Episode 5 - Iva Moss

In this episode, Michael Littlecrow interviews Ava Moss, an educator from the Wind River Arapaho community. Ava shares her journey of becoming an indigenous math educator and her experiences in both academia and her community. She talks about how she initially didn't want to become an elementary teacher but agreed to change her major at the request of Brian Brayboy. Ava discusses her work as a middle school math teacher and the challenges of teaching without a curriculum. She then transitioned to teaching Arapaho language and culture, working with elders to develop a better curriculum. Ava highlights the differences between the Western and Arapaho classrooms and how the elders taught the students to listen without using their eyes. She talks about the importance of working with elders as content experts and cultural contributors. Ava also discusses the challenges of incorporating cultural adjustments into the curriculum, such as counting in different ways depending on the animate or in As the little crow flies, straight talk from indigenous communities. I'm your host, Michael Littlecrow of the Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe people. In this episode, I have a discussion with Ava Moss, an educator from the Wind River Arapaho community, who teaches STEM, mathematics, and Arapaho language. Our first question, as we welcome you, Ava, is if you could share your overview, sort of as your journey, what's brought you to being an indigenous math educator, what kind of experiences you've had, both within schooling, academy, and within your community, that kind of helped you to build your identity as a math educator? My journey, when I started college in, I think it might have been in 2000, I was a math major. And then my husband got accepted to a scholarship at the University of Utah under Brian Brayboy, the AITTP program, that was his first, probably his first teacher cohort. And so my husband was the first cohort, and he got funded for the second cohort. So then Brayboy asked if I could come in, he said, we need elementary teachers that are strong in mathematics. He said, would you mind changing your major and becoming an elementary teacher? And I was like, no, I don't like kids. I was really honest with him and really blunt about, you know, about how I viewed elementary educators, you know, dealing with other people's children every day. But I agreed, and I graduated with an elementary degree. And then I worked, but I got hired as a middle school math teacher when I returned back to the Wind River Reservation. So I taught 7th and 8th grade mathematics, and they didn't have a curriculum. So they had something called accelerated math, I don't know if you're familiar with that, it's more like an intervention mathematics where you can go in, all your students' names are in there, you put them in a program, it prints out worksheets, and then they fill out a little card, and then they scan it, and then it tells them how many they got correct. The computer did the grading for you, and then you just recorded, printed out another worksheet for them. I mean, it wasn't like standard, like, okay, here's these standards. It was a bizarre curriculum. That was my first classroom in math. And then I got switched over to Arapaho language and culture. So then I had to teach K-8. The board at that time said, we would like you and my husband to teach Arapaho language and culture and work with the elders because we need to start developing a better curriculum on how to teach the language, they said, because, you know, the kids at the school did not like going to Arapaho language and culture. Really? Well, the board members were like, okay, we need to change. So I did that for a while, developed a whole new curriculum, and made that classroom the favorite class. And I think working with the elders probably was my first professional development on how to connect the Western education system to how Arapaho think about it. And I got to work with them and seeing how the Arapaho classroom was like the opposite of a Western classroom, and how the elders interacted with the children. And the first example, or the one that really stuck out in my mind was my elder. She was at the whiteboard. And so what we did was we printed these pictures that she was teaching, teaching them how to say in Arapaho and kind of giving them short phrases and everything. And she had, might have been kindergartners, kindergartners or first graders in there with her. And she was going through it, and they were just looking at her. And she stopped right in the middle of the whiteboard, and she said, get your eyeballs off of me. You know, here's this elder, she's in her 70s, right? The kids were like, what? And she said, you're supposed to be listening to me. And they said, we are listening to you. Our teacher, their white teacher says, look at me when I'm talking. Yes, right, right. And then the elder was like, well, you don't listen with your eyeballs. Get your eyeballs off of me and listen. She said, you look at this picture. Don't look at me. Look at what I'm showing you. Interesting. It was just how those two different cultures collided. And then we had to go and talk to the first grade teachers, kindergarten teachers, like when you say, look at me, you know, that's not culturally appropriate. Wow. And going back through that. So I think that that was probably my first professional development, working with the elder within that classroom and thinking about how they teach and how they expect their learners to listen and how we're expected to listen in the community. We don't look at, you know, we don't look at one another, right? Right, right. And what I'm finding about your journey is so interesting is that the first time you really got to work with the elders, you're working with them not just as elders, but as content experts, right? Because this is what they grew up with. They are the experts. Rather, many of us have a, you know, we work with