Dr. Donald Calvin Page (1949-2019)

My older brother died on Saturday after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. He finally won the war and is resting in peace and joy in his Heavenly Father’s arms.

Donald was two-years-old when I was born. He was one of the few constants in my childhood as our minister father moved us from one church to another and even from one country to another. Growing up, we lived in Shelby, Michigan; Elmira, Illinois; LaPrairie, Illinois; Amman, Jordan; DeTour Village, Michigan; Edinburgh, Scotland; DeTour Village, Michigan, again; Lake City, Michigan; and Schoolcraft, Michigan. Actually, Donald started college when we moved to Lake City and doesn’t have much of a history there, but he lived with my parents at Schoolcraft while earning his master’s degree.

Donald was a typical Page in many ways. Aside from being a committed Christian and having a strong work ethic, he also exhibited the other two dominant Page traits: a belief in higher education and a love for travel.

On the education front, Donald received a master’s degree from Western Michigan University and a PhD from the University of Michigan. His degrees were in communication, with an emphasis on television and film production. Between college and his master’s degree, he worked for a television station in Lansing, Michigan as a cameraman.

After receiving his PhD, Donald took a teaching job in the Department of Communications at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee. He told me at the time that he planned to teach for five years and then he’d try something different—perhaps producing documentary films—for the next five. He expected to change positions every five years or so because he wanted to be challenged and to keep learning.

Fast-forward to 2017, when Donald celebrated forty years on the TSU staff. When I reminded him of his five-year plan, he laughed and said there was always something new to learn right where he was. I’m sure he would have taught for many more years if his Parkinson’s hadn’t forced him to retire in 2018.

Already widely traveled, Donald’s biggest regret near the end was that he wouldn’t get to visit some of the other places on his list. His final trip was to Japan in March with my brother Gordon and nephew Ian. Donald’s Parkinson’s created complications on that trip, but he was glad he had done it.

Shortly after Donald’s return, he fell and ended up in the hospital and eventually in a nursing home. He went downhill quickly after the fall, and I’m grateful for his final relief from pain and from the helplessness that he experienced these last few months.

Although I will miss Donald, I’m happy for him.

Death is swallowed up in victory. Halleluiah!

Christmas Wishes

I make my own Christmas cards, often using a photo I took during that year’s vacation. My card for 2019 highlights one of the reliefs on the outside of the Helsinki Cathedral in Helsinki, Finland. I used only the nativity scene, which you can see in the first picture. But the reliefs also told the rest of the story, as you can see from the second photo showing Christ rising from the dead and coming out of the grave.

Few churches in the United States tell the story of Christ’s life on their façade where it witnesses to those passing by. Even stained glass windows usually face inward so that you have to be inside to see them clearly.

To some extent I understand why American churches do it that way. A church is where we hear God’s Word preached and receive the full power of the message through that Word. Those who already know Christ are comforted and strengthened in their faith by seeing the story as well as hearing it.

But it wouldn’t hurt to share the message on the façade, as well.

Have a blessed Christmas.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Dealing with Religion

Creating Esther is written for a secular audience, but religion was a part of both the Native American culture and the white culture that officials tried to implant at boarding schools. So some mention was necessary for authenticity.

Yes, some Native Americans were Christians by then, but it was still an anomaly. And the boarding schools did not understand how to integrate Christianity into the local culture. Since I wanted to show a realistic picture of what it would be like for most of the children attending the Indian boarding schools in 1895 and 1896, I had to include the conflict between Ojibwe religious beliefs and Christianity as taught by the boarding schools. My challenge was to be sensitive to Native American religious practices while remaining true to my Christian beliefs.

In the end, I decided to show the conflict between the two without resolving it. Here is a passage from the protagonist’s first boarding school Christmas:

“What is Christmas?” Ishkode asked Mrs. Hansen. “Everyone talks about it coming next week, but what is it?”

“It’s the day Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus.”

Even though Ishkode had been attending chapel every Sunday for three months, she still didn’t understand who Jesus was. Sometimes he sounded like Wenebojo, who was born of a human mother and a spirit father. But she had asked a minister after chapel one day, and he said Wenebojo was not Jesus.

Now Ishkode rubbed her forehead. It was too confusing.

Actually, the book even shows the negatives about how the boarding schools practiced and taught Christianity. The Christianity I found in my research is not the Christianity I find in my Bible. I’m sure many of the teachers and administrators were sincere, but they were also misguided.

Boarding school staff tried to convert the Native American students by forcing religion on them. That approach doesn’t work in life, and it doesn’t work for fiction writers, either.

