Tag Archives: Native American Teachers

Alaska’s Native American teacher John “Wolf Smeller” Fredson

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Alaska’s Native American teacher and pioneer John “Wolf Smeller” Fredson workded tirelessly for the Neetsaii Gwich’in people of the Yukoi, Photo credit: US National Park Service.

Often dedicated teachers commit themselves to the important social causes of their day. This is true of Alaska’s John “Wolf Smeller” Fredson, a 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, instructing his students how to grow household gardens in a community that had previously supported themselves through hunting. In Venetie John became a tribal leader and worked to establish 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. On this reserve 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.

Alas, this Chalkboard Champion died of pneumonia on August 22, 1945.

New Mexico teacher Laura Escalanti succumbs to Covid-19

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With great sadness we report that yet another beloved educator has been lost to Covid-19. Laura Escalanti, a teacher at Pojoaque Valley Middle School in Santa Fe, New Mexico, succumbed to the disease on November 21, 2020. (Photo credit: Santa Fe New Mexican)

With great sadness we report that yet another beloved educator has been lost to Covid-19. Laura Escalanti, a teacher at Pojoaque Valley Middle School in Santa Fe, New Mexico, succumbed to the disease on Nov. 21, 2020. She was 69 years old.

For more than 20 years, Laura instructed courses in Spanish and the Tewa language at the middle school. In addition, she served on the planning team for Tewa Women United’s A’Gin Project.

The loss of this dedicated Native American educator has been keenly felt in the community, and in her Pueblo of San Ildefonso. “We lost a treasure,” remarked Joe Talachy, Governor of the Pojoaque Pueblo. “People like her are invaluable. It’s hard to find people with that kind of ambition, that kind of charisma and character that really gets through to our youth,” he declared.

As a young girl, Laura attended St. Catherine Indian School, where she graduated in 1968. She enrolled at the College of Santa Fe, but dropped out when she was a senior to get married. With her new husband, Laura moved to the Mescalero Apache Reservation, where she lived for 27 years. In 1995 she obtained a divorce and returned to her home town of Santa Fe.

When she returned to Santa Fe, Laura earned her Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education and her Master’s degree in Multilingual/Multicultural Education. She accepted her first teaching position at her alma mater, St. Catherine Indian School, where she worked until 1998. The next year she relocated to Pojoaque Valley Middle School. Later Laura earned a second Master’s degree in Education Administration from New Mexico State University.

To learn more about this Chalkboard Champion, see this article published in the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Educator Laura Escalanti, pictured in the back row, fourth from the left, with students from her Tewa Women United’s A’Gin Project. (Photo credit: Tewa Women United)

Elaine Goodale Eastman: She was a “Sister to the Sioux”

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Elaine Goodale Eastman: The teacher who was a “Sister to the Sioux” (Photo credit: Boston University)

Many talented and dedicated educators have devoted themselves to working for disenfranchised groups of students. One of these was Elaine Goodale Eastman, who often called herself a “Sister to the Sioux.”

Elaine Goodale Eastman, originally from Massachusetts, was a talented teacher who established a day school on a Sioux Indian reservation in the territory of South Dakota. She believed very strongly that it was best to keep Native American children at home rather than transport them far away from their families to Indian boarding schools. She hadn’t taught on the reservation very long when she was promoted to the position of Superintendent of Indian Education for the Two Dakotas. In this capacity, she traveled throughout the five Dakota reservations, visiting the more than 60 government and missionary schools within her jurisdiction, writing detailed evaluation reports on each school she visited.

It was because of her work that Elaine just happened to be visiting the Pine Ridge Reservation when the tragic Wounded Knee Massacre took place. As a result of this tragedy, more than 200 men, women, and children from the Lakota tribe were killed, and another 51 were wounded. In addition, 25 government soldiers were also killed, most by “friendly fire,” and another 39 were wounded. Following the massacre, she and her fiance, physician Charles Eastman of the Santee Sioux tribe, cared for the survivors and wrote detailed government reports to accurately describe what happened.

In her later years, when America was experiencing a back-to-nature revival, Elaine and her husband operated Indian-themed summer camps in New Hampshire. Read more of the life story of this fascinating educator in Theodore D. Sargent’s biography The Life of Elaine Goodale Eastman, or an encapsulated version in my first book, Chalkboard Champions: Twelve Remarkable Teachers Who Educated America’s Disenfranchised Students, both available on amazon.

Rhode Island’s Loren Spears: Teacher, essayist, artist, and tribal council woman

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Rhode island’s Loren Spears: Teacher, essayist, artist, and tribal council woman of the Narragansett Tribe. Photo credit: Rhode Island State Council on the Arts

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. In 2016, First Lady Michelle Obama awarded a National Medal for Museum and Library Service to Loren Spears during a ceremony at the White House in Washington, DC. 

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.

To read a short interview of Loren see this link to the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts.

Wowaus of Massachusetts: Native American printer and teacher

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A page from the Bible printed by Samuel Green and translated into the Algonquin language by Wowaus. Wowaus was a Native American printer and teacher.

There are many examples of Native Americans who have become talented classroom teachers. One of these was Wowaus, also known by the name James Printer. He was a typesetter, translator, and educator who helped translate the Bible into the Algonquin language.

Wowaus was born in Hassanamesit, a Praying Indian settlement founded by colonist John Elliot. The remains of the settlement are located in modern-day Grafton, Massachusetts. The exact year that Wowaus was born is uncertain, but researchers believe it was approximately 1650. Son of William Sudbury, an indigenous leader who converted to Christianity, Wowaus was a member of the Nipmuc Tribe.

As a child, Wowaus attended an Indian charity school where he became fluent in the English language. He went on to study at Harvard University’s Indian College. As a youth, he was apprenticed to Samuel Green, the printer who published The Cambridge Press in 1659. While there, Wowaus assisted in printing many of the books in the Algonquin language that were used throughout the American colonies in his day. He also helped create the first Bible in the Massachusett language. These Bibles were used by English colonists in their attempts to assimilate Native Americans of the Algonquin tribe.

During King Philip’s War, an armed conflict between Native Americans and New England colonists (1675-1678), Wowaus joined forces with tribal chieftain Metacom. Once the war was over, he returned to the printing press. His work during that period is most notable for his work typesetting the famous captive narrative of Mary Rowlandson. In his later life, the former printer returned to his home town of Hassanemesit, where he became a teacher. This intriguing historical figure passed away in 1717.

To read more about this Chalkboard Champion, you can click on this link to The American Antiquarian Society.