This is very important. Things are changing, but to keep pushing the envelope, we need to learn ourselves to recognize some of those legacies of what's gone before. It may be our ideas about schooling today are still being shaped by our parents, our grandparents, or our own experiences in boarding schools. There are certain possibilities we don't even see yet, about how might Native pedagogies be re-introduced into a setting, whether it's a classroom or some other setting. There's nothing simple about this.
Many people have a vision of Native American culture as something that exists only in the past.
And I want to know about their spiritual life. You know, being a teacher goes way beyond working with some subject matter and trying to figure out a pedagogically-appropriate method to transfer some body of knowledge. And it's very interesting to see students really grapple or really struggle with these stories we use in appropriate ways, and in appropriate settings and in appropriate seasons, bits and pieces of particular tribal origin stories, creation stories, all that wealth of information in oral literature, in oral narrative.