From the Western Drau Territory, Concerning a School

There is a school here. I write this because maps produced in the capital continue to label this region “unadministered wilderness.”

The school consists of a long timber structure, two smaller huts, and a cleared space beneath an overhang of rock. There are no desks. Children sit on woven mats and write upon treated bark with charcoal and mineral pigment.

They are taught counting, hunting routes, seasonal weather, local history, medicinal plants, boundary agreements, and three neighbouring languages. Older students learn enough Human script to read trade notices and government proclamations. By any reasonable definition, this is an educational institution.

The provincial survey office does not recognise it because it is neither licensed nor permanent. The settlement has occupied the same valley for at least one hundred and forty years; the survey office has existed for thirty-two.

I watched a lesson in which the instructor explained a peace agreement between two neighbouring Drau communities and then asked the students to describe why it had failed. Their answers included resource scarcity, insult, revenge obligations, mistranslation, and what one child summarised as “old people refusing to stop being angry.” This struck me as a respectable introduction to political science.

Later that evening I reviewed a government report describing the local Drau as “possessing no formal institutions of education or historical record.” I had intended to annotate the report and did not. There are occasions when the margin is too small.