I imagine learning happening anywhere and everywhere, you know, it's not just, enclosed within a building, it's throughout the community and the land.

You know, 200 years ago, we didn't care if you got an “A” or, or a failure, a failed class, it wasn't even a pass/fail. It was, “What did you learn from that?” And, “What did, what could you contribute to society to help them as a society?” That's not even a good word in our, in our perspective. But - “What could you contribute to others in your community to ensure that their health and wellbeing was being taken care of?” It, it wasn't a pass/fail thing. And, and so I think getting away from that in a system, getting back to the traditional values because you have worth, and it, there's all different degrees of it.

An image that keeps coming up for me is like a kitchen table and like coffee and sitting around and having conversations with aunties, uncles that kind of, but like for some reason, that's the thing that keeps, the kitchen table.

You see the petroglyphs on the wall, we’ve displayed the Alutiiq alphabet and numbers…and so it goes from everything that they visually see to when they have color sheets, instead of having a zebra and a giraffe, we’re going to have a taquka'aq and a amitatuk - a bear and a weasel. You know, things that are here. Our curriculum follows a seasonal curriculum so it’s going to be fall, winter, spring. And so in the spring, we’ll talk about what berries, what plants are ripening, what foods can you eat and find in the spring. In the summer, subsistence - what kind of fish are in the streams? Count the fish…in the wintertime, there’s not a lot of food to be found, so we do storytelling. So we’ll have our Alutiiq dancers come in and do dances and just make it a very living, tangible culture for these kids.

It all kind of ties back to how we would traditionally learn life, you know? In my region there was the men's home, the woman's home. You would go there and then you'd learn from the Elders of the community. Then when you were done with that and you learned everything that you could then you'd switch. Then the men would learn the stuff that woman taught and the girls would learn the stuff the men taught. You would work. You would know what you wanted to do. Go learn from people that their whole life experience doing it. Then everything comes full circle. Once you've done it the whole time you teach the young kids, they come, they teach the young kids and it's good. It'll work. And we won't have, you know, a shortage of people and won't have too many people cause everyone will know what they wanna do from the jump.

They have culture camps, you know, in all of the areas…because there's families who don't know anything about their culture and there's families who do know about their culture and, and it's just a good time to get together and learn it all together.

On the land learning. On the land classrooms like hide tanning camp or seasonal activities…Our calendar would look different. Our calendar would be more based on seasonal activities.

We stayed in Barrow for about year, year and a half. And up there they had two weeks off. The people, the parents, take the kids out to their camps and show them how to get stuff. And I thought that was pretty neat. We did it too in Kiana. I taught there and we had two weeks. We had a week in the spring and a week in the fall where we, the entire school, everyone in it. We went to Selawik Lake in the spring and we sheefished and ice fished. And all the food was Indigenous. All the topics were Indigenous. The custodian taught more classes than I did those weeks. I mean, I didn't teach any, cause I didn't know anything. So it was cool. It was really cool.

To me, education is elevation. And so, the way that we are going to get to a place of health reform or policy reform and ways that will allow us to get closer to our traditional ways of life, that starts with education. That starts with people being educated on how laws are made on like what laws are gonna place right now. And so if local communities could decide when and where learning takes place instead of like eight hour days, Monday through Friday, in a way that like traditionally things weren't done, I think that that could be the catalyst to returning to our traditional place.

When our schooling is in our communities…we're our own teachers, we're teaching our own people…Then we would also value our youth interacting with their families and other community members. Doing those cultural activities, living our life. Those are, I think, just as valuable educational moments. Teaching moments. Then what happens in the classroom.

I think we would lean more heavily on community as our teachers, and our culture guiding our educational practice.