the math. And so that may not be the content experts from the elders. We're looking for their cultural input. But you had both. You're looking for their cultural input into the curriculum. But also, they were the content experts at the same time, which is a very interesting path and one I hadn't heard before. That is amazing. Yeah. And we started that next year. The superintendent was like, well, can you add like kindergarten standard? You know, basically taking kindergarten standards and how they want it and then translating it into the Arapaho classroom, like trying to like if the kindergartners are learning to count one through 20, can they learn how to count one through 20 in Arapaho? If they're learning the alphabet, can they learn the Arapaho alphabet? So they were trying to like mirror, but we were doing it in our Arapaho language classroom. And so that was another thing. Then we got to talking about counting. How does an Arapaho count? And so they told me the story about, well, there's always been one or two, four, because we have four things, five, and then seven, those numbers that are always being used. But they said there was never anything to count above 10. And so they had to make a counting system up to 100, because first graders have to count to 100. Okay. And so they wanted to have that consecutive. But then once we start going into it, I mean, Arapahos can count like five different ways. Just depending on the animacy, you know, if it's animate or inanimate, if they're counting objects, you know how in math, elementary math, they count bears or they count sticks or they count whatever, you know, they always have manipulatives to count little cubes or something when they're learning how to count. Right. But if we did that in Arapaho, then the counting changed. If it was bears, it was seen as an animate object. So the count, the number changed. But if it was a chair, then it was inanimate. So then the number changed. But then if it was, oh, I think I just stuck to those three ways, like the consecutive without anything and then animate and inanimate counting. Then once you got above one, then the plural form came in. So you had a singular form with just one, and then you had the plural form once you got above one. And so the language told you that we must have known more than one because it pluralized. And then when it was just one, then it was singular. And that's how we knew more than one because of the Arapaho word would change to more than one on its ending. So that was like my first introduction to how Arapaho thought about math in that context. Like, and it's all in the language. And I didn't think about that until I started working with the elders on it. And then they would explain when they said, this is how we've always done it. But, you know, we're here at the school, so this is how it has to be done because of the way that this kindergarten stuff looks like or this first grade stuff looks like. Then I got them to think about fractions. And that was kind of hard. Interesting. So you're working with elders who have this understanding of the need to make adjustments, cultural adjustments to fit with the other culture, not necessarily changing a culture, but saying, OK, in our cultures this way, but we have to we have to bridge this for these students, which is very, really very progressive in the way of thinking. Also, I did a project on the Ojibwe language, Chippewa language, Algonquin. And I remember I came across a dictionary that was written by a Jesuit priest in 1850s. And he did he did talk about that. And my interest was the way he wrote the dictionary. He did a lot of explaining in it, and I looked over the number part. And I remember there was five different ways that they use number in Ojibwe, like you're saying. And one of them, again, I have to go review it, but one of them is not used in English. It's a sort of a tense of depending upon time and this and that. In English, it doesn't even get used. So we see that within our languages, native languages, there was sort of an advanced way, at least, of using number. And I remember in the Ojibwe, not only was there animate and inanimate, but if something was made of wood, it was spoken of differently than if it was made of stone. So they had this kind of because the wood was at one time animate as a tree, like a tree that's animate. But when it became a piece of wood, a stick or tool or something, then it was now inanimate. But it came from an animate thing. So they had interesting ways of speaking. And of course, a lot of people don't see that as mathematics. But the culture, as I was always taught, the culture is in the language. And so mathematics, the culture of mathematics is also in the language we use to talk about number. So that was that definitely is a very, very interesting sort of foundation of your journey learning before you became, well, I guess you were a math educator before. Now you're a language educator. What was the continued path that got you back into teaching math? I became, they had math coaching. So we became like math coaches to the teachers. And then we started taking groups to intervene on like if they were lacking on maybe division. Division is always a killer in fourth grade, third grade, fourth grade. So it was like pulling those groups like this is division. We're going to learn how to divide and we're going to learn the multiplication table. And so we did that for the school district did that with three of us. They took us out of the classroom and they put us as math coaches. And then we also went in and helped the teachers teach their classroom. And that was K-8. The three of us, we broke it up like you work with third grade, you work with first grade, you work with eighth grade. And then we would switch in fourth grade, fifth grade, kindergarten. We took our turns rotating through that. And then I went into a master's program and I was doing middle level mathematics. So I needed to be in the middle school level. And so