Here.
I’ve now brought this article up twice in the past two days (including in class), so I’m posting it.
With the help of Natalie Turner, assistant director of the Washington State University Area Health Education Center in Spokane, WA, Sporleder and his staff implemented three basic changes that essentially shifted their approach to student behavior from “What’s wrong with you?” to “What happened to you?”
(emphasis added)
H/T Judge Whitener
Here is “Alaska Is Failing Its Indigenous Students” by Evon Parker.
And meanwhile, over near Grand Ronde:
Leaders of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde have pressed the Willamina School Board for a decision on their request, calling it a positive gesture in a district where about a quarter of the students are Native American.
It was greeted in April by a counterproposal from the board’s chair, Craig Johnson: The tribe should pay the district $25,000 over five years to display the flag. Another board member, Ken Onstot, said displaying the tribal flag could be “semi-divisive” because only a quarter of the enrollment is Native American.
Just a reminder post that the registration for the White House Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education listening session is here and the registration for the 11st Annual Indigenous Law Conference–Dismantling Barriers in American Indian Education–is here. Those events are happening on November 19 and 20 in East Lansing.
See this page for more information about both events.
Annette Nickel, Judge Butts, Maribeth Preston, Judge Maldonado
Spoiler alert–the answer is “gold standard.”
Amazing turn out.
Washington Post article here.
Turtle Talk favorite Sherman Alexie is in the news again, this time as the focus of a textbook for high school English teachers. From Jodi Rave at the Missoulian. H/T Indianz.
Native insight: Textbook guides teachers on author’s racial messages
It ain’t easy being Indian. So says one of America’s premier Native writers of contemporary Indian life.
To help explain the racial complexities that permeate Sherman Alexie’s work, a textbook for teachers, “Sherman Alexie in the Classroom,” was recently published to help educators explore Native Americana in modern times, stories often told by Alexie with an acerbic twist.
To wit, says Alexie: “I rooted for John Wayne even though I knew he was going to kill his niece because she had been ‘soiled’ by the Indians. Hell, I rooted for John Wayne because I understood why he wanted to kill his niece. I hated those Indians just as much as John Wayne did.”
So why would an Indian hate Indians?
English literature professors and teachers Heather Bruce, Anna Baldwin and Christabel Umphrey explain this paradox in “Sherman Alexie in the Classroom,” a high school literature series published by the National Council of Teachers of English. The text examines Alexie’s provocative body of work, ranging from poetry and novels to film scripts.
Turtle Talk 
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