Tag Archives: Native American Teachers

Maggie George: Teacher and expert on Native American education

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Educator Maggie George of the Navajo Nation provides role model for Native American students.

There are many talented educators who serve as superb role models for Native American students. One of these is Maggie George from Arizona, a member of the Navajo Nation.

Maggie was born into the Tachii’nii clan, born for the Naakaii Dine clan in Red Valley, Arizona. Her father was a traditional practitioner and her mother was a homemaker. Maggie was raised in the traditional pastoral Navajo ways, raising livestock and living off the land.

As a youngster, Maggie attended a public school and a boarding school on the Navajo Reservation. “I grew up in an era when it was a challenge to be an Indian, and only one of my teachers was Navajo,” Maggie once confided. “I decided in junior high that I wanted to change that and teach Navajo children. Knowing who I was as a Navajo person — and being grounded in my identity, language and culture — helped me have confidence, competence and persistence,” she declared.

To achieve this goal, Maggie earned her Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education in 1980 and her Master’s degree in Guidance and Counseling in 1989, both from the New Mexico Highlands University School of Education. Later she earned a PhD in Higher Education Policy and Leadership from the University of Kansas.

Once Maggie earned her degrees, she worked as a K-12 educator and counselor for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and contract schools in New Mexico. After her skill as an educator became well-known, Maggie was selected to serve as the Executive Director of the White House Initiative on Tribal Colleges and Universities. She also served as the Deputy Director of the American Indian Science and Engineering Society. In addition, she was a member of the faculty and then the Dean of the School of Education at Haskell Indian Nations University. The former classroom teacher also served as the Dean and Academic Vice President of Dine College in Tsaile, Arizona, from 2000 to 2005. From 2011 to 2016 Maggie served as the college’s President. There she inaugurated a program of academic affairs and Indian education for the New Mexico Higher Education Department.

For her work in the field of education, Maggie garnered a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. To read more about this chalkboard champion, click on this article about her work at Dine College.

The destructive nature of Indian boarding schools

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While conducting research for my book Chalkboard Champions, I was surprised to learn a great deal about numerous types of schools that I had never heard about in the 36 years I had been teaching. For examples, I learned about industrial schools, soup schools, farm schools, normal schools, specialist schools. Where were all these terms when I went through student teaching? I was particularly interested in reading about Indian boarding schools, and the controversies these facilities generated.

Indian boarding schools were created specifically for the purpose of educating Native Americans. American Indian children were sent to these schools, sometimes involuntarily, because it was believed the only way Native Americans could ever succeed in a predominantly white society would be if they abandoned their tribal ways and adopted the lifestyle practiced by the dominant culture. Proponents believed that this assimilation could best be accomplished when the Indian children were very young.

Most Indian boarding schools were originally founded by church missionaries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Later, some were established and run by the US government. The intentions were pure, but in retrospect, the results were disastrous. Some historians go so far as to assert these schools were institutions of cultural genocide.

The children, some as young as four years old, were taken away from their families, sent many miles away from home, and forced to give up their native languages, customs and religious beliefs, art and music, clothing, and even their names. These youngsters often found it traumatic when they were forced to cut their long hair, a symbolic act of shame and sorrow to many Native Americans. The highly regimented routine and military atmosphere of the boarding schools were harsh on the youngest ones. Exposure to diseases to which they had no natural immunities, coupled with homesickness and, in some locations, unsanitary conditions, led to a disturbingly high death rate. In despair, some of the youngsters ran away from their schools, freezing or starving to death trying to make their way back to their home reservations. Such a terribly sad thought for educators who care so much about kids and really believe in the liberating power of schools.

You can read more about these schools in the book Indian Boarding School: Teaching the White Man’s Way, available on amazon.com. You can also read about them in my book, Chalkboard Champions.

Music teacher Zitkala Sa: Honored by the National Women’s History Project

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Zitkala Sa

Music teacher Zitkala Sa: Honored by the National Women’s History Project

It’s Women’s History Month, so today I would like to introduce you to one of the most amazing chalkboard champions and political activists in American history. She is Native American Zitkala Sa, whose Indian name translated means Red Bird.

This remarkable educator was born on February 22, 1876, on the Yankton Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Her father, an American of European descent, abandoned his family, leaving his young daughter to be raised alone by her Native American mother. Despite her father’s absence, Zitkala Sa described her childhood on the reservation as a time of freedom and joy spent in the loving care of her tribe.

