Sandoz Conference to study 'Joy of Learning'

Celebrating the role that rural schools played in Nebraska’s history, Deb Carpenter-Nolting of Bushnell will facilitate a discussion of one-room schoolhouses, while sharing Mari Sandoz’s experiences attending and teaching Sandhills schools.  

Carpenter-Nolting, who grew up in Sheridan County, attended a one-room school and taught in rural schools. She knows that rural education is entrenched in our lives in the Midwest and many have an ancestor who attended, taught or both.

“I have many anecdotes about my school days (we pumped our own water and had two outhouses out back behind the school) and of teaching in one-room schools,” she said “And I have a feeling we will hear lots of great stories from those attending the conference.”

Carpenter-Nolting is a teacher by profession, but many will know her by her performances of original poetry, songs and stories throughout the West for years.

In another conference session, Chuck Trimble of Omaha will discuss, “Generations: Ghosts That Haunt Native Youth.” Trimble, who was born and raised on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, will discuss the problems afflicting native youth today.

“The prevailing theory is that horrors of boarding school life experienced by our great grandfathers has hopped over generations and haunts native youth today, even to the point of suicide,” he said. “I won’t try to debunk the theory, but I will talk about issues faced at places like Pine Ridge and Rosebud and a generally dysfunctional society.”

However, Trimble, a pioneer Lakota journalist and economic development promoter, believes that a better pan is actually addressing the problems that result from long-term unemployment and the hopelessness that comes from total dependency over many generations.

“We are concentrating so much of our energy on more abstract problems like intergenerational trauma as the root of our problems, when families and communities have become totally dependent on relief programs, including aid to dependent children, food stamps, and surplus foods (commodities),” he said.

In such complete dependency, the government has supplanted the family and the male population is most impacted, he said.

Trimble is an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, founded the Native American Journalists Association and is a past director of the National Congress of American Indians.

Information on the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society conference is available at www.marisandoz.org or by emailing marisandoz_society@windstream.net.

Prior to the conference, on Thursday, Oct. 13, at 7 p.m., the Sandoz Society will present the second annual Pilster Great Plains Lecture Series, titled “Mari Sandoz: On Writing and Life,” which features one of Nebraska’s most famous daughters in her own words.

Ron Hull, close friend of Mari Sandoz and longtime Sandoz Society board member, will present a program featuring newly digitized footage of interviews of Mari when she appeared on Nebraska Educational Television in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to other NET appearances, Mari taped a series entitled, “Mari Sandoz Discusses Creative Writing” with Hull.

The lecture at Memorial hall on the Chadron State College campus is free and open to the public.