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Tribal Education in Wisconsin: Revitalizing Culture and Language

Thursday, September 13, 2018

The words ‘tribal’ and ‘education’ call up a troubled history in America. According to the report on American Indian Education in Wisconsin.“American Indian education efforts predate the establishment of the United States as an independent country and have played an important role in European-American efforts to subjugate and assimilate American Indians and Alaska Natives.” The creation of Indian boarding schools during and after the brutal displacement of indigenous people by the U.S. government isolated children from their families and forced assimilation.

While the problems and erasure that indigenous people face are by no means over, education has become a vehicle for the revitalization of language and culture. This education includes indigenous and non-indigenous students alike, focusing on the history, sovereignty, and current status of tribal groups in Wisconsin.

In Keshena, Wisconsin, Menominee Indian High School is working to incorporate the Menominee language, as well as cultural teachings, into curricula. Benjamin Grignon, a teacher of traditional Menominee crafts and one of Wisconsin’s High School Teachers of the Year, takes a holistic approach to his curriculum.

“Long ago, our children learned while participating in our cultural activities,” he says. “Starting with the boarding school period, the way that we learned changed. Our kids were removed from our communities and were forbidden to speak our language or practice our traditional ways. We lost a lot during that dark period in history.”

Grignon’s approach to teaching is interdisciplinary. Though he is an art teacher in title, his students learn about biology and botany while gathering plants to make dyes for their basket and textile materials, geometry while designing and building wigwams, and natural history when foraging for dogwood and milkweed stalks to make textiles.

He recalls a year when he served as principal for the high school summer school and designed a program centered on collaborative projects. Students worked on packets in the morning, and then met in the afternoon to learn about and build a traditional garden, a wigwam frame, and an earth oven.

“Our students could see the immediate benefit of learning geometry through making a wigwam greenhouse,” says Grignon. “They could learn about our traditional stories about plants as we were planting and could write new stories through natural observation. We really reached students that summer. We were on to something.”

To the Northwest, Waadookodaading, a language immersion school in Hayward, also uses project-based learning as a way of connecting kids with their cultural roots while immersing students in Ojibwemowin (the Ojibwe language). Classes from preschool to third grade are taught in Ojibwemowin in order to immerse students organically in the language, facilitating natural patterns of language acquisition. By the time students finish kindergarten, most have a working knowledge of the alphabet and writing system, as well as vocabulary.

Each spring, students and teachers alike open the sugar bush (maple sugaring camp) with a traditional story about maple sugar gathering. “The winter stories of the Ojibwe are vital narratives that offer a historical and moral guide for understanding the environment and our people’s place within it,” says an excerpt from a passage about Waadookodaading on The Ways, a website devoted to education on Great Lakes Native cultures and languages.

Students partake in the sugar bush as both observers and doers. Younger students — who are attending for their first or second year— watch older students engage in tasks like hauling wood or sap and drilling trees, and then try things themselves. All the while, students and staff speak to each other in Ojibwemowin, connecting to their cultural history through the sugar bush and the language.

Founded in response to the near-extinction of Ojibwemowin due to federal policies forcing indigenous children into boarding schools and forbidding youth to speak their home languages, Waadookodaading is also a seminal member of the National Coalition of Native Language Schools and Programs.

The sharing of knowledge and experiences around language-immersion models has been critical for Waadookodaading; in the school’s beginnings, it was necessary for them to examine models from places like New Zealand and Wales where there were already efforts to preserve declining languages.

Though Menominee Indian High School isn’t a language immersion school, Grignon and his colleagues also feel a strong push to ensure their students are intentionally exposed to the Menominee language in the context of education and community.

“Our language is classified as nearly extinct, which means there are less than 10 first-language speakers left,” says Grignon. “We have to speak our language to our kids. We have to continue teaching them about our culture. Our schools are the only way to reach them, not individually, but as a community.”

Related resources: Indian Community School, an intertribal school located in Milwaukee; the Niigaane Ojibwe Immersion Program at Bug O Nay Ge Shig School in Bena, MN; National Coalition of Native American Language Schools and Programs.