I asked them if I could switch to middle school. And so they put me as a sixth grade math and science teacher. So I did that for one year and then I got switched to STEM. So they had a STEM classroom where they had a curriculum, but it was all online. They had computer stations and they went through like different programming. So like one could be engines. So they had a little two horsepower, you know, the lawnmower engines. Oh, yeah, yeah. One of those in there that the kids were learning the parts to, and they would take it apart and put it together. And so then there was filmmaking was one of the modules. Then there was 3D printing on one of the modules. Engraving, there was an engraver on one of the desks. So it went through like the STEM careers that use, you know, mathematics or science. Then they got to learn about or design a green energy home. So then they got into like architecture and planning how to build a home. And then, of course, there's the stuff with the cars, with the CO2, where they designed their own car. And then we had races and, you know, that old school. Right. That we were familiar had that. And then I started moving them into computer science and starting to teach them how to code. And so we were doing some of that stuff. Then I introduced drones. So learning how to read maps, because the wind maps, you have to know how to, like if you're going to fly a drone, you know, what would be the best day or wherever you're taking it, knowing what the wind is going to be like and then what time you have to be out of there if the wind is going to pick up. Right. A lot of mapping with that. Do they have like a contour map for the various altitudes as well? Because I know wind would be like maybe worse up, higher up and. Yeah. Oh, wow. We had to do the elevation, the elevation maps. Yeah. And get them, we had to, it was kind of funny. We had a, we found a lesson where they took a potato and then they cut it. They sliced it. And they had the kids draw around that potato and then that next piece inside. And then as they got to the top, that was the top of the elevation. Then they kind of understood how just from that potato. And then they looked at that potato and it's like, well, that's how high it is. That top one you drew, they took a 3D and put it down to a 2D. Right. So that you could read an elevation map, you know, because you're going to have these maps. You're not going to have the one on your phone or your computer because there's no signal. Right. Amazing, amazing. And what I, as you're, again, as you're talking more, I'm seeing the flexibility of you getting a elementary certificate for teaching because as I, as you're saying, all the various ways, the different topics, that's what the elementary ed degree allows you to teach all subjects, right, up through eighth grade. And it allowed for such a diverse approach and different things that you were able to do, which is more of an Indigenous way of looking at things, right, a holistic way that we don't break them down into just math, language, and this and that. It's everything is related. That's how my STEM classroom ended up being. And then I started, once the students got comfortable with me, they were probably the other ones who started teaching me about what they wanted to learn. They started saying, why do we always have to learn about these white guys? You know, they were, they're really blunt. So the majority of my students are Northern Arapaho students. And they're like, we're, you know, they would always come from social studies classes. That's probably why. So they're learning about dead white guys in social studies, you know. Then they come over to my classroom and they were like, what about us? Where are we on the land? Where, what did we do? You know, how did we get to Wyoming? Why are we in Wyoming? You know, they started asking questions and that's, you know, what is STEM? You know, you're an investigator and it was a holistic approach to teaching them about like, what are you, yeah, where did we come from? And so when we did the drones, we like, okay, well, we're going to go out onto BLM land. It's off the reservation. We're going to go and investigate tipi rings out there. And instead, we didn't find tipi rings. We found buffalo jumps and buffalo wallows. And then they started asking like, so this is where the buffalo lived in it. And that went into the storytelling of, well, we were migratory people. We followed the buffalo. So this is probably one of the places where we lived. We lived on this, this plateau up here above the Wind River Basin. You know, and so then they started looking and learning that way and engaging in their math and their science because they didn't think of themselves as mathematicians or scientists. They just didn't see themselves as a student, but they were a student of Arapaho. They wanted to know who they were. They wanted to know where they came from. And then once we started taking them out on these field trips, they were like, oh, we lived out here like this. What about the snakes? What about, what about, you know, all those animals that live in the sagebrush? How did we, how did we live out here? You know, how did we, how did we know this? How did we know that? And then, so then when we started taking them through the science and they started to engage more with the curriculum. So it was kind of interesting to see that they became the STEM person that, you know, we've always been. Right. And, and as you're talking about, I remember in the fire circles, we had a, we talked about the concept of time and you just, I got this picture how you're, you're having them study history in reverse because you, okay, what does this, what do we see in this land? Well, it was, you know, Buffalo. So we must have lived here. So it's, it's kind of taking the present, what we see in the present and extrapolating backwards to history. Whereas in Western world, oh, we go look up in the book, we find out what happened then and, you