Roles We Play: John White, Supervisor
The Roles We Play is a communications project started by ATD Fourth World in England. The project explores the roles played by people with a lived experience of poverty within their families, communities, and society at large, which often times are not recognized. The aim is to highlight their efforts, recognize their contribution and challenge the negative attitudes often held towards vulnerable and excluded families. Recently in the New Mexico team we in the United States embarked on this journey to share the stories of courageous women and men – the stories of lives often made of struggles and harm, secrets never told before, the story of lives full of hopes for the future and generations to come. Below is the story of John.
My name is John White. My family and I are from Manuelito, New Mexico. I have a large family. We lived there on the reservation all our lives. My family migrated from a different area called Sand Stream. We grew up without my father being around because he was usually with his other family. So my mother raised us all at our house and we all went to public school. We lived with no running water or electricity and sometimes didn’t have enough food. It was pretty rough growing up. Other difficulties were no transportation, no money, no jobs, and a lack of incoming information. We had no internet and no TV, mostly just old magazines and books.My mother only spoke Navajo, so that was our first language. We learned English, but it was our second language, so it was difficult to learn it. Once we left the school and went back home, we went back to speaking Navajo. There was no reinforcement of the English language. My mother never learned English, so she couldn’t teach it to us.Growing up I learned to make bows, arrows, and spears. From my mother we learned a little bit about medicine: natural and herbs. We also learned how to make rugs, do beadwork, and about how to value animals. We also raised goats, chopped wood, learned how to cook for ourselves, and were basically premature adults.Today I help my family and my brothers and sisters by trying to give them a chance to move forward in life. Helping my family makes me feel happy and makes my family feel a little bit happier here. It helps them enjoy life.One of my favorite things to do is helping others work together as a team and to learn to appreciate what they have.At Youth Conservation Corps (YCC) and the University of New Mexico I work with groups of young people, including Navajos, other Native Americans, whites, and Latinos. We’re all different, but I’m trying to encourage them to do better. Whether it’s learning math or just having the ambition to come to class, to learn, and to have goals. YCC is more about getting to know the workers. Some of them have rough home lives, so when they go to YCC it’s more about positive energy, learning how to work with their hands, working as a team, and helping them appreciate what they’re doing for themselves and also for their community.When they built the wall at the community pantry, they told me, “We never worked hard like that before.”I help them appreciate what they’re doing for themselves by giving them encouragement and telling them about my experience living on the reservation and going out and seeing the world: taking that risk, being away from family, joining the military, and traveling to different countries. I tell them to go out there because it will give them different perspectives and views about life. And then they can come back to have their own families. I try to help them move forward in life because there are other things out there than just the reservation.After getting a Master’s degree in architecture, I want to encourage students to travel and have a different perspective about how to construct buildings and landscapes. In a friend’s class I critique the students’ models and help them think outside the box about how materials blend together.I see progress in the youth I work with because the workers at YCC go to class, go to college, and things get better with their families. After they move off to other places, some of them come back and tell me, “I know what you’re talking about now.” They start to realize that working hard makes them feel better as individuals and in turn it helps their parents.I’m proud that even though I didn’t have anything to reinforce my education, I’ve overcome my fears. Now I think I’m well educated. I’ve always told myself I’m not good enough, but I am. I am successful. It’s very hard for a person coming from here to be successful and actually pass the age of 25- or 30 years old. A lot of people fall into drugs or alcohol or gangs.