My Accidental Adventure

Falling Forward
I kind of accidentally became a teacher. I was planning on going to law school to get our land back. Like every other student pursuing law, I took the LSAT… and bombed. I wasn't prepared; I was exhausted from being in school. So I went home to my Rez in Coppermine, Arizona, and decided to go with a friend to teach English in Taiwan. 

I thought it would be perfect. It would look good on my resume for law school. I was still planning on going, I just wanted to take some time off to recover from how exhausting the education system is. After a year, I would come back and be ready to take on something as big as law school.

As I was getting my paperwork ready to go,  my parents freaked out. They felt it was so far away and didn’t want me to go. They even had an alternative gap year plan for me. They told me, Mrs. Ross needed to hire special ed teachers. They thought it would be a great opportunity for me and repeatedly asked me to go sit for an interview with her. My initial thought was, “that really doesn't sound nearly as fun as going to Taiwan. I don't know about that”. But they were persistent. 

Finally, I caved. I told them I would schedule an interview with her, just to make them happy. So, I grabbed my cell phone and went out to the woodpile and climbed onto a log, and pointed towards Navajo Mountian - the only way I could get reception - and I called her. Well, she was elated. She scheduled me for the following day.

I had no time to prepare and I had only taken one class remotely related to education under my belt. Even that was only because my undergrad was in Spanish Literature. I knew that my Native American background and knowledge, combined with Spanish and literature would make me more marketable for law school. Again - all of my choices were supposed to prepare me to become a lawyer.

So, I went with the knowledge I had and ended up getting hired on the spot. She said, “you’re hired” and I was like, “what?” I thought it was crazy but I took the job.

I was assigned to the Mild-Moderate Special Education classroom. It felt like I didn’t know what I was doing the entire year. Realistically, I didn’t even understand what that classification meant; I went in blind. That was the hardest part for me. From my first day in the classroom, I got an upfront and personal look at what those students had to struggle through and cope with daily. My experience through elementary education was nothing like theirs. I had one student diagnosed with “Failure to Thrive” and there she was, seated in my fifth-grade classroom. Other students had traumatic brain injuries and developmental delays but each student was very different. They all needed a different part of me and for that year I felt like I just winged it. That’s not how I operate but I learned a lot, probably more than they did that year, and I was hooked. 

I went back to college and got my Master’s Degree in Mild-Moderate Special Education and was part of the American Indian Teacher Training Program at the University of Utah, with Dr. Brian Gray Boy. And that changed my life. Knowing how important it is for us to invest in our communities and be connected to our communities, no matter where we are, was huge, because I always felt like my community was home, it was in Arizona, and that place will forever be home for me that there's a community here. There's a community,  wherever I am, an indigenous community that I am, like inherently connected to.

In my master's program, I began focusing on Indigenous epistemologies of our peoples. Our cultural ways of learning just don’t fit into the “norm” of the system, a system built and created for us by middle-class white men. The gross misrepresentation of Native American students in special education is unsurprising never mind how often Native American students are misdiagnosed because of our different ways of learning.

After I graduated, I went back to Arizona to teach. The fifth graders that I had my first year were freshmen and I got them all back again. I was thrilled to have them all back in my classroom. They had grown into these like, punk teenagers but they were mine and I love them so much. I taught there for a year until I married my husband, then I taught in Alaska for a year but I just missed my students so bad. We relocated to Utah when my husband got another job. Thankfully we were a lot closer so when those freshmen graduated, I was pregnant but I packed up my two kids, and my husband and I drove us all down to see them and celebrate with them. I got to see them with their families and see how far they had come and it was just beautiful.

I taught in the English department at Utah Valley University for eight and a half years and spent a lot of time digging into conversations around allyship and Native American issues. I did everything I could to tie that into the papers our students needed to write with concepts of rhetoric and rhetorical thinking and critical thinking. I posed questions about how different audiences and different writers adopt certain styles to create the desired effect on their audience. Diving into that power an author has explained how a white historian could prioritize violence over the medicinal nature and wisdom of Indigenous teachings, which then opened up conversations about why someone would do that, to what benefit, and to what end.

The Business of Education
I reached a point where I was ready for some change and so when an opportunity to transition to the private education sector came up, I applied. When I joined the company, I wasn’t in this role. Somehow as I constantly advocated for our students, I stumbled into this Project Manager role. I oversee two contracts that we have with the State Department of Education in Idaho and Utah. Both states were serving Native American students in all grade levels so I help with any needs they may have in that regard. I do a lot of work in the background, collecting and analyzing data, learning how supplemental educational technology works, as well as core curriculum and educational technology - which is a whole new realm for me.

During my graduate program, someone told me that there’s the art of teaching and then there’s the science of teaching and when you go into the classroom, you have to know how to balance those both well enough that it continues to serve you and your students. That stuck with me. You can’t go into teaching expecting it will all be happy, funny, and joking around but if that’s in your personality and that’s who you are, then you have to embrace it and bring it into your classroom. You also have to tap into the science behind it all if you’re going to be productive and effective enough that your students will be able to think critically and grow within your classroom.

What they didn’t tell me was the business part of teaching. There’s a lot of politics woven in too. I don’t think a lot of people fully understand that aspect of it because so many decisions are made at the state level or district level without any direct teacher involvement. Those decisions trickle down to the students. At a high level, sure the products and strategies chosen are meant to be helpful but sometimes they just aren’t. They miss the mark and the students are underserved and there’s nothing they can do about it because it came down to politics and money. They’re not made based on the individual, seated in the classroom, who desperately needs support.

How it all works together, the art, science, and business of education, has shaped how I work with different institutions and governing systems. We’re the private sector so it’s not all morals here; we’re very much money-driven, but even in this space, I step in as an advocate for Native American students. I step in to make sure our students have access to culturally sensitive, relevant content without cultural appropriation and misrepresentation.

It’s been interesting and I appreciate this position because I’m doing more than I ever could when I stood in front of my 25 students for the year. Teaching students is so very important but there’s more to education and there are different areas people can push into to make a difference. We need quality educators at all levels of governing systems to advocate for our students. We also need authors and artists to develop curricula so that Native Americans are no longer absent from education.

From Our Roots to Classrooms Everywhere
Right now, my passion is in providing non-Indigenous people with access to the right content and information, to teach their students about us, effectively. Some of that has come along as I raise my children and navigate the curricula presented to them. I’m very vocal about my position and how I prioritize my children learning accurate accounts of our people and our history. I’ll continue to do it but we need more. We need a movement if anything is going to change.

 If you stop and look at the behavior patterns across time, you’ll see nothing has changed - not much at least. The things that we’re currently dealing with are a result of the same behaviors that initiated our extermination. Those thought patterns, behaviors, and motivations that happened outside of our communities impacted us in devastating ways. That continues today.

That’s why I’m looking forward to connecting with people I met in the Indigenous Educator Cooperative. I’m very much looking forward to how new opportunities present themselves and how I will be involved in this positive change; the sooner the better.