know, have some authority tell us what was happening. And yet what you did is you, you really did place the authority into the students that let's, let's observe and let's see what's there. And well, if this is here, this must be this, this must be, and that must, and you develop the path of what it must have been because of the evidence, which I always loved history. But that the thing about history was it was always, you look in the book and you find somebody wrote something. And, and I always kind of went that way. Well, what, what can, what evidence do I see here? But because I see this, this must have happened in the past. And that, that is an amazing sort of use of time, a different, a different understanding of time that we can understand the past by trying to understand our present. That is something new. Getting them to engage in their, their own education, you know, whether it's out there or, and then connecting it back to the Western classroom. Like this is why, you know, this is why we have to teach you what we have to teach you. And this is why you, you need to participate in, in your assignments, because my school was probably one of the roughest schools on my reservation. And if we, we accepted all the, all the kids, if they got kicked out of all of the schools in Fremont County, they came to my school. And so we had a lot of those kids who were most of the majority of the time, they may have had, they may be on probation. You know, we were dealing with probation officers in middle school. We were dealing with a lot of probably homelessness. Probably a lot of them were experiencing being or taking care of the younger siblings in their households. So they were, they were highly stressed individuals at that age, right? And so getting them to, this was a place for them to learn. They didn't, they just want it to be a kid. You know, it was, they seen it as a space for them to, to be a kid because at home, they couldn't be that kid. They couldn't interact. And so taking them to say, you know, getting them to, to engage in their learning was probably what we, what I learned how to do at that school was to take them out of that. And move them towards something better for themselves. Wow. How to use their, you know, their brains. Yeah. So the teacher's a learner too. You were, you were studying your students while they were studying their topic. And, and you learned your way through it by responding to what they needed rather than. Listening to them. Yeah. Yeah. Listening to them. And then when I am, remember I told you we did a, there was like digital storytelling in that STEM. Right. And so I said, well, let's learn digital storytelling. Let's tell stories. You know, storytelling is one of the rapid ways of learning about things. I said, what do you guys want to know? What story do you want to hear about? And so they kind of perked up and they said, well, we want to know about the little people. You know, we have little people stories here on our reservation. I don't know if you guys have little people where you're at, but. We do. Yes. My grandma talks about it sometimes. So, yes. Yeah. So the Shoshone people on our reservation, they don't talk about them. It's kind of a taboo for them. But Arapahos, we always talk about them and honor them. I said, okay. I said, well, we're going to build a story with Arapaho symbols. And we're going to tell this little people story using Arapaho symbols. We're going to recreate this whole story using our symbols. And we're going to draw it on this big art paper. And you guys are going to learn how to photograph them and then put it together as a story. And that's what we were working on when COVID happened. Wow. And so I only have, I only was able to get, I think we were finished drawing the story, but they were never, we never got to the photography part of it to put it together. And then they were working with recording an elder telling that story in Arapaho. So learning like the recording equipment, how to edit, because we had iPads. So I think I was using like GarageBand for them to get them to do that. And teaching them how to use the ruler. Here they are, eighth grade girls, they did not, they could not read a ruler to save their life because we were hand drawing on this paper. And then we were switching it over to Google Draw and seeing if they could read the measuring tools within that system too. It was challenging. You know, how do you teach a ruler? You know, I had, I didn't have a whiteboard in my room. So I borrowed the library's rolling whiteboard. Yeah. And I put that up there and I was like, this is how you read a ruler. And that thing stayed up on that whiteboard. As long as the librarian didn't need that whiteboard, the way they had to read the ruler, you know, I wrote it all out on that whiteboard and that was their reference. They needed that page so that when they were measuring out and then making an equilateral triangle, because the equilateral triangle symbolized the heart. And so their little people's story was talking about how these little people would go out and cause war, but they would leave their hearts hanging in the tipi so that nobody could kill them. Because you had to kill, you had to hit their heart in order for them to die. And so that's the story they were telling about how these little people were out causing war, going out and battling, but they would come back to this tipi and their hearts would be hanging on the tipi poles. Interesting. So the symbol for the heart in Arapaho symbolism is an equilateral triangle. Wow. So we had to learn how to, you know, build an equilateral triangle with the ruler. Which is not easy. No, it's not. How do you get them to do that? Right. And patience, you know, and learn that patience. And erase when they had to erase. That's why we did it on paper first. Yeah. Because it's easy in Google Draw, you know, there's a symbol there. You just put it in there. Right. But what's so amazing is this, what I've always looked