So use a soft touch when writing about religion.

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I took the photo at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways at Mount Pleasant, Michigan while on my 2015 research trip.

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This post is a revision of the December 22, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Language Issues

The characters in Creating Esther speak two languages, which makes the work harder for me as the author. At the beginning of the book, Ishkode understands some English but speaks and thinks in Ojibwe. Once she reaches the boarding school, she still thinks in Ojibwe but is forbidden to speak it. So how do I distinguish between the different languages without confusing my readers?

The second issue is how to write the dialogue and text when Ishkode and her friends speak or write English. At a conference I attended several years ago, a speaker said that broken English and grammar errors tell the reader that the character is unintelligent, even when that is neither the reality (to the extent fiction reflects reality) nor the message the author intended to convey. The speaker said the better option is to keep the character’s English sentence structure and vocabulary simple at first and to make them more complicated as the character learns the language. Good advice, and something I may not have thought of on my own.

I bought a number of books to help me bridge these language barriers, including two scholarly studies on how students acquired English language skills in the boarding schools, two basic books on Native American sign language (which I ended up not using), and two Ojibwe dictionaries. But although they gave me some help, I had to figure it out myself.

So what did I do?

I made Ishkode a quick learner who had been attending the reservation day school for several years before the story opens, which allowed me to start her with a basic command of English. Since all of Ishkode’s narrative thoughts would be in Ojibwe,however, they could be more complex than if they were in English. So although I had to simplify the dialogue, I didn’t have to simplify the narrative.

I still needed to signal which language my characters were speaking when there was dialogue. I solved that problem by specifically stating when people were speaking English in Part I (on the reservation) and Part II (travelling to the boarding school), which tells the reader that the rest of the dialogue was spoken in Ojibwe. I reversed the process for Part III (at the boarding school), which mentions when people are speaking Ojibwe. And yes, Ishkode and her friends do defy the ban on speaking Ojibwe.

As far as I can tell, I succeeded in distinguishing between the languages without confusing my readers. My beta readers all followed the story, and none of them mentioned any problems with how I handled the language issues.

But it wasn’t an easy puzzle to solve.

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This post is a revision of the November 24, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Naming Fictional Locations

I got spoiled when writing my first middle grade historical novel, Desert Jewels, which follows a Japanese American girl living in California during World War II. There were plenty of good memoirs with detailed accounts of what happened to the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast during this relatively short period. More importantly, several of them traveled from Berkeley, California to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California to the Topaz War Relocation Center in the Utah desert as my characters did. So it was easy to set my story in real places and know that I would have all but a few minor facts correct.

I couldn’t do that with Creating Esther. The story is set in 1895, but the first off-reservation boarding school opened in 1879 and some existed until the late 1900s. The history goes back even farther when on-reservation boarding schools are included. That’s a very long period, and things change over time. Most of the memoirs I have are from the mid-20^th century, and they give little insight into the boarding school world of 1895. And although I have some earlier memoirs, those are short on details. I couldn’t find enough information to set my story in any particular school during the relevant time period without the risk that someone would find significant factual errors.

That means I had to create a fictional school using what is universal and making up details consistent with the ones in the memoirs. So that’s what I did.

But creating a fictional school meant I needed to make up a name, too.

The last three words in Dewmist Indian Boarding School were easy to come up with since that is what all of them were called. Well, some included “Industrial” after “Indian,” but the name is long enough without that. The challenge was to come up with something creative and unique for the first part of the name.

I discarded a few choices before deciding to play with the letters in the word “Midwest,” which is where my school is located. First, I tried reversing it, but Tsewdim isn’t easy to say or remember. So I switched the first two letters of that attempt and came up with Stewdim. But that didn’t seem very memorable, either. And Westmid is too obvious.

In the end, it came down to two choices: Mistdew and Dewmist. I chose Dewmist because it flows together better. As you can see, I simply rearranged a word and got a name.

But maybe you want a more fanciful explanation. Here’s one that I came up with after the fact. Dew and mist are temporary, dissolving when the sun comes out. The acculturation process at these boarding schools was also temporary, dissolving when the students went back to their reservations. Actually, some attributes stayed with them, but the schools couldn’t beat the Native American culture out of their residents.

And that’s a good thing.

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The picture shows the East Building of the Shawnee Indian Mission boarding school in Fairway, Kansas, which Roland and I saw on vacation in 2013. The building is typical of the dormitory and school buildings at the various Midwest boarding schools.