Wyoming
‘Not just coloring tipis,’ experts debate quality of Indian education in Wyoming schools – WyoFile
RIVERTON—Nine years after the Wyoming Legislature passed the Indian Education for All Act, education experts say there is still more work to be done.
“I think it is a key priority across the state. Having grown up in Wyoming as a Native student in an off-reservation school, there was never a priority about learning about either tribe; and I still see that today,” Fremont County School District 21 Superintendent Deb Smith told the Wyoming Legislature’s Select Committee on Tribal Relations. “And I’m well into my 50s. So I think we need to push more.”
When the Legislature passed the Indian Education for All Act in 2017, lawmakers did not create an office of Indian education similar to the ones already in place in states such as Montana. Now, some experts and tribal members say they hope Wyoming will move in that direction in the future. But regardless of the particulars of future steps, reservation school leaders told lawmakers that the Indian Education for All Act needs more support and better integration into Wyoming schools.
“As a Native person, we shouldn’t always have to be the one advocating on behalf of our tribes,” Smith said. “People that are Wyomingites should know. They should be sharing that great history.”
Fremont County School District 14 Superintendent Blakke Bertram agreed.
“When there are questions on our state assessment that are geared towards Indian Ed. for All, then I’ll know that we’ve taken it serious,” Bertram told the tribal relations committee during its June meeting in Riverton. “I feel like I have yet to see that.”
The Legislature, he pointed out, recently passed new requirements for literacy education — and backed it up with grant funds and rulemaking. “So when we say something’s important, when we put support and money behind it, we’re saying it’s important. Have we really done that for Indian Ed. for All?”
Revisions underway
When she takes Lander fourth graders on their annual tour of the Wind River Reservation, Fremont County School District Native American Liaison Lisa McCart said one of the highlights is often the visit to Sacajawea’s grave. Having read “Naya Nuki,” the kids usually know who Sacajawea is — but seeing her grave, and hearing Fort Washakie Schools Librarian Robin Levin explain the history of disputes over her burial place, is special.
Fremont County School District 1 is not among the schools regularly invited to testify at tribal relations meetings. However, district representatives sat down with the Lander Journal in the days following the meeting.
As the Lander schools’ Native American liaison, McCart explained, her job involves keeping track of all of the district’s Native students and working with the district’s curriculum coordinator to coordinate learning and cultural experiences. McCart invites in tribal experts, organizes field trips, and works with extracurricular clubs in addition to helping Native students get to, stay in and feel supported at school.
Not every Wyoming school district has a significant population of Native American students, or a Native American liaison. Schools like those in Lander, which are close to the Wind River Reservation, have a bit of an advantage when it comes to integrating Indian education into their classrooms, the Lander district’s Curriculum Coordinator Deidre Meyer explained.
Scotty Ratliff, a member of the Wyoming Department of Education’s relatively new Native American Education Cabinet and a former legislator, said the Wyoming Department of Education could do more to provide districts with resources, teaching materials and curriculum to support the implementation of Indian Education for All statewide. Not every school in Wyoming, he pointed out, is close enough to the Wind River Reservation to have easy access to tribal experts.
The Indian Education for All Act requires that the state take another look at its social studies standards related to the act every nine years. Last updated in 2018, the state is currently in the process of putting together those new standards, the department’s Native American Liaison Rob Black told legislators.
Meyer worked in the Montana Office of Indian Education for years before moving to Lander and was at one point the principal of Fort Washakie Elementary School. She is among several Fremont County educators represented on the committee revising those standards.
Beyond her role as her district’s Native American liaison, McCart is also a member of the Wyoming Department of Education’s Native American Cabinet. In particular, she’s involved in an Essential Understandings subgroup that will be reviewing the updates to social studies standards currently underway to ensure they adequately incorporate tribal perspectives and Native American culture and history.
Learning language
Accessing Shoshone and Arapaho language classes also can be difficult for students, especially for those seeking successive years of Shoshone or Arapaho to qualify for the highest tier of Wyoming’s Hathaway Scholarship, Native American Education Director Roy Brown said. Brown works for Fremont County School District 25, which oversees Riverton schools. Part of the problem is a lack of qualified teachers, Brown and Fremont County School District 38 Superintendent David Holbert noted. Riverton has only ever offered one year of Arapaho language, Brown explained, which means that the district’s students wanting to take Arapaho can’t meet the high-tier Hathaway requirement of two successive years of a foreign language unless they actually take three years of foreign languages.
