Impact of teachers focus of keynote speech
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POLSON — The medical record from Don Bartlett’s first doctor’s appointment read “freak, Indian cleft palate baby.” The doctor told his mother Bartlett would never talk, never learn and she should send him away.
With the story of his childhood and how teachers, natural and certified, impacted his life, Bartlett drew educators into his keynote speech at the Pupil Instruction Related day. The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes sponsored the 17th annual day on Sept. 16 at Polson High School.
Born in a one-room log cabin on a cold December day in 1939, Barlett was the first child of a young Native American couple. Both his parents were from big families and wanted many children, but Bartlett’s father, a tall strong athlete, could not deal with a handicapped child and ran away. Bartlett was born with half a nose, no upper lip and a hole in his mouth.
He and his mother lived 22 miles from a small white town, with no money and no car. Their home had no electricity and no running water.
His first grade teacher locked him in a closet every day, and his first friends were the rats at the dump. The other children at school hit, kicked and spit on him. Law enforcement officers sexually abused him. Bartlett’s father returned, a full-blown alcoholic. He kicked and threw Don and Bartlett’s mother through a window.
Then a wealthy white woman came into his life in this small community so prejudiced again Indians.
“She was not Native American, hadn’t a lot of training, was not a social worker,” Bartlett said.
She heard about my plight and “walked into my world when I was 12 years old.” She put her hand gently on mine and said, “Don’t be afraid of me. I’ll not hurt you. I think you can learn. Let me help you.”
This white woman hired Bartlett to wash her automobile for a quarter. She had to teach him about a water faucet and “it scared hell out of me.”
Then she took Bartlett into her house and fed him. He did know how to chew. Bartlett just shoved the food directly into the hole in his mouth. A natural teacher, she put her hand in his mouth and began to teach him to move his tongue.
“Then she taught me how to read, how to write, how to learn and introduced me to the world of books,” Bartlett remembered. “I read ferociously today because of her.”
After instructing him in table manners and social graces, she took him back to school, but the teacher said, “I will not teach him. He smells like an Indian.”
She realized the prejudice then, Bartlett said, and took him to her house.
“They say you smell. We will remedy that,” she told Bartlett and put him in the shower.
Bartlett did not remove his clothes so he had shampoo and soap all over himself. When he was cleaned up, they went back to school.
The teacher said, “If he can’t talk, I will not teach him.”
Barnett said his mentor read about his condition, called in medical experts and began to teach him to speak, using a clothespin on his nose and a mirror — “touching, challenging, believing, loving.”
She paid for 17 major surgeries on his face, including a new nose and upper lip and a round steel plate in the roof of his mouth.
She challenged “a non-Native student, who played basketball and football, was a leader, popular in every way, to be my first friend I ever had in public school.”
When Bartlett was the first Native president of his junior and senior class, this boy ran his campaigns.
Although Bartlett didn’t like math, the math teacher found he enjoyed bookkeeping and found him a job at the hardware store.
He couldn’t read a note of music, but the music teacher put him in a band uniform and outfitted him with cymbals and told the other kids to “tell him when.”
The high school English teacher “was mean,” Bartlett said, but she helped him to become a better writer.
“Now,” Bartlett said, “I mail her a copy of everything I write. She’s 96 years old and lives in Clearwater, Fla. She marks all my mistakes in red.”
Bartlett graduated from high school as the first Native American handicapped valedictorian.
“My high school teachers revolutionized my life,” Bartlett said. “Then the white woman said ‘Now go to the university’ and I said, ‘No way.”
So she said, “No more eating my food. “
Bartlett went on to three universities, earned his doctorate and “she mailed me food.”
“The impact of a teacher is forever,” he said simply.
