BOOK OF THE WEEK
鈥楢 School of Their Own鈥� traces the Ramah Navajo fight for education and justice
鈥淎 School of Their Own鈥� is essentially a memoir that weaves together multiple stories, most of them involving the memoirist, attorney Michael Gross.
The central thread is about Gross and his position as counsel for the Ramah Navajo School Board for more than 40 years.
The book takes the reader from Ramah and its ongoing struggles to open a Navajo-run school in western New Mexico all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Gross represented the school board twice to ensure the board receives the millions of dollars in federal funds he felt it was owed.
The memoir has tangents that give readers background on the main subject 鈥� the creation of a new Ramah Navajo School operated by Native Americans.
The son of Holocaust survivors, Gross grew up in suburban New Jersey and graduated from Brown and Yale University Law School.
A fascinating aspect of the memoir is Gross鈥� explanation of how he was influenced by the ethnic and racial discrimination that he heard about and witnessed. He wanted to do something to help those discriminated against.
He tells about how a great aunt and uncle in America reached out across the ocean to finance the rescue of his parents and grandparents, who were about to be swallowed up by the web of Nazism in late 1930s Austria.
Later, in another instance, Gross was participating in a People-to-People program and wondered how Hallmark Cards could sponsor such an organization when the company鈥檚 headquarters were in segregated Kansas City, Missouri.
He was offended that 1960 Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson, who was Black, could not dine in the same Kansas City restaurant nor stay the night in the same Kansas City hotel as the white People-to-People delegates.
Gross writes, 鈥淚 was appalled, ashamed, stupefied. Someone I had admired was made into a de facto totem of the Other America 鈥� the imperialist, racist, cruel, superior-minded, nose-in-the-air America that had bullied its way to world power.鈥�
One summer while at Brown, he signed up to tutor students at the historically Black Tougaloo College in Mississippi. The tutoring brought him into the midst of the James Meredith-led March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi.
Meredith was protesting Ole Miss law school鈥檚 refusal to admit him because he was Black.
Gross rubbed shoulders with Black leaders Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael and Whitney Young.
A whole chapter is devoted to the subject of 鈥淐oercive Assimilation.鈥� It is more in the form of an emotion-laden personal essay about pernicious missionary work.
No group in history, Gross argues, has been the victim of aggressive missionizing 鈥渕ore than American Indians from coast to coast and from the tip of South American to the Arctic.鈥�
He contends that Europeans started with military invasions, followed by genocide, followed by the sins of the clergy in scaring people with warnings of hell if they did not convert, often accompanied by mass sexual assaults.
All of that was aimed at economic exploitation 鈥� along with converting people to alien beliefs and slavery, was the seizing of land.
鈥淚ndentured labor of Natives, a form of slavery, extended here in New Mexico and still exists in the 21st century in the form of human trafficking,鈥� Gross writes.
Missionizing among Native Americans has resulted in joblessness, family breakups and suicides, he adds.
Gross acknowledges that not every missionary he鈥檚 known is so pernicious.
With that as background, he began work with DNA legal services on the Navajo reservation for a year or two. Then he鈥檇 move on.
His first lawsuit at DNA failed to prevent the closing of the public high school at Ramah.
After several years presiding over failed litigation, he left DNA legal services and signed on as counsel to the Ramah School Board.
He felt he couldn鈥檛 give up on the board: 鈥渢heir problem seemed intractable 鈥� yet their situation was dire and compelling.鈥�
Gross writes he eventually suggested the community try something innovative 鈥� start their own school from scratch. No Indian community had done that since the 19th century.
鈥淲ith much outside assistance from private foundations, BIA insiders, politicians and a unanimous, enthusiastic Ramah Navajo community, we managed to storm the barricades in Washington, D.C., make national news with a grassroots project to fix up the school building and empower our clients to become active participants in their own solution,鈥� he writes.
There was 鈥� and is 鈥� one model of Navajo-centered learning 鈥� the Rough Rock Demonstration School on the reservation near Chinle, Arizona. Conceived by the BIA and the federal Office of Economic Opportunity, it opened in 1966.
Kevin Washburn鈥檚 introduction to the book described Gross鈥� hard-driving attitude: 鈥淔ew crusaders for social justice have the willingness to do the hard work of parsing complex and perhaps uninteresting bureaucratic rules of the ISDA (Indian Self-Determination Act). But Gross was unusual. He was tenacious, detail-oriented and he had a passion for helping this particular client (Ramah Navajo).鈥�
Simultaneously, Gross kept fighting for the principles of Indian self-determination, Washburn wrote.
Washburn, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation, is a former dean of the University of New Mexico Law School and served as U.S. assistant secretary of Indian Affairs.
Gross, who is retired, resides in Santa Fe with his wife Andi. They and their daughters edited the manuscript. Marita Prandoni fact-checked it.