We’ve always sat on the fence with identifying your Iñupiaqness through assessments, and we’ve never really felt like that’s... Something you could measure. Yeah, I mean, you can’t tell somebody how Iñupiaq they are by how compassionate they are and whether or not they’re practicing it at a certain level. It’s a real gray area that’s not real black and white, and you don’t want to put a value system on your Iñupiaqness. I think that blood quantum has already done that for us in a way. And, you know, we’re trying to fight that battle in and of itself. And so I think that what we’ve done with the framework is that, we have four different levels, five different levels that are kind of tied to age bands, but they’re not, technically, in a traditional sense, tied directly to age of a child. It’s more so the level of expertise and knowledge they’ve gained in that specific area. And so, to align it and have better understanding, we’ve attached it to an age band, where we have emerging, beginner, novice, and practitioner. And then beyond that is a master level. And so, that in and of itself helps identify where students are at with certain core themes and standards with our local knowledge. That was all done by Elders and community members across the North Slope. And it’s integrated in that way. But, you know, when we talk about putting a value on how Iñupiaq you are, I really disagree with doing something like that.

So we're, we're observed, we're taught, we're guided by Our own people. And we have certain expectations we have to meet. And there's also certain expectations at work, in a Western sense. So we're always walking in two places all the time.

Discipline is really based on relationship. A lot of times, most of the time, it's not based on consequence. When a child does something that you don't want them to do, you don't, a mother and father, or a grandma, grandpa, don't just say, “Oh, go stand in the corner.” That's not realistic. It's not lifelike. And then related to that, in the school systems we have now, there are expectations that, okay, “You're in third grade, by May 15th, you are going to be able to add three digit numbers carrying, carrying two of them.” Well, that's not how you learn in life. In my family, we learned through readiness. When, when we were ready, then we were challenged just enough to make us feel safe, but that we could learn something new.

But I think we'd have more people who would want to be involved if they didn't have to worry about where their food was coming from or where their money was coming from for rent. When we depend on grants, they're there for a certain amount of time, and you're not guaranteed work after that, you're not guaranteed a position. And so we ask people to, "Hey, do this culture, do this language work," but there's a timeframe on it and we don't know what's gonna happen afterwards. And so if we didn't have to worry about the grants and we had unlimited resources, we'd be able to create a school system language. We would have the people who would dedicate the time to language, dedicate the time to being culture bearers and they'd have a place in our community that would support those things. They'd be able to buy food. For example, a lot of people from Lime Village know how to make fish wheels. There's people that learned how to make the snare traps, but they work. They work really hard to live out in the villages. They don't have time and they don't have unlimited resources and they don't have a way to come and teach other people because it takes time and money. And when you live out in the village, you don't have a lot of time. You're always constantly getting wood, getting water… you know, doing things. You're busy getting food. And so, I think not having the cap on those resources and not relying on grants would be great.

I think that one of the issues with the whole educational system and where I struggle with it is the issue that one size fits all. It doesn't…There are different obstacles that preclude us. It could be the supply chain. It could be work staff capacity. It could be the lack of language instructors. It could be the size of our community… Self determination is to be able to then take funds into your community and do what you think you can do best with it, rather than being told, this is what you will do with it.

This reminds me of the Kahtnuht'ana Duhdeldiht Campus because It has learning in all phases. We start with our young children. We start prenatal as our young people are becoming parents in their own way and on through. Then into the learning and the language and the culture, in that building. It's the center of our multipurpose room, you'll see the traditional value wheel there as a reminder to our children. And I very much respect our values but I also recognize that these values, as has been said, have been instilled in us for thousands of years. And it's the morals of those in a non-Native culture that you have as well, the respect, integrity, the sharing, those are the things that are, that we, I think are hoping will happen there and they'll happen at all levels. And it isn't a specific diagram, you move from this to first grade to this, to this. It's a blending of that so that whatever they choose to do, they take that with them, into the future and guide them in their past.

We spent the past two days, Monday and Tuesday, talking about rites of passage and how are we gonna bring rites of passage to the kids. And so we're gonna start next year and we set up a scope and sequence for year one, year two, year three. And so rites of passage - first catch, first dance are things that we're gonna start incorporating into the school culture.

Their learning environment is collaborative. It's not just in the classroom, it's out in the world. It's shadowing the people around them, and they're learning by doing…They are spending time with their family, leading through service. Providing to the community. Learning that service is an important part of being a part of community.