There are very few available and certified teachers of the Arapaho language, the group of superintendents explained — and even fewer for Shoshone.
McCart recalled that several years ago, Lander pursued its own attempts to bring Northern Arapaho and Shoshone language classes into the district. But, she said, her district found that there are very few people with the appropriate certifications to teach either language as part of a public school class. One of the ideas that she and Meyer have discussed is bringing in tribal elders or others who are fluent in Arapaho and Shoshone outside of a formal class setting, where they might not need to meet the same certification requirements as a teacher but can still help interested students start to learn.
‘[Not just] coloring tipis’
Bertram also challenged the implementation of the current standards for Indian Education for All, even in schools close to the reservation.
“My kids, they go to a neighboring school district, an off-reservation school district. I’ve seen the work that’s going toward Indian Ed. for All in that school district,” Bertram said. “It is not teaching my daughter, my son, about what Indian Ed. for All stands for and what it means to be a Northern Arapaho or Eastern Shoshone tribal member on our reservation.”
He continued: “We’re talking coloring tipis. That’s the kind of stuff we’re seeing on our off-reservation schools when it comes to Indian Ed. for All. And that’s a border school.”
If the district in question had called, Bertram’s district would likely be willing to work with them to share resources, he said.
“I appreciate his passion,” Lisa McCart said of Bertram’s remarks. However, she added, the superintendents at Fremont County school districts meet monthly, and she isn’t aware of any concerns along those lines having been raised at any of those meetings.
McCart and Meyer explained some of the ways Lander schools work to incorporate Indian Education for All into Lander’s curriculum, including reservation tours, cultural events, and the incorporation of Native American literature, history, and legal texts into classes from kindergarten through 12th grade.
For example, a few years ago McCart worked to bring musician and artist Gabriel Ayala, a member of the Yaqui tribe of Arizona, to Lander schools. Ayala worked with a variety of grade levels, McCart said, including teaching kids at Gannett Peak Elementary about the meanings of different symbols in Yaqui culture through an activity that involved the elementary students selecting symbols that would be meaningful to their family and drawing them on a tipi.
“If we weren’t confident in what we’re doing and trying to do in this district, we wouldn’t be vocal at the state level,” Meyer pointed out. “It’s not just coloring tipis.”
To characterize the district’s approach as such, McCart added, “is disrespectful for the [Native] families that choose to be in this district.”
McCart and Meyer noted that communication is key, and they hope Fremont County and Wyoming school districts can work together to ensure all Wyoming students receive an adequate education concerning tribal peoples and issues. If someone has concerns, they said, they both hope they will bring them to them directly so Lander can work to address those concerns.
A slew of fantastic fossils from Earth’s earliest primates have been discovered in southwestern Wyoming, offering new insights into the evolution of humanity’s tiny, sap-sucking great-uncles and aunts.
A new study published in the Journal of Human Evolution reports on the tiny fossils of three prehistoric primates excavated at Smiley Draw, a sandstone site in the Wasatch Formation of the Eocene Period.
Among paleontologists, Wyoming is well known as one of the best places in the world to find fossils of the earliest primates. These discoveries add to that reputation while also showing how much remains to be found.
“We’ve made the picture of the early Eocene more complicated than what we once thought,” said Chris Beard, a Foundation Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. “There will be much more to learn about these fossils, especially from southern Wyoming. There’s a reason we’re working down there.”
Fascinating And Frustrating
Wyoming has been a hub of primitive primate paleontology since the 1880s. The first fossils of lemur-like primates, dating to around 55 million years ago, were discovered in the Bighorn Basin around that time.
“A whole lot of work happened in the late 20th Century in the Bighorn Basin, especially with respect to this animal called Tetonius,” Beard said.
Tetonius, named after the Tetons, is a “vaguely tarsier-like creature,” as Beard described it. It was around the size of a modern-day mouse lemur, less than a foot long and under 2.5 ounces, but its closest living relatives are modern tarsiers.
