Shipped Off to Boarding School: Late 1920s
- Chester stands slashing at some bushes, thinking. He's got a lot on his eight-year-old brain: he and his younger sister Dora are about to be shipped off to boarding school.
- The government wants Navajo children to learn English, which means that Chester and his sis have to go to school. After the corn is harvested, they'd be sent off. But Chester's worried: he's used to being home with Grandma and the family, and school is part of the white man's world.
- The big day arrives in October. A local missionary drives Chester and Dora to a kindergarten in Tohatchi, New Mexico.
- It's this missionary who gives Chester his last name, "Nez," which is his father's name. Nez means "very long" or "very tall" in Navajo, because Chester's dad is a tall guy.
- When Chester and his sister arrive at the school, they're fed some milk and one cracker. Not much, we know. Nez misses the yummy food he ate at Grandmother's house—tortillas and mutton and corn cooked over a campfire.
- Over the next few days he and Dora are always hungry. They just don't get enough food.
- When Chester and Dora go home for a visit, they tell their older brother Coolidge how they're starving all the time at school.
- Coolidge tells them that they're not going back to school in Tohatchi; instead they'll go to his school in Fort Defiance.
- They hitch a ride with the same missionary again, this time on their way to the new school in Fort Defiance. They arrive at Fort Defiance around midnight, and they're scared.
- Chester fills us in on some history here: he tells us that Fort Defiance was built in the early 1850s by a Colonel Sumner, a Union commander in the Civil War. From the Fort, American soldiers quashed Navajo uprisings.
- It was here that Kit Carson had gathered the Navajo for the Long Walk to Fort Sumner. By the time Chester arrives there, the Fort's been turned into a government school for Navajo children.
- On the first day of school, Chester lines up with the other new boys. They have to get a haircut. A lot of the boys are crying, because in Navajo culture, hair and fingernails have to be disposed of properly. The Navajo believe that if hair and fingernails aren't hidden or burned, they can be used to jinx or curse their owner.
- But Chester has no choice: he's pushed into a chair and a barber shaves his head. Native American matrons (though they're non-Navajo) watch as the boys get their haircuts.
- The boys are then given navy-blue uniforms. Chester tries to help a boy who can't do up the buttons on the uniform. He makes the mistake of speaking in Navajo. Bad move. A terrifying matron tells him off.
- The new boys are given a tour of the school.
- At night, Chester and the other boys head to their dormitory. In the middle of the night Chester's neighbor in the next bed wakes up screaming.
- He's having bad dreams. Chester sees an owl perched on a lamppost outside the dorm—a bad omen in Navajo culture.
- Chester still can't get any sleep the next night. He sees spirits of dead warriors. He wishes that his big brother Coolidge was sleeping next to him, but his brother is in a different building because he's older.
- A few days later, Chester is smacked across the head because he addresses another boy using his Navajo name. All the boys are given English names, but Chester gets to keep the name "Nez" that the missionary has given him.
- Two scary matrons oversee Chester and the boys in his section of the school. They test the kids' knowledge of their new English names. When they get them wrong, they smack them across the head. That's just cruel.
- Another time he'd been caught again speaking Navajo, the matron had brushed his teeth with soap. Those matrons are awful.
- The kids in the dorm whisper in Navajo, talking about how mean the matrons are. Chester thinks about Grandmother's home, and how he's never beaten there.
- He remembers playing games at home, shearing sheep, and how Grandmother and Auntie weave beautiful rugs from wool in the winter.
- He misses the warm wool clothes that Grandmother and Aunties made for him from sheepskin. In the school, he's cold all the time.