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Thursday, October 29, 2020

Chalk Rocks and Sacred Stones

It’s Thursday afternoon.  Almost all of the children are already gone, except the few who remain outside.  HR is using a dump truck to carry the rocks that he finds around our playscape/garden.  I notice this, and it reminds me of digging for crystals in my backyard  when I was a child.  Thinking of this, I join HR and hunt for rocks all around the yard.  When we are through, we leave the dump truck with all of the rocks in it near the front of the driveway.  

Monday morning rolls in.  The preschoolers are arriving at school and CKP has an idea.  “I want to draw with chalk!,” he says, searching for a piece to begin his work.  I hear and see his ideas, and offer to grab some more chalk out of the shed. 

After we have gathered a spectrum of chalk colors, we begin thinking about what outside materials we could decorate.  CKP quickly spots the truck that HR and I had used for collecting rocks, and the creation begins.  

As OP and JA join CKP in this endeavor, I pause to admire the colors of the stones they have already embellished with fresh chalk.  Bright blue, purple, yellow, and pink adorn these rocks in an array of lines, circles, and scribbles.  I pause, thinking about the way that rich colors such as these have significance and meaning in many Native American Tribes.  For example, the Navojos have four colors (black, white, blue, and yellow) that represent four sacred mountains in each geographical direction (North, South, etc.).  Furthermore, these same colors represent the four stones that are a central part of their creation story (Navajo People, 2020).  This convergence of meanings strikes me, and I experience an array of feelings reflecting on this.

The children do not know this, and I do not mention it to them.  Instead, I ask where they will take these treasures that they have so aptly colored.  CKP says, “We should put them all over the yard so that people can see the beautiful colors!”  Everyone soon agrees to this plan, and we begin the process of distributing the rocks throughout our playscape.  

While the children decorate the yard with their co-creations, I think more about our interactions with these “other-than-human” stones, and I wonder about whether our relationship to these objects reflect the honor that we seek to imbue.  “We acknowledge the people whose land we stand on,” begins the land acknowledgement at the bottom of this page.  And while these words convey our hopes, I wonder if they convey our practice.  In our relating to these stones, to these colors, to this place, are “our pedagogical and communal actions” honoring “the Native American tribes who have come before us, and those who remain here still?”  

I will not end this story with an answer to that question; rather, this blog is a living provocation for continual reflection and reformation of our values and practice. How do these words feel to you? What are we doing as a community to actively engage in the journey of justice for Native Americans? Where do we fall short? And how will we move forward together?



Navajo People. (2020). The Navajo Four Sacred Colors. Retrieved from http://navajopeople.org/blog/


*We acknowledge the people whose land we stand on- the Multnomah, Kathlamet, Clackamas, Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla and several other tribes along the Columbia River.  In doing so, we commit ourselves to the continual recognition of the historical violence done to their people by White people.  It is our hope that our pedagogical and communal actions may honor the Native American Tribes who have come before us and those who remain here still.

1 comment:

  1. See https://www.portlandoregon.gov/civic/article/505489 “More than 60 of our Tribes in Oregon were terminated by the federal government in 1953. Termination meant revoking tribal sovereignty and government responsibilities to Native peoples, as well as claims to reservation land and unique identity. While done under the guise of the then-liberal notion of assimilation, the policy also meant our protected resources were taken from us, with millions of acres of land removed from our stewardship. Thousands of our Native women (and some men) were forcibly sterilized or coerced into sterilization when in the justice, mental health, and child welfare systems.”

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