Wild-tended gardens flourish

just around the corner

Have you ever driven down a different alley, and realized the people whose yards line it live a totally different life than you do? They might have a tidy lawn edge rugged out from underneath a straight-line cedar fence, or maybe tangled shrubs stretch through chicken wire and snag your jacket sleeve. Their trash system looks different, or perhaps they’ve got a wild-tended garden growing along the alley pavement. Whatever the case, it’s a revelation to you — that your mow-it-to-nubs-and-forget-it approach might not be universal.

A whimsical analogy, perhaps, but apt all the same, to how it feels to uncover a different way of thinking. What if you were a mainstream, western-educated whiteperson having attended an average public school where competition and achievement were paramount, where course subjects existed isolated from one another and taught as though nothing else mattered, where penalties rained down for late work, error-riddled work, pencil-written work, incomplete work, missing work, work turned in on wide-ruled paper, work without page numbers and a running head? Or for no provided reason at all? Does this sound familiar?

Obviously, my lanyard and name tag for the NIEA convention last week. This convention is awesome.

I’ve been far too slow to perceive these traits of school, much less do something about them, and this embarrasses me. Yes, I’ve always hated grades, and I’ve often fought against penalties, and in my current role developing Indigenous language classes I’ve followed the lead of my language partners in determining whether to assign grades or attach deadlines to students’ language learning efforts.

But it is so very hard to identify and then reject what you’re swimming in. What we do in public and most private schools calls upon and enhances terrible mindsets such as a call to over-work (I need to earn an A!), or perhaps cutthroat tactics (I need to be valedictorian!), or dissolute negativity (I will never succeed in this class so why bother trying to learn), or righteous apathy (what even do I need to learn this for?) Teachers often reinforce these habits because they too have been colonized by a capitalistic approach to education.

Gratuitous share of my AWESOME signed copy of Braiding Sweetgrass **swoon**

A whole-cloth remaking of education via a worldview that prioritizes place, community, and relationships has hardly entered my consciousness. But it is what Dr. Cornel Pewewardy talks about in his book Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education, what Vine Deloria, Jr. and Daniel Wildcat describe in Power and Place. What Robin Wall Kimmerer so eloquently advocated during her visit to Missoula a couple of weeks ago and in her book Braiding Sweetgrass. What so many Indigenous educators continue to dream of, and present, and make happen when they talk about decolonizing and Indigenizing education.

Last week the National Indian Education Association Convention & Trade Show took place in Albuquerque and I loved being surrounded by people who articulate and stand by their culture and their belief in children and the future. I attended sessions on language revitalization, Indigenizing education, and attaining funding for Native-focused projects in addition to the opening ceremony and powwow.¹ This year, I also had the opportunity to co-present with my Fort Peck language partner, Dr. Ramey Growing Thunder, about our project to develop online language modules (and eventually a course) in Dakota and Nakoda languages. I hope a year does not arrive when I cannot participate in this convention.

I just learned 2023 marks the 50-year anniversary of Two Eagle River School, the location of my first teaching position and where I learned so much as a baby teacher. In my dissertation from a dozen years ago, I interviewed former superintendent Clarice King, who told me this about the founding of the school: “After meetings – discussions, we decided that the Indian students were being pushed out of the public schools on the reservation. We decided that we could establish our own school.” That became Two Eagle, a BIA² school which focuses on culture, community, and learning — but the learning is not necessarily assessed in the same way we measure it in public schools, with grades and credits earned. And, teachers smudge³ in their classrooms, boys sometimes sing at the drum during lunch, students and teachers quilt during and after school in preparation for Elders’ Week.⁴ Sure, basketball, teenage shenanigans, as well as horrific tragedies play roles. But for many students, this school has been a saving place. And for me, it was my first teaching-teacher.

So why did it take me so long to perceive a different, better path for education? Of relating to kids, and community? Of serving? I’ve been teaching for 25 years. You’d think, after a quarter century in reservation schools, teaching Native American studies, building language courses…I might be a little quicker to untangle my own knot of biases and misperceptions.

Perhaps thinking beyond one’s comfortable environment is like scaling a wall you can’t see the top of. It’s just so big, you can’t see the high edge. You don’t question it. There’s certainly no climbing it. Instead, you draw pictures on the wall of a different reality, how you can imagine something different, though it’s not real to you yet. A two-dimensional window into a world where the gardens are tended but let to grow a little wild, where students are prepared for their future without a competitive, penalty-driven system burdening them, where kids spend time engaging in what interests them. “What if,” you think. That’s all.

Taos Pueblo. Mostly unrelated to this newsletter unless you really make an effort, but I could not resist the colors of New Mexico.

And then, you discover that if you just walk along that wall, you reach its end. You round the corner and find yourself in a different world. Wild-tended gardens flourish, and you find yourself standing there, where you maybe ought to have been long ago.

1. And let’s be real, the vendor area where shiny silver jewelry gleams under fluorescent lights of the exhibit hall and calls your name…Annnnnnnnaaaaaaaaaa

2. Now BIE

3. burn sweetgrass or sage

4. I am describing how it was 20 years ago when I taught there, so my apologies to readers who know if things have changed since then.