Walking into the classroom the next morning, I stood as straight as I could. I was hoping to impress Sister MacQuillan, but I was in for a shock. The kind nun wasn’t there. It was the Raven who hovered behind the larger wooden desk, where Sister MacQuillan should have been. How could the Raven be my teacher? The smile shrank from my face as I squeezed into the small desk that she pointed me to. Unfortunately, it was right in front of hers. After all of the other children had been seated, she let out a croak. By now, most of us who were new had become very good at following the cues of the older girls. We had even learned a few phrases in English.
Each of us found a reader inside of our desk. We pulled the books out and set them before us. The Raven rose from her seat, closing in on me, and pointed a yard stick in my direction, motioning for me to stand.
“She wants you to read aloud,” whispered Agnes from the seat behind me.
I rose to my feet, but how was I to read? I didn’t even know which page to turn to.
The Raven cocked her hip and tapped a foot. “Welllll?” she said.
My cheeks felt hot. I looked around me, from child to child. The faces stared back, blank, waiting, as my stocking began to slide down my calves.
The Gwich’in girl raised her hand high in the air.
“Katherine,” acknowledged the nun.
She rose and started reading aloud from her own schoolbook.
The Raven raised a wing-like arm, silencing Katherine. She turned back to me and pointed her finger to the ground.
The other children giggled.
“You can sit down now,” Agnes said in a soft voice.
How did the Raven expect us to learn without speaking to us in our language, so we could understand?
My first reading lesson had not been what I had anticipated. I was grateful when it was over, and I launched myself from my desk, eager to follow the others outside to play. But the Raven stopped me. She put a brush in my hand and pointed to the colossal chalkboards. I gave her a questioning look. I did not know why she was making me stay to clean them.
She answered with something in English that I did not comprehend, and my older classmates cried with laughter as they left the room.
Later, I stopped Agnes in the hall.
“What did the teacher say that made the others laugh at the end of class?” I asked.
“She said that cleaning the boards should be no problem for you, because you are so tall your stockings won’t even stay up.”
“She has it in for me. I know she does.”
“Who?” asked a lyrical voice in our own language. It was Sister MacQuillan. We had not noticed that we were standing in front of her office.
“No one, Sister,” answered Agnes, in English, before tugging me down the hall.
The Raven thought she knew a lot, but she cared more about making us do chores than about teaching us. She said that chores were part of our education. For some reason, she seemed to think that I needed more of an education than the others, and as the weeks went by, I was forever mopping the floors, tidying the recreation room, and emptying the honey buckets. I wasn’t sure what she meant to teach me, but I had something to teach her about the spirit of us Inuvialuit.