Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

LEIF ENGER: The acting education commissioner for the Mille Lacs Band, George Weber, says the reservation tried for more than 10 years to get new school funding from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

GEORGE WEBER: The problem is you end up going on a waiting list somewhere in the Bureau of Indian Affairs inventory of tribes who need new schools. Every year, you have to reapply, so every year the list was new. So by the time you make the top 10 list, then you might be one or two that get funded that you were picked that year. If you're not, the next year, you start all over again because you have to reapply again, and they have a new top 10 list and a new one or two that might get picked. That's just the game.

LEIF ENGER: All through the '80s, the Mille Lacs Reservation played that game while holding school for junior high and high school kids in a substandard building without adequate classrooms. But the '90s have brought changes. This is the Casino Era. There's money coming in. When the band successfully floated a bond to pay for infrastructure improvements on the reservation, there wasn't much debate over what to build first.

[SCAFFOLDING CLATTERING]

In this sparkling new classroom, a painter dismantles scaffolding to be moved on to the next room. The new $5.7 million Nay Ah Shing school consists of two structures-- the kindergarten through third grade building, which also houses a Head Start program and a daycare for infants and preschool kids, and the 4th through 12th grade building, constructed around a central pipe ceremony room, and including a large library and well equipped computer center. Millie Benjamin worked for 13 years at the old Nay Ah Shing school, teaching the Ojibwe language.

MILLIE BENJAMIN: When I first came here, we had classes in a trailer house at the Nutrition Center. Then, they moved us over here to the community center. And now, we're gonna have a school with classrooms, and I'm still not gonna believe it until our first day of class.

LEIF ENGER: If the change is a big one for the teachers, Benjamin says, it'll be bigger for most of the students. The old Nay Ah Shing school was limited to grades four and above. There was only room for about 65 kids-- fewer than half the number expected this fall. Lower grade students had to go elsewhere. Most of them to the nearby Onamia school district, where they made up a 15% minority and where racial tensions have periodically surfaced.

Last year, some white students staged a walkout, saying the faculty treated Native students preferentially. Onamia Superintendent Kent Baldry says, while his district has had to cut teachers, bracing for the loss of Native students to the new school, he wishes Nay Ah Shing the best.

KENT BALDRY: They know that education is important, but they also value their culture, which has always been somewhat of a bone of contention, I think, of the, you know, the reservation residents and the public school. They don't feel we've been able to give them enough in that area. So now, they've got an opportunity to, you know, do everything they can and provide that.

LEIF ENGER: Providing the cultural curriculum, says George Weber at Nay Ah Shing, presents the biggest challenge for the new school. A teacher who's clearly been to his share of education workshops, Weber talks about the kind of instruction he hopes will happen here. A kind of shoot from the hip, look for the teachable moment variety, rooted in thoroughly Ojibwe themes. The curriculum will be dictated by seasons. This fall, one theme will be wild rice.

GEORGE WEBER: We're gonna probably-- we're gonna go ricing. We're gonna rice. There'd be a whole ton of biology applications here. What sort of materials are we using? Trees, leaves, birch bark. How do you parch it and why does it parch, you know? Why is some rice, green rice? Why is some brown rice?

And you can do poetry, you can do art, you can do history. You can try to tie it all in, you know? But it's a challenge. It's a different type of teaching. You have to be willing to walk into the room and not really know where the day is gonna go, but be comfortable with that.

LEIF ENGER: Weber admits that's easier said than done. Probably not every teacher hired will choose to stay. For that matter, not every student may choose to stay. The new school is so much better equipped than the old that it's raised expectations in the community for academic performance.

Every graduate will be expected to be fluent in the Ojibwe language, and every student will be expected to graduate. Weber says, that's not how it's usually been done at Mille Lacs. And he says, other reservations, especially those with rich casinos and poor schools, will be watching. Leif Enger, Main Street Radio, Mille Lacs.