Tag Archives: Native American Teachers

Science educator Alex Joanis teaches Native American students

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Science teacher Alex Joanis works with Native American students on the Spokane Indian Reservation in the state of Washington.

Throughout our country, there are many talented and dedicated educators who work with culturally diverse groups of students. One of these is science teacher Alex Joanis, who works with Native American students on a reservation in the state of Washington.

Alex was born in Los Angeles, California, in 1995.  As an adolescent, he attended Santiago High School in Corona, California. After high school, he enrolled in California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, in San Luis Obispo. There he earned his Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry, cum laude, in 2017. He earned his teaching credential from the same college in 2018.

Alex cites several sources that influenced his decision to become an educator. First, he gives credit to his AP Chemistry teacher, Dr. Branton Lachman. “He was a great teacher who pushed me to do the best I could, and provided all of the resources and opportunities that I needed to achieve my academic potential and engage in authentic science learning,” Alex remembers.

Also, Alex says his experiences a a tutor deepened his resolve to go into the profession. “There’s a really neat feeling I get whenever I help someone else understand something they were struggling to get before,” he declares. “The light bulb goes off in their head, I can sense that, and I’m flush with a good feeling. It’s just nice to help people do the things they struggle to do on their own, and I like having that feeling,” he continued. “I also had an internship class in high school, where I got to drive down to my old elementary school and essentially act as a teacher’s assistant for two hours in one of the fifth grade classrooms. Just like how I loved the feeling of helping people ‘get stuff,’ I loved the feeling of building rapport with a group and being relied on for help,” he concluded.

After his student teaching experience at Templeton High School in Templeton, San Luis Obispo County, California, Alex accepted a teaching position at Wellpinit High School in the state of Washington. Alex has taught there for two years, instructing courses in biology, physics, chemistry, food science, and environmental science. The Wellpinit School District is a K-12 public school system located on the Spokane Indian Reservation. The school’s minority enrollment is 94%, and 82% of students are economically disadvantaged.

“Because I’m at a very small school, I get to sink more time into building relationships with the few students I have,” asserts Alex. “I’ve really taken a liking to this year’s sophomore class. They’re very easy-going, and now that I understand them better as individuals and as a group, I’m able to get them to engage more with the content and buy into the educational experiences I’m trying to give them,” he says.

In addition to his classroom responsibilities, Alex is one of two advisers for the sophomore class. He’s also working with a colleague to revitalize extra-curricular clubs that would provide students with leadership opportunities.

What advice would Alex share with fellow educators? He suggests that it is important to remember that there are students in your classroom that recognize the work you put into it and appreciate what you do. “Real recognizes real,” he says, “and as long as you present yourself authentically and do the best you can, you will have students that recognize that, respect the work you do, and put in some effort,” he advises.

Alex Joanis: A true Chalkboard Champion.

Native American teacher Nicole Williams mentors her tribe’s young people

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Native American teacher Nicole Williams returned to her home school, Calcedeaver Elementary School in rural Alabama. There she teaches her tribe’s culture, language, dance, and history to a community with a large Choctaw Indian population. On the way, she mentors many of those students through high school.

Approximately 90 per cent of the students who attend Calcedeaver are Choctaw. Most of them live in poverty. Until recently, they had to trudge through raw sewage to get to class when rains were heavy. Most qualify for free or reduced lunch.

In a career that has spanned 15 years, Nicole has devoted herself to overcoming those obstacles. As one of many dedicated teachers, administrators, and support persons, she has helped turn things around at the school. And the efforts are paying off. The state math and reading test scores for Chalcedeaver students outpace those of their fellow students in Mobile County and across Alabama year after year.

In addition, high school graduation rates are up dramatically. When Nicole inaugurated her mentoring program, the high school graduation rate for Native American students who were elementary students at Calcedeaver was only about 50 per cent. Now, the high school boasts a 91 per cent Native American student graduation rate. That’s one of the highest in the state. “I try to ensure the community and students are getting my best and they’re giving me their best,” Nicole remarked. In fact, among her classmates, Nicole was the first, and one of only a few, who went on to college and earned a degree.

To read more about the work of this Chalkboard Champion, click on this link: Education Week.

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.