Native Teacher Program

I am from the Red Cliff reservation in Wisconsin. I have been living in Duluth for the past 15 years. I went to Fond du Lac Tribal and community college right after I graduated from Denfeld Highschool. I received my AA degree from FDLTCC in 2004.

I then joined the Native American Teacher Corps Program, Gekinoo'imaagejig (the ones who teach). This was a unique program because it was collaboration between UMD and FDLTCC. I received my Bachelors Degree in Education (K-8) with a minor in Ojibwe Language from UMD in 2006. During the last semester of Gekinoo'imaagejig I signed up for Global Student Teaching, Study Abroad and I did my full day student teaching in Dublin, Ireland for a 5 month period. I was able to also study language revitalization in Ireland. In Ireland their indigenous language is called Gealic. Their language loss story is similar to many of our indigenous language loss stories here in America.

After coming home from Ireland I decided to enroll in the UMD Tribal Cohort Masters in Education. This program focused on Education but also had an emphasis on World Indigenous Languages. We studied language revitalization efforts around the world and at end of the cohort we traveled to Hawaii to visit their language immersion schools and to meet and visit with language revitalization activists and educators.

After graduating with my Masters degree in 2008 I wrote and received a grant to do a Master-Apprentice Program with Mary Moose, who is a first language speaker of Ojibwe Language. My daughter and I had the opportunity to spend 9 months working on language projects and learning language with her.