off time."
' H St
EVEN INSIDE the regular
classroom Mangan isn't overly
awed by ' the prescribed
Nebraska grade school
curriculum. "Nobody around
here expects to be able to
follow it," he says. "I've never
even looked at it."
"I have 14 kids and about
six different levels in my class.
What's important is how much
they understand, not how
much of the book we cover."
Macy school also started an
ungraded primary system in
what would normally be grades
one through three this year.
Children transfer back and forth
from room to room according
to their proficiency in the
particular subject being taught.
"We're getting into a lot of
team-teaching, aides, and
small-group work this year,"
Mangan explains.
THE SCHOOL has also
started an Omaha Indian
language class for the young
Indians this year. Larry Evers,
an NU graduate student
working in Macy this year,
helped organize the program.
The children are tutored in
their native language by John
Turner, an Omaha who speaks
the tongue fluently.
The Movement is still
growing in Macy. It's not too
well defined, -and nobody's too
sure what its results will be.
And some of the older teachers
don't believe in movement
under these conditions.
But one fact emerges crystal
clear from the whirlpool of
fluctuating philosophies and
rapid changes of the Movement
in Macy: the children are
coming to school more
regularly.
And John Mangan will be
back again next year. He may
have seen his last of the New
York suburbs. 'These kids are
real," he says with conviction.
"They're the same in school as
they are out of it. They aren't
goody-goody phonies like you
find in white middle-class
schools."
WEDNESDAY. MARCH 17, 1971
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