How can teachers better support Native students? And how can they more accurately teach about Native history and contemporary cultures to all students?
Those questions are at the center of the annual Native American Education Conference, which is back for its fifteenth year. It’ll take place at Central Wyoming College in Riverton from August 6-7.
The theme for the two-day event is “Community Wisdom and Engagement: Teaching Resilience to Our Indigenous Youth.” The programming includes talks about re-Indigenizing food security, language revitalization and career opportunities for Native students.
Rob Black is the Native American liaison for the Wyoming Department of Education and helps plan the event. He said this year’s theme is closely tied to last year’s theme of “The Whole Child – Addressing Mental, Emotional, and Physical Needs of Indigenous Students,” which was in response to some of the challenges Native students faced as a result of the pandemic.
“Not only will we continue to focus on meeting those mental and emotional needs of students, but we want to better highlight the community's role in student health, not just the role of the school,” he said.
Black said last year’s conference drew about 450 people from across the state and the connections made there extend far beyond the event itself.
“Every year I hear from attendees who meet presenters, often Native presenters, who are more than willing to come to their schools, to come to their classrooms, and visit in-person with their students and answer questions,” he said.
Black said he’s especially excited about a presentation from Phineas Kelly, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Wyoming. Kelly will offer details about a new immersive virtual reality project he's been doing, in which Northern Arapaho elders travel to sacred sites using VR goggles.
“While they’re immersed in the camera footage from drones and on-the-ground cameras in these cultural areas, they describe what they're seeing, how they're feeling and how their ancestors may have interacted with these sites. Their stories and what they saw in virtual reality are available to students now,” said Black.
Eastern Shoshone bison manager Jason Baldes will give the keynote speech, titled “Tribal Buffalo Restoration: Culturally Relevant Reconnection and Revitalization.” Baldes is also the executive director of the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative and will give a tour of its headquarters on the evening of August 6.
The conference helps educators throughout the state achieve the goals of the state’s Indian Education for All Act, which was passed in 2017 and aims to educate all students in Wyoming about the Native American tribes of the region.
“We hope that our attendees better understand the history, the government, the culture and the daily lives of Native peoples. We want teachers to be comfortable teaching about those aspects. We want them to know where to find good resources and good lesson plans that they know are factual and have been vetted and endorsed by the tribes,” Black said.
When it comes to those resources, Black points to materials from Wyoming PBS, the Buffalo Bill Center for the West and Wyoming Humanities as places for teachers to start.
According to Black, about 75 percent of the people who attend the conference are teachers, with a “good chunk” coming from Fremont County or the Wind River Reservation. But he said health care and social service workers, parents, community members, elders, tribal government officials and state legislature representatives also show up – and emphasized that the conference is open to all.
“It's not just for educators and it's not just for Native Americans. It sounds like it – it's the Native American Education Conference – but everyone is welcome,” he said.
The conference has also bolstered its Youth Pacesetter Awards in recent years, which honor outstanding Native students at high schools throughout the state. Black said the recognition ceremony is full of dancing, singing and community.
“We always invite the youth and all of their family – mama, papa, aunties and uncles and grandpa and grandma. We invite them to come down for free and take part in the ceremony and dine. We really want those Native American students to be honored,” he said.
General admission is $35 and includes lunches for both days of the conference. Students of all ages can attend for no cost.