Tarsiers are tiny, tree-dwelling animals known as “dry-nosed” primates. Endangered populations of these tiny primates still exist in the rainforests of Southeast Asia.
In their study, Beard and his colleagues described a new species of Tetonius, T. varleyorum, from Smiley Draw, an Eocene site in the Great Divide Basin in Sweetwater County.
“In Wyoming, you typically find Eocene-aged fossils in mudstone that erodes very easily,” Beard said. “This particular site is very unusual, if not unique, as it’s a layer of sandstone chock full of fossils. It’s rare to find Eocene fossils in sandstone, so Smiley Draw is exactly the opposite of what we normally expect.”
According to Beard, the discovery of a new species of Tetonius, based on its age and anatomy, is highly significant.
“It’s obviously a different species because it’s younger than the Tetonius and its younger descendant, Pseudotetonius, from the Bighorn Basin,” he said. “The fossils we found in Sweetwater County occur after that whole lineage has gone extinct in the Bighorn Basin.”
The study also describes fossils of two rarely found anaptomorphines, another group of prehistoric primates. Arapahovius gazini and Anemorhysis savage have never been found in the Great Divide Basin, and only a handful of other specimens have been found.
What’s significant is that the fossils of these three primates were found at the same site, which means they coexisted at the same time and place. That just raises further questions about life in the early Eocene.
“We’re finding animals that lived together at Smiley Draw that never ever cohabitated in the Bighorn Basin,” Beard said. “Tetonius, Arapahovius, and Anemorhysis don’t coexist there, but we find them together here.”
That’s why Beard said it’s “frustrating,” from a paleontological perspective, to compare Smiley Draw with the well-researched discoveries in the Bighorn Basin.
“We have an idea that animals evolve, they go extinct, and other animals replace them,” he said. “What we’re finding at Smiley Draw is the animals that we think are going extinct at a certain time in the Bighorn Basin probably aren’t going extinct elsewhere.”
Gradual And Parallel
Tetonius, Arapahovius, and Anemorhysis are all omomyids, a family of early tarsier-like primates known from several Eocene sites worldwide.
Beard said Wyoming’s omomyids are excellent examples of gradual evolution, which is what Charles Darwin proposed in his landmark 1859 book “On the Origin of Species.”
“There was a huge debate in paleontology about how evolution proceeded,” he said. “Did it occur gradually, the way that Charles Darwin predicted, or did it conform more to a punctuated equilibrium model, which was made famous by Stephen Jay Gould and his collaborators?”
The fossils of Tetonius and Pseudotetonius from the Bighorn Basin are a textbook example of gradual evolution. While they are distinctly different animals, Beard said the fossil record shows “no break in the single lineage chain from primitive to advanced.”
The key observation is the significant changes in the lower jaws of these primates, which Beard and his colleagues observed in fossils from the Bighorn Basin and the Great Basin Divide.
“These animals start out with fairly long lower jaws and lots of teeth in between their back teeth, the molars, and their front teeth, the incisors,” he said. “Through time, their lower jaws get compacted from front to back. They lose some teeth and develop a rodent-like incisor that sticks out of the front of their jaw, getting bigger and stouter over time.”
The purpose of this overly large incisor remains a mystery. Beard said that if you asked three different paleontologists, you’d get three different answers.
“In my opinion, they’re using that big front incisor to gouge the bark of trees,” he said. “A lot of modern animals do this to stimulate sap or gum or resin to come out of the tree.”
Tree sap contains a lot of sugar. For a tiny primate with a high metabolism, that sap would be a valuable source of energy and nutrition.
Is this change in jaw and dental anatomy driven by a change in diet, or were the omomyids perfecting the tools needed for millennia of the same diet? That’s another debated question, but Beard said the latter is the most likely answer.
These questions are significant to the new discoveries from Smiley Draw because they show the same thing happening – the shortening of the jaw, loss of teeth, and larger incisor – in Tetonius, but not exactly the same as in the Tetonius from the Bighorn Basin.
“The T. varleyorum from Smiley Draw has shorter haws and fewer teeth, so it’s similar but not exactly the same as what we see in the Bighorn Basin,” Beard said. “These are two different lineages evolving in parallel to achieve the same result.”
