Minnesota program helps educators accurately teach Native American content in classrooms

GRAND PORTAGE, Minn. — A bunch of educators gathered round a canoe show on the Grand Portage State Park welcome middle. Rick Novitsky, who was once the park supervisor, started telling a narrative about how the Grand Portage band of Chippewa turned this land on the banks of the Pigeon River and the Canadian border from personal property into reservation land and a state park.

“It’s change into the vacation spot that it all the time was — now for tens and hundreds of holiday makers each summer time and winter,” Novitsky mentioned, “It’s the one state park in Minnesota that’s not on state land.”

He spoke to greater than 50 academics from district faculties, charters, faculties and Okay-12. They’d come from round Minnesota to spend per week coaching on the northernmost tip of Minnesota, subsequent to Lake Superior, studying the historical past and present-day work of the Grand Portage Band of Chippewa.

After listening to Novitsky speak concerning the tribe’s DNR work stocking fish, shopping for land and counting wildlife moose populations, the educators go away the welcome middle and start climbing as much as Excessive Falls — the tallest waterfall in Minnesota.

The lecture and tour are a part of a week-long educator coaching program referred to as the Native Research Summer time Workshop for Educators. Darlene St. Clair, affiliate professor at St. Cloud State College, helped discovered the workshop and has been organizing and main summer time coaching classes for greater than a decade.

It’s meant to deal with a dearth of educator preparation to show Native content material. A latest statewide survey of educators commissioned by the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Neighborhood discovered that almost all Minnesota academics lack the boldness to include Native American content material into their instructing observe. In addition they mentioned entry to Native tribes or people was probably the most important issue needed to extend their confidence in instructing. Practically 30% mentioned they didn’t have age-appropriate, culturally genuine sources to show Native content material.

For St. Clair, addressing this entry to Native individuals and sources is central to her summer time coaching program. Every year she works to find the coaching on certainly one of Minnesota’s 11 Native reservations. To date they’ve visited 10 of these reservations — in some circumstances greater than as soon as. St. Clair waits for permission to go to. Then she works with the tribe’s educators, elders, artists and authors to offer workshop individuals details about treaties and sovereignty in addition to the historical past, present occasions, language and tradition of the reservation.

This week they’re on Ojibwe land, studying about log constructing, hand weaving and meals sovereignty. However they’re additionally listening to Dakota visitor audio system discuss that tribe’s language, historical past and tradition.

For St. Clair, this kind of coaching for educators is important.

“Faculties have been used to erase Native individuals,” St. Clair mentioned. “We’re utilizing those self same establishments to deal with that erasure, to halt it and to kind of restore it and to revive Native individuals because the indigenous peoples of this land and that we ought to be central to all of those conversations.”

Summer time workshop individuals spend the primary few days of the session listening to audio system and elevating questions on all the things from methods to do hands-on botany work within the classroom, methods to perceive and deal with historic trauma with college students and why the Little Home on the Prairie collection has problematic portrayals of Native individuals.

“Everybody coming into the workshop has some baggage that they’ve realized about Native folks that’s problematic or one hundred pc unfaithful, so we now have to kind of begin the week with grounding and suppose, ‘what’s it that I’m bringing in?’” St. Clair mentioned.

Awna Cournoyer is the Native American liaison for the Cedar Mountain district in southern Minnesota. She’s additionally an enrolled member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe. For her, the weeklong coaching is a corrective to among the misinformation she’s come throughout in textbooks. It’s additionally precious info she will be able to deliver again to her classroom.

“I’ve preferred it. I primarily serve Dakota college students, so this can be a huge change as a result of we’re on an Ojibwe Anishinaabe Tribe(‘s reservation),” Cournoyer mentioned, “Having the ability to inform my college students (our historical past) goes past simply southwestern Minnesota — it goes all the way in which as much as the Canadian border and there’s sacred websites throughout.”

However it’s not simply lectures, excursions and group discussions. In the previous couple of days of the session, individuals take what they be taught and begin to consider how precisely they will incorporate it into the work that they’re doing.

For Anna Greatest, who teaches particular schooling to center college college students at on-line constitution Minnesota Connections Academy, the coaching is about extra than simply determining methods to satisfy state requirements for instructing Native content material. She’s additionally considering particularly concerning the methods she will be able to deal with among the stereotypes, labels and different boundaries that have an effect on her Native college students.

“There’s knowledge that reveals there’s a big discrepancy of Native college students in particular schooling so my purpose … has been to subsequent 12 months actually dive into that inhabitants at our faculty and to essentially look and see what helps these college students wants past simply being labeled as particular schooling and getting particular companies,” Greatest mentioned.

The week-long seminar isn’t complete, however St. Clair hopes it will get academics began on studying what they should do their jobs properly, and introduces them to the sources they want.

“If I may help our educators enhance the way in which that they train about and to Native individuals, that’s the way in which we’re going to make the bigger change that we wish to see,” St. Clair mentioned.