Written by Shannon Golden Photos by Natalie Myking
Righting the Curriculum After decades of work by educators, activists and tribal members, Indigenous culture and history is now a mandatory part of K-12 curriculum in Oregon.
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econd grade teacher Nicole Butler-Hooton begins her yearly Native American unit with a word association exercise. On a whiteboard, she writes the words, “Native American,” “Indian” and “Indigenous people.” She asks her second grade students what images come to mind when they see those words. Together, the class compiles a list. Each year, students bring up some of the most prominent stereotypes: bow and arrows, long hair, teepees and fighting. After this exercise, Butler-Hooton shares that she is an Indigenous woman herself. She shows the class photos of her grandparents and teaches them a few words in her language, Siletz Dee-ni. Butler-Hooton is an enrolled tribal member of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians and the San Carlos Apache Tribe. For her, teaching students about tribal culture and history is part of everyday life. “As a Native community, we are alive. We are resilient,” she says. “That resiliency is what I want to come across in my teaching.” But growing up in Reedsport, Oregon, Butler-Hooton didn't have any teachers of color. And she says she didn’t embrace who she was until college, where she met teachers like her and discovered programs designed to support Indigenous students. When she began teaching at Irving Elementary School in north Eugene 15 years ago, there were no requirements for teachers to implement Indigenous curriculum in their classrooms. Butler-Hooton is one of many educators, activists and tribal members who have worked for years to incorporate Indigenous history into their classrooms. In 2017, their work paid off when the Oregon legislature enacted Senate Bill 13, making Indigenous education mandatory in every K-12 public school district in the state. Now, educators and officials are working together to decolonize the American education system and teach the next generation about Oregon’s tribal history. During her second year at Irving, Butler-Hooton had a student in class who identified as Native American. She noticed that during class, he would write about his family’s customs, like drumming and beading. She wanted to support her student and
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the pride he had for his culture. She reached out to his family and began working with them to build a Native American unit. Together, they organized assemblies for the school with dancing and drumming. The student’s grandfather came in to teach about tribal culture for several years after the student left Butler-Hooton’s class. “This was an organic, unique way for students to feel accepted and for other kids to ask questions and experience excitement in learning about a new culture that was different from their own,” she says. April Campbell, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, was one of just two Native American students in her small Washington school district. She grew up in the 1970s and 1980s when Oregon tribes that were recently terminated, meaning that their tribal governments were longer recognized by the federal government, were working to regain federal recognition. She was the first in her family to graduate high school and college. Now, Campbell is the Director of the Office of Indian Education at the Oregon Department of Education. She says that the lack of support and recognition she received in school is exactly why she is so passionate about SB-13. Campbell says that a combination of factors led to the passing of SB-13 in 2017. When she started at the Oregon Department of Education in 2013, one of her first tasks was to help revise the Oregon American Indian/Alaska Native Education State Plan. The seventh objective on the plan, which was released in 2015, outlined the beginnings of the bill. Oregon is only the third state to implement a senate bill that requires tribal education in public schools. In 1999, Montana passed the first bill of its kind to address this gap in curriculum on a state level. In 2015, Washington passed similar legislation. Using the foundation from this state plan, Campbell, her Oregon Department of Education colleagues and tribal members began to lobby for a bill that could be modeled after those in Montana and Washington. Once the bill was passed, the Oregon Department of Education invited representatives from each of the nine federally recognized tribes in Oregon to create a document called “The Essential Understandings of Native Americans in Oregon.”