In 1884, when she was just eight years old, missionaries visited the reservation and removed several of the Native American children, including Zitkala Sa, to Wabash, Indiana. There she was enrolled in White’s Manual Labor Institute, a school founded by Quaker Josiah White for the purpose of educating “poor children, white, colored, and Indian.” She attended the school for three years until 1887, later describing her life there in detail in her autobiography The School Days of an Indian Girl. In the book she described her despair over having been separated from her family, and having her heritage stripped from her as she was forced to give up her native language, clothing, and religious practices. She was also forced to cut her long hair, a symbolic act of shame among Native Americans. Her deep emotional pain, however, was somewhat brightened by the joy and exhilaration she felt in learning to read, write, and play the violin. During these years, Zitkala Sa became an accomplished musician.

After completing her secondary education in 1895, the young graduate enrolled at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, on a scholarship. The move was an unusual one, because at that time higher education for women was not common. In 1899, Zitkala Sa accepted a position as a music teacher at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Here she became an important role model for Native American children who, like herself, had been separated from their families and relocated far from their home reservations to attend an Indian boarding school. In 1900, the young teacher escorted some of her students to the Paris Exposition in France, where she played her violin in public performances by the school band. After she returned to the Carlisle School, Zitkala Sa became embroiled in a conflict with the Carlisle’s founder, Colonel Richard Henry Pratt, when she expressed resentment over the rigid program of assimilation into the dominant white culture that Pratt advocated, and the fact that the school’s curriculum did not encourage Native American children to aspire to anything beyond lives spent as manual laborers.

After that, as a political activist, Zitkala Sa devoted her energy and talent towards the improvement of the lives of her fellow Native Americans. The former teacher founded the National Council of American Indians in 1926 and served as its president until her death in 1938. She traveled around the country delivering speeches on controversial issues such as Native American enfranchisement, their full citizenship, Indian military service in World War I, corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the apportionment of tribal lands. In 1997 she was selected as a Women’s History Month Honoree by the National Women’s History Project.

Zitkala Sa: a national treasure and a genuine chalkboard champion.

You can read more about the Carlisle Indian School in my book, Chalkboard Champions, available from amazon.

The amazing story of teacher and WWII Seminole Indian Code Talker Edmond Harjho

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Edmond Harjho

Teacher and WWII Seminole Indian Code Talker Edmond Harjho

I love to share stories about hardworking teachers who have also served our country in the military. One of these stories is about the amazing Edmond Andrew Harjho, an elementary school teacher who served as a Seminole Code Talker during World War II.

Edmond was born in Maud, Seminole County, Oklahoma, on November 24, 1917. He spent his boyhood in Maud, eventually graduating from Seminole High School. He earned his Bachelor’s degree and his Master’s degree from Oklahoma City University in Oklahoma.

During World War II, Edmond and his brothers enlisted in the US Army. The men served in Battery A of the 195th Field Artillery Battalion, and participated during the landings at Normandy in 1944 and the Battle of the Bulge in 1945. The story goes that one day in 1944, Edmond was talking with his brother in their native language. The pair were overheard by their Army captain, who quickly recognized that the men could communicate with each other in their native tongue on the army radio and not easily be understood by soldiers from the opposing army. That’s how Edmond became a Seminole Code Talker.

For his military service, Edmond was recognized in 2013 with the Congressional Gold Medal. He was also awarded the Eastern African Middle Eastern Campaign Service Ribbon, a Silver Service Star, and a Good Conduct Medal.

After the war, Edmond taught elementary school, first in Maud Public Schools, then in the Justice Public School in Wewoka, Oklahoma, and lastly in the Pickett Center School located in Ada, Oklahoma.

Sadly, Edmond Harjho passed away from a heart attack in Ada, Oklahoma, on March 31, 2014. He was 96 years old. When he died, he was the last surviving Seminole Code Talker. He was buried at the Seminole Nation Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Seminole, Oklahoma.

Teacher Loren Spears: Working towards appreciation for Native Americans

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Loren Spears

Teacher Loren Spears: Working towards appreciation for Native Americans

I enjoy sharing stories about talented and dedicated educators who 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 young girl, Loren attended Chariho Regional High School in her home town of Charleston, a rural village in southern Rhode Island. After she earned her high school diploma, 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.

Once she earned her degrees, Loren accepted a position as an elementary school teacher in the Newport Public School System. Her teaching career spanned two decades and included twelve years as a first grade and fourth grade teacher 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 the 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 misrepresentation.

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 educators who were name Extraordinary Women honorees for Rhode Island. 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.