Tell me a Story

At the American Indian Nations: Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Conference in Great Falls, Dr. Margaret Field, assistant professor of American Indian Studies at San Diego State University, was on the panel addressing language immersion schools. She is a linguist, one who studies the tiny subtleties of words and the way they connect, rather than a person who specializes in learning a language. Nevertheless, she had something amazing to contribute: a “story book” on her computer which would speak the words for each picture in the voice of an elder who was fluent in that language. We all know this is possible -- we have plenty of computer programs that do the same thing in English. It’s just that no one had quite put it together this way before. She said her university had a graphics department that drew the pictures.

Another program named in the Indian language flowers and other objects, then presented several together, urging the observer to choose the one that embodied some quality. If the person was right, the fact was celebrated. If wrong, there was gentle chiding.

Leo Fox, who works with the Kainaiwa Immersion Program, has worked to publish the fourth volume of Kitomahkitapiiminnooniksi: Stores from our Elders, which preserves a hundred and forty stories recorded by old people. These are provided to teach young people through his program.

In the spring of 2004, the Northwest Regional Laboratory put “The Indian Reading Series: Stories and Legends of the Northwest” (which had been out-of-print) on-line where anyone can download it. This is a print series. (http://www.nwrel.org/indianed/indianreading) There is no charge. Teacher’s manuals are included with the stories, which are in English but authentic and very popular. Robey Clark had a lot to do with this series and he says, “For whatever the reasons, most kids really like these illustrated stories. Common sense tells me that using culturally relevant materials will not change the world, but it is a practical way for educators to make school more interesting and relevant to children.”

When I went back to visit my own grade school in Portland about 1992, the teachers told me that their students didn’t know the basic cultural stories of “mainstream” America. Since I had left in 1957, the neighborhood had become black with many impoverished and disadvantaged students from families with young parents who had insufficient schooling. The teachers prepared a series of videos of people simply reading out loud the stories that my parents had read out loud to me: Three Little Pigs, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and so on. The videos were put in the library and checked out to kids.

It was hard to get the videos returned to the library. One sturdy librarian went out to tour the streets and see if she could claim them back. In house after house she discovered PARENTS sitting in front of the videos, with or without their kids. “We never knew this stuff,” they said. Of course, they are full of cultural messages, meant to be the secrets of success.

Stories are the keys to the universe, Native American stories no less than any others -- maybe MORE than any others today, and not just for Native American kids. More than ever, all the stories belong to all the kids.

The NWREL stories were very carefully prepared, authenticated by the participating tribes and field-tested with more than 1,200 kids, both Indian and white. The reading levels are grades one through six and accompanied by teachers’ manuals with cooperative learning projects and manipulatives. Robey says, “Balancing authenticity and relevance with readability and comparability to existing grade level materials was something that had never been done before.”

The Vernon project was simple: a person, a video camera, and a book. Piegan Institute discards the video camera and provides a real Blackft-speaking grandma with a sit-able lap who doesn’t need a book to tell the story. A good deal of teaching success can be traced to doing what is possible -- not putting it off in hopes of perfection later.

I’ll quote Robey again. This is from the NWREL newsletter: “As he makes clear in a report he prepared for the Comprehensive Center (www.nwrac.org/newpath/ i.html), Robey favors an approach to Indian education that emphasizes applied learning, cooperative learning, and integrated curricula. Technology, he believes, can strongly enhance some facets of this approach. Nevertheless, if he had just one thing he could give to a K-12 student, it would not be an Internet connection or educational software. Remembering his own classmates who fell by the wayside and his own childhood inability to visualize success, Robey ponders how cultural training affects perceived possibilities. "If I had a magic wand," he says, "I'd like to go to a school and instill the belief among all students and all teachers that they can do well, and that it is worthwhile." Then, he believes, "they would do well, even if nothing else changed in the educational system."”

I can only commend to you two stories from my own culture. One is “The Little Red Hen,” who did it herself -- though I’m a little dubious about her conclusion that since she was the only worker, she was the only one who got to eat the bread. (“Red” as in Republican Right Wing?) The other is “Robert the Bruce and the Spider” which made a big impression since my father’s name was Bruce. It seems that Robert the Bruce, who fought like Braveheart for the independence of Scotland, had been defeated and wounded. He lay in a little stone shed, half-unconscious. In a corner of the shed was a spider who had determined she would sling a line across the corner to the next wall. She paid out her filament, grabbed the end and cast off, but fell short. So she tried it again. And again. It was hours before she finally managed to anchor the foundation of her web. Inspired, Robert the Bruce rose from his bed of straw and went out to fight again, until he won. If that isn’t a teachers’ story, I don’t know what is.