Parallel evolution is a well-documented phenomenon in nature. The legendary finches Darwin collected in the Galápagos Islands are an excellent example, as the different but related birds had beaks shaped to suit their diets on their isolated islands.
It’s more evidence that something strange was going on in Sweetwater County 55 million years ago.
Hyperthermal Events
Beard and his colleagues are studying all the mammal fossils recovered from Smiley Draw to see if they have the same story as the recently described omomyids. If they do, it would be further proof that different things were happening in different parts of Wyoming.
“It’s an interesting phenomenon,” he said. “We find animals living side-by-side at Smiley Draw that were already extinct or never lived side-by-side in the Bighorn Basin. They were only going extinct locally in the Bighorn Basin.”
Climate change might explain this discrepancy. The Eocene was a roller coaster of climate, which usually leads to extinction or adaptation for flora and fauna.
“We’ve got lots of iterations of what we call hyperthermal events in the Eocene, where the world warms up very rapidly and cools down again,” Beard said. “When the world warmed up, animals that were more tropically adapted spread northward, from Sweetwater County to Park County. When it cooled down, and they were no longer happy, the animals went back down. It’s a very dynamic thing, and we’re picking up a lot of these oscillations by looking at Smiley Draw.
Our Great Uncles
This new study on prehistoric primates raised more questions than it answered. That’s not a bad thing, as it gives Beard and his colleagues more reasons to return to Smiley Draw.
Beard said his team was at the site collecting fossils in June. Some of those specimens are already being studied using a micro-CT scanner in North Carolina.
“I can tell you that we found additional fossils of early primates and primate-like creatures that are totally new just two months ago,” he said. “We’ll have a lot more to reveal from Smiley Draw.”
They’re not the only ones looking at overlooked spots in southern Wyoming. Paleontologists with the Duke Lemur Center Museum of Natural History at Duke University have been finding phenomenal Eocene fossils in Bridger Basin, including the best specimens of the earliest known primate-like mammal in the fossil record, Plesiadapis.
“The Bridger Basin is the Madagascar of the Eocene,” curator Matthew Borths told Cowboy State Daily in December 2024. “We transition from a few primates on the landscape to a lot of diversity, hopping around in the rainforests of Wyoming.”
Borths’s dream was to find an omomyid in the Bridger Basin, as they’re humanity’s closest Eocene ancestor. There’s no shortage of omomyids in Smiley Draw, which is less than 200 miles northeast.
Beard said Wyoming is “better than any other single place in the world, including Europe, Asia, and Africa” for paleontologists studying the origins and evolution of the earliest primates. That’s just from what’s been discovered, let alone what’s still out there, waiting to be found.
“Wyoming is incredibly fundamental to understanding the deep origins of humans,” he said. “None of these animals are the direct ancestors of humans. They’re probably great-uncles and great-aunts, but that doesn’t make them any less important. In fact, in my opinion, it probably makes them more important.”
That’ll keep Beard and his colleagues busy for decades. There’s a lot more to find, study, and understand – if that’s an excuse to get dirty in Wyoming, all the better.
“I love Wyoming, personally and scientifically,” Beard said. “We wish that we had a perfect fossil record, but we don’t.
“What we have are snippets and glimpses; we try to piece together what it means. Wyoming has been overlooked for a while, to be honest, and we’re very fortunate to have such an amazing fossil record there.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
The Wyoming Aeronautics Commission will be presenting an updated study of the economic impact of Wyoming’s 34 public airports, as well as the return on investment of the Capacity Purchase Agreement and the Air Service Enhancement Program. The program will begin at 9 a.m. on August 26 at the Fair Grounds Exhibit Hall.
Steve Maier, one of the Wyoming Department of Transportation’s Aeronautics Commissioners, explained what the meeting will be about.
Maier represents District 5, which consists of Sheridan County, as well Campbell, Crook, Johnson and Weston counties. Sheridan currently participates in the Capacity Purchase Agreement.
He added this about Sheridan’s air service,
Maier is the president of CAST, Sheridan-Johnson Counties Critical Air Service Team, and he added how CAST works to provide support of the airlines.
Anyone interested in air service in Sheridan and Sheridan County is welcome to attend the meeting.
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