Tag Archives: Native American Teachers

Special Education Teacher and Native American Politician Sharon Clahchischilliage

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HCLAHMany talented educators distinguish themselves in the political arena. This is certainly true of Native American Sharon E. Clahchischilliage, a Navajo elected to the New Mexico House of Representatives.

Sharon was born in Farmington, New Mexico, in 1949. She was raised in Gad’iiahi, just west of Shiprock, New Mexico. Her parents, Eleanor and Herbert Clah, worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs at the Shiprock Boarding School. She is the granddaughter of two former Navajo Nation Chairmen, Deshna Clahchischilliage (1928-1932) and Sam Ahkeah (1946-1954).

As a teenager, Sharon attended high school at Navajo Methodist Mission in Farmington, where she graduated in 1968. After her high school graduation, she enrolled at Bacone Junior College at Muskogee, Oklahoma, and then transferred to Eastern New Mexico University, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in education in 1976. She earned her master’s degree in social work from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. Since then, Sharon has acquired additional training in special education, guidance counseling, and administrative education from the University of New Mexico.

Sharon has extensive experience in the public schools. She worked for more than ten years as a special education teacher at Albuquerque Public Schools, Bernalillo Schools, the Farmington School District, and as a guidance counselor at the Southwestern Polytechnic Institute.

In addition to her career in education, Sharon has devoted many years to public service. She was a Lieutenant Commissioned Corps Officer for the US Public Health Service for the Points of Light program of President George H. W. Bush. She also worked for the Family Center Program located at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia, a program that helped patients with substance abuse recovery. While there, Sharon also worked at the Strecker Substance Abuse Unit at the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital.

As a Native American, Sharon has devoted much of her energy to tribal issues. She has devoted her energy to the Indian Health Service, Albuquerque Service Unit, and has also worked as a liaison between the Department of Children, Youth, and Families and New Mexico tribes under former State Cabinet Secretary Heather Wilson during the administration of New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson. In 1999, this dedicated teacher served as the Executive Director of the National Council on Urban Indian Health in Washington, DC. Additionally, she has nine years of experience as the Executive Director of the Navajo Nation Washington Office (NNWO). The NNWO serves as the official link between the Navajo Nation and the United States government. The organization monitors and analyzes congressional legislation, disseminates Congressional and federal agency information, and develops strategies and decisions concerning national policies and budgets that affect the Navajo Nation.

When Sharon won her seat in the New Mexico House of Representatives in November, 2012, she became the first Republican Navajo woman to be elected to the New Mexico State Legislature for District 4.

Sharon Clahchischilliage: a true chalkboard champion.

 

John “Wolf Smeller” Fredson: Chalkboard Champion and Native Alaskan Rights Activist

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24210_405689419765_7704338_n-350x640Many times dedicated teachers commit themselves to the important social causes of their day. This is true of John Fredson, an Alaskan Native American educator and hospital worker who labored tirelessly on behalf of the Neetsaii Gwich’in people of the Yukon.

John was born in 1896 near Table Mountain by the Sheenjek River watershed in the Yukon. He grew up speaking Gwich’in as his first language. His Gwich’in name is Zhoh Gwatson, which translated means “Wolf Smeller.” Orphaned at a young age, John attended a mission school operated by the Episcopal church.

As a youngster, John became exceptionally skilled in climbing, hunting, and following trails. At age 14, he became a member of a 1913 expedition that climbed Mount Denali, the highest peak in North America. For this expedition Johnny served as the base camp manager. While the older men climbed, John  remained at the base camp for 31 days by himself, feeding himself by hunting caribou and sheep. The young boy’s experiences are documented in the book Ascent of Denali by Archdeacon Hudson Stuck, another member of the expedition.

With the Archdeacon’s encouragement, John decided to continue his education beyond elementary school, becoming the first native of Athabascan descent to complete high school. He earned a scholarship to attend Sewanee, the University of the South, an Episcopal college located in Tennessee. He was the first Alaska native to graduate from a university. While there, John worked with renowned linguist Edward Sapir to classify Gwich’in as part of the Na-Dene language family. This work is documented in the book John Fredson Edward Sapir Ha’a Googwandak (1982).

After he graduated from college, John served his country in the US military. When he was discharged, he returned to Alaska, where he worked at a hospital in Fort Yukon. In his later years, he built a solarium for Native American tuberculosis patients. At that time, his facility was the only hospital in the far north, and was utilized by many native Alaskan patients, primarily from the Gwich’in tribe. Most of these patients suffered from communicable diseases introduced by Europeans and Asians to which the natives had no immunity.

John also taught school in the village of Venetie, teaching how to grow household gardens to a community who had previously supported themselves through hunting. In Venetie John became a tribal leader and worked to establish the Native Alaskan rights to traditional lands. He was the primary founder of the Venetie Indian Reserve, the largest reservation in Alaska, which earned federal recognition in 1941, before Alaska was admitted to the Union as a state. The reserve was approximately 1.4 million acres at the time of its establishment. There the John Fredson School of Yukon Flats has been named in his honor, and the school remains there to this day.

All his life, John “Wolf Smeller” Fredson was a Native American rights activist, writer, hunter, skilled debater, musician, artist, and more.  He is said to have lived his life with integrity, passion, and a great sense of humor.  He always exhibited a great love for the land and for his people, and he made many significant contributions to his tribe in his relatively short life. This chalkboard champion died of pneumonia on August 22, 1945.

Teacher, Author, Historian, Veteran, and Chalkboard Champion Stanley Vestal Campbell

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walterstanleycampbell_ohs[1]Many talented teachers make a name for themselves in fields other than education. Such is the case for Walter Stanley Vestal Campbell, a high school English who is also well-known as a writer, biographer, poet, and historian. He is probably best known as an author of books about the Native Americans and the Old West.

