Transcripts

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SPEAKER 1: This object is [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].

SPEAKER 2: Table.

SPEAKER 1: Table. That's it. It is a desk, though, but that's close enough. OK, and the Appaloosa is right at the wire. Horse number three, this is one of our greeting words. What am I saying when I say, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH]?

SPEAKER 2: Hello.

SPEAKER 1: Hello. All right.

SPEAKER 3: Ojibwe schoolteacher Bambi Goodwin has everyone's attention this morning. The first-grade class is divided into teams. Each team has a different horse up on the blackboard. The better the kids know their Ojibwe words, the faster their horses head for the finish line.

SPEAKER 1: OK, who can tell me what [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH] is?

SPEAKER 2: I'll see. I mean, listen.

SPEAKER 1: Listen, yes. That's why it's so important. I'm going to give you guys that one.

SPEAKER 3: For the first-graders here at Bemidji's JW Smith Elementary School, this hour a week of Ojibwe language and culture is a wonderful game. They compete, they earn paper feathers as merit badges, and they get to go home and confuse their parents by saying, [NON-ENGLISH SPEECH], instead of, hello.

The lessons get more complicated as the students get older right up through high school, but teacher Bambi Goodwin says the most important lessons are learned right here among the very young.

SPEAKER 1: I have a question that says, what is an Indian? And five years ago, we got some real crazy answers like, someone who dances around a fire and wears feathers, and people who wore-- wear war paint. And now, five years later, I've noticed a big difference. On the pretest, I did not get one real derogatory image of Native Americans, and most of them were very accurate.

SPEAKER 3: The Bemidji school district decided to implement the Ojibwe curriculum not long after the State Board of Education issued a policy statement encouraging schools to include Native American subjects. School officials say it's helped decrease the tension that sometimes arises between the district's 10% Indian minority and non-Indian students.

But there was and is resistance to the program. Cheryl Berglund was one of a small number of parents who took their children out of Ojibwe class.

CHERYL BERGLUND: I thought, you know, my child is going to learn more about another culture and a language more than she would know about her own. It rubbed me the wrong way.

SPEAKER 3: Five school years later, Berglund continues to keep her daughter out of Ojibwe classes. The program still bothers her. She feels it was ramrodded through, that the school board never gave parents the chance to comment on the curriculum before it got rolling. And she says it steps too near the line of church and state separation.

CHERYL BERGLUND: In the Ojibwe culture, like many cultures, they intertwine their daily living with spiritualism. That is what I brought up to the school board that I thought this was rather on thin ice, doing powwows during school time and expecting the schoolchildren and teachers to participate.

SPEAKER 4: All we're trying to do is just bridge a cultural gap that we need to bridge in our community.

SPEAKER 3: Ken Litzow is a White Earth Chippewa and principal of Central Elementary School.

SPEAKER 4: It's not like a program where one was going to learn French or German or like that. It's more of a program to provide just some basic information, some fundamental understanding of a culture. You know, we've been neighbors in this area here for hundreds of years now, and we're still isolated from each other.

SPEAKER 3: Litzow says the Ojibwe curriculum may have stirred up the community when it came in five years ago but contends that things needed stirring up. Barry Yocum, who directs the Upward Bound College Prep Program at Bemidji State University, says teaching Ojibwe from the first grade up shows Indian students that their culture is indeed valuable and can set the pattern for the rest of their school years.

BARRY YOCUM: There are some subtle things, I think, that happen in schools, and those things have to do with expectations that we might set for Native American students in schools that may not be as high in some cases as expectations we might have of Anglo students in schools. That student graduates, comes out into the world, wants to pursue higher education, the result is they're not comparably equipped to deal with the academic challenges as their Anglo counterparts, and that's unfair.

SPEAKER 3: Central school principal Ken Litzow.

SPEAKER 4: I'm very loyal to Bemidji, and I think it's a healthy place to raise a family and work and so on. But it also has problems, and one of those problems is racism. And isn't that what education is all about? You know, trying to look at what our needs are in our community and provide them in our school?

SPEAKER 3: In Bambi Goodwin's classroom, another horse race is over. The kids have collected their feathers, and now a few of them, Indian and white, gather to hash over the class and say what they think of it all.

SPEAKER 5: Ojibwe class is my favorite class in school.

SPEAKER 6: Because I want to learn about Indians when I grow up. Because all different kinds of Indians. My grandpa and grandma, they learned about Indians when they're kids, and then they tell me all about Indians.

SPEAKER 7: Always listen to your elders because they've got more experience.

SPEAKER 3: Bemidji first-graders from the Ojibwe class at JW Smith Elementary School. This is Leif Enger.

SPEAKER 7: I think I'll try to teach other people Ojibwe.