No Parole Today (pg 1-27)

In this book, Laura Tohe memorably records her experiences with boarding school life alongside those of her mother and grandmother. She also writes of the joys and tragedies of growing up on and off the Reservation. She describes attending a government school for Indian children and the challenge it presented to her socially, culturally, and expressively. She shares many of her experiences in poems. In grade school she describes her teacher, Miss Rolands as an alien to them. She was a black woman from Texas and the children thought she had a hard time adjusting to living in a Dine community. Laura loved to dance, she and her friends practiced often and she enjoyed wearing her dancing boots that her brother often made fun of. In high school her first dance was with Pierce in the Indian School gym. She remembers his cologne and the way it smelled, she will never forget the smell of Pierce. When she went off to college she starts to remember home and how much she misses it. She remembers the calves nuzzling their mothers; she remembers the mountains, the smells and her mother. She misses her mother’s warm, round tortillas.