Known by his middle name, Stanley was born on August 15, 1887, near the town of Severy in Greenwood County, Kansas. His parents were Walter Mallory Vestal and Isabella Wood Vestal. Shortly after the young Stanley’s birth his father passed away and his mother re-married. From his new stepfather, James Robert Campbell, Stanley adopted the surname Campbell.

In 1889, the Campbell family moved to Guthrie in the newly-established Oklahoma Territory. In 1903, the family moved to Weatherford, where Stanley’s stepfather had accepted a position as the first president of Southwestern Oklahoma State University, a newly established institution of higher learning.While growing up in Guthrie and Weatherford, young Stanley counted many Cheyenne as his playmates and companions. He learned much about their culture and Plains Indian cultures in general, knowledge that aided his field work among the Lakota and served as the basis for three historical studies he produced later in his life.

In 1908, Stanley graduated from Southwestern Oklahoma State, and later he became the school’s first Rhodes Scholar. The young man then attended Oxford University in England, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1911 and his master’s degree in 1915. His field of study was English language and literature.

When Stanley returned to the United States, he taught for three years at the prestigious Male High School in Louisville, Kentucky. Then he became a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma at Norma, where he became known for his excellent courses in creative writing. His students regularly sold their work to reputable magazines and journals.

thCANUIB1QStanley’s tenure at the university was temporarily interrupted when he left the university to serve as a captain in an artillery regiment during World War I from 1917 to 1919, and again when he left to serve as a Guggenheim Fellow from 1930 to 1931, and yet again when he left to serve a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1946. Between 1927 and 1957, Stanley wrote more than twenty books, some novels and poems, and as many as one hundred articles about the Old West. In his writing, the former teacher worked diligently to change negative perceptions of the Plains Indians.

Stanley passed away in Oklahoma City from a heart attack on Christmas Day in 1957. He is interred as Walter S. Campbell at the Custer National Cemetery in Big Horn County, Montana.

 

Chalkboard Champion Bill Holden: He Talks the Talk and Walks the Walk

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holdenbridge_i[1]Often classroom teachers become advocates for social issues that extend far beyond their classroom. Such is the case with teacher Bill Holden, an educator who has worked tirelessly to increase awareness about the problem of juvenile diabetes.

Bill was born in 1948 in Elgin, Illinois. He earned his degree from Southern Illinois University in 1970. Bill accepted his first position as a teacher in 1973, but soon became interested in working with Native American students. After teaching many years in Illinois, he transferred to Camp Verde, Arizona. At Camp Verde, Bill became aware of the alarming rate of diabetes among his Native American students. Bill retired after 32 years in the classroom, but he was not done dedicating his energy to benefit his students. He decided to focus his vast energy on helping to find a cure for juvenile diabetes.

In 2005, Bill literally walked from Arizona to Chicago, a distance of 2,100 miles, with the goal of raising $250,000 in donations for the American Diabetes Association to fund research to find a cure for juvenile diabetes. Bill started his walk on January 11, 2005, walking through the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois. Along the way he battled arthritis in both knees, fatigue, sunburn, windburn, and stifling heat, and once he was nearly hit by a car. It took the dedicated teacher six months to complete the walk, but the effort garnered him national attention.

Bill Holden is certainly a true chalkboard champion.

Loren Spears: Native American Teacher and Cultural Educator

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2437_71373757792_8359_a[1]Many talented and dedicated educators work diligently to foster an appreciation for the cultures of under-represented ethnic groups. One such educator is Loren Spears, a teacher, essayist, artist, and tribal council woman of the Narragansett Tribe in Rhode Island.

As a youngster, Loren attended Chariho Regional High School in her home town of Charleston, a rural village in southern Rhode Island. After her high school graduation, she earned her bachelor’s degree in elementary education and teaching at the University of Rhode Island, graduating in 1988. She earned her master’s degree in education at the University of New England in 2002.

Loren’s teaching career spanned two decades and included twelve years as a first grade and fourth grade teacher in the Newport Public School system working with at-risk children. Throughout her professional career, Loren has always been a strong advocate for integrating more Native American history and experiential learning into school curriculum. Loren says she remembers, “being in a history class during my elementary days and actually reading that I supposedly didn’t exist, that my family didn’t exist, that my people didn’t exist.” She has spent much of her adult life correcting that misimpression.

In addition to her professional accomplishments as a teacher, Loren works as the executive director and curator of the Tomaquag Indian Memorial Museum in Exeter, Rhode Island. The museum was the site of a private, state-certified school, the Nuweetooun School, which this talented educator directed from 2003 to 2010. Nuweetooun, which translates as “Our Home” in the Narragansett language, was founded by Loren with the help of the Narragansett community and generous donations, including monies from a local charity, the Narragansett Tribe, and the Rhode Island Foundation. Though Loren is Narragansett, the school is not connected to any specific tribe. As the school’s director, Loren made sure that the Nuweetooun School provided Native American children from kindergarten through the eighth grade an experiential, collaborative curriculum based on Native American traditions and culture, as well as standard academic subjects including mathematics, language arts, social studies, science, and health.

In June, 2005, Loren received the Feinstein Salute to Teachers, Teacher of the Month. In 2006, she earned the Native Heritage Gathering Award, and in 2010, Loren was chosen as one of eleven Extraordinary Women honorees for Rhode Island in the area of education. Today, this chalkboard champion lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and uses her vast energy to focus on educating the public on indigenous issues, arts, culture, and history through cultural arts programming, lectures, art classes, inter-generational programming, grant writing, exhibit development and design, curriculum development, school design, Native American education, and educational consulting.