Native American Family Leaves Waldorf
We tried Waldorf, but the more I read about Anthroposophy the more uncomfortable I felt with it. I am Native American, Ivy League-educated and my husband is the same. I grew up in the 1970's and watched my mom, a Navajo woman who grew up in a traditional matriarchal society, happily join the ERA movement and try to bring the rights that we take for granted in traditional Native American cultures to women in a America. I remember how she cried when the ERA bill died. My father, a Yankton Nakota Sioux (NOT a patriarchal tribe, as some would-be shamans would try to tell ya) supported my mother 100%. With this said, I come from a line of women accustomed to a certain respect and I am highly educated about my own traditions, both at home (I come from a line of medicine people) and in college (I studied Native American cultures in college and made documentaries up and down the Americas). BTW, I feel silly even having to give my qualifications, but the Waldorfian response had me so shaken. So, when I had questions about things I had read at the Waldorfcritics website (I was particularly concerned about parental complaints about the teaching of history, one African American mom saw her child copying pictures of Africans with paternalistic quotes beneath, negative Anthroposophic views on the art of filmmaking by a filmmaker mother, and another mother's experience with her daughter being corrected for mistakenly drawing a woman with black hair, it was changed to blonde.) I went to the administrator of my Waldorf school with pages of printouts that were heavily footnoted and marked passages from Steiner books demonstrating Aryan bias I had purchased from the school and he laughed at me to my face. He refused to even deign to look at the material and refused to answer my questions in a meaningful way. I was confused and bewildered, I was not expecting this reaction. When I spoke (tentatively) to other parents and teachers they were equally dismissive. They did not seem to care about these things because they enjoyed the overall effect of the Waldorf environment more than the truly troubling accusations against it. They chose not to do the research. My husband wondered why such freethinking individuals could not just disassociate themselves with Steiner and build their own school system that more accurately represents their ideals and wants and needs. I have to ask myself the same question. When I tried to speak to my daughter's teacher she simply looked scared and did not want to talk to me at all. It was such a different reaction than what my mother had received at my public school in the 1970's. The principal had listened to her concerns about the teaching of Native American history and had told her they would change it and they did. The teachers were completely supportive and totally welcomed her input. The strange silence and the closing of the doors on our family made me feel strange about the whole thing. I really made me think of the parameters of race relations in this country. It is subtle, but interesting. I took in San Francisco a class taught by Betitia Martinez (author of 500 Years of Chicana History) called Challenging White Supremacy and a bit part of it was getting white liberal activists to understand, truly, the parameters of their own priviledge being white. It was fascinating and continues to give me grounding and I believe made those activists more effective in the good work they do.
