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The School That Signed

The first student was a girl from Omaha named Katie Callahan. She came through the door of a school building on Twenty-Second Street, between St. Mary and Leavenworth, on April 1, 1869, and Nebraska began teaching its deaf children. The legislature had voted the school into existence two years earlier, and the man in charge of it was a deaf man. Principal William DeCoursey French ran the Nebraska School for the Deaf alongside a minister named Henry W. Kuhns, and the medium of instruction was sign language. A deaf child could walk in and see a deaf adult in charge, and most such children had never seen that before. Forty-two years later, the same state made that language illegal in the school’s classrooms.

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Mel Gibson: Watch the Hands

On Saturday, August 29, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Mel Gibson walked out from behind a curtain to begin a retrospective Q&A at Fan Expo Canada, the sprawling annual gathering billed as Canada’s largest comics and gaming event and the third-largest pop culture draw in North America. An American Sign Language interpreter stood at the edge of the stage, doing the work that makes such an event available to Deaf attendees, work interpreters were doing at panels across the hall all weekend. As Gibson passed behind the interpreter, his hands went up in a burst of empty flapping, a second or three of imitation nonsense played for the crowd, and then he waved and took his seat to talk about his career. Fans had paid 275 dollars apiece for photographs and autographs. The clip of the flapping traveled across social media before the weekend closed, and by Monday he had issued a statement through the trades, blaming the disorientation of being pushed into a spotlight and apologizing to anyone who took offense.

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