for, is having the motivation was within the context of the assignment. And within that assignment, you taught maybe three or four different classes. You taught a technology class on how to do this. And a ruler class, you know. And in Western ways, okay, we teach you how to use the ruler. But we don't necessarily tell you why. We just teach you everything about the ruler. And then we teach you everything about the software program. Not necessarily why. And then at some later point, we're supposed to put it all together. But how do you keep the students motivated while they're learning this separate skill? And you really came up with it. Is that, well, you don't do it separately. You put it as part of this project. And then each step in the project, we have to learn these different skills to make the project work. You certainly have like a whole semester's curriculum built right into that. And it came from your students. We want to learn. We want to hear about the little people. Who are they? What do they do? Why are, you know. And so luckily, you know, one of my elders had a big pile of books next to me. Arapaho stories, songs, and prayers. So the school had this book. And it was written by one of our elders with the anthropologists or the linguist, Andy Cal. And so they picked one of the little people's stories out of this. And so the way that they wrote it, it has the Arapaho translation with the English translation in it. And so they were able to put the Arapaho words. But then they were working with an elder on how to say those words. So then it went into their Arapaho language and culture room. And I worked with that teacher to say, this is what we're doing. This is what they want to know how to say. They want to tell the story in Arapaho. Can you help them? I engaged another classroom into this project. Wow. Because in that classroom, they were like, we don't like to go to that class. They were always, we've already learned what they taught us. They keep teaching us the same thing every year after year. It's always the same. And so then I asked them if they wanted to do that. And that teacher was happy to help. But then COVID happened. And we got taken out for those parts. So that way I can scan them in and try to put it together so you could see. Oh, that is amazing. So we mentioned COVID, and it's affected different communities in different ways. And obviously, it would shut down much of what you're doing because you need to be in contact with each other. How did your school fare over the two or three years that we were having the COVID? It went to online, where the teachers were in person at the schools, but the students were at home. And they had Zoom sessions. And then when it went back to in-person, a lot of the students did not want to touch their technology. Because the middle school was in Chromebook. They already had Chromebooks already. They already had iPads if they needed them. But they just didn't want to touch the technology. And I kind of seen that when I was teaching sixth grade, because they introduced Chromebook and they introduced iPads when I was teaching sixth grade. And some of my sixth graders were like, can't you just give me a book? Do we have math books? Can I just have the math books? Because they bought the math curriculum that had an online version. Right. And they could access it with their Chromebook. And pretty soon by second semester, they were asking like, can I just have a book? Can we just use the book? And so then after COVID happened, a lot of the students, they did not want to touch their technology. Interesting. As you move forward, I know your current research you're doing is on the mathematics behind teepees. And I remember in the Fire Circle, you shared a video with us, which actually had this experiential learning. And in watching that video, I started to understand the geometry. And I'd seen a teepee go up before, but I hadn't really looked at it in the process of forming that teepee. The way you spoke about it and the way you recorded it, I could definitely see the geometric principles and why things were done the way they were. Could you maybe connect with what you're doing with your current research and this journey that you've been on with the language, the stem, the bringing all this together from the culture and the elders? When I found my participants, I asked them, when I first started working with the teepee when I was in middle school, it was with the 3D printers. Okay, so we had these 3D printers. I don't know if you've ever worked with 3D printers, but they take about two to three hours to print something. That's what I've heard. Two inches tall and two inches wide, it takes a long time for them to print. Those were the first printers. So we had to figure out what do we do with the kids in the meantime, because we got the 3D printers during summer school. And so we were doing STEM summer school. And the STEM teacher at that time, he was like, I didn't plan for anything because I thought we were going to be at these printers all day and that they were going to learn and they printed that. But we taught them how to print. The thing says it's going to take about six hours. My goodness. He said, so we need to find something else for them to do. And so we figured out the culture summer school, they were going to go get teepee poles. The school bought teepees. So the culture said, we're going to teach them how to set up teepees, but we're going to also teach them how to go look for teepee poles. And we're going to go out. So we joined them. And so we talked about how to select the pole. What's the diameter of the teepee? Is it 18 foot or 16 footer? So that took us down that road of, again, building a teepee backwards. So what my kids did was they said, look at all these cute little teepee poles. Do they make teepees that size? And I said, we could make a teepee that size. Go get your poles. So they got about eight to 10 poles. And so then we had to figure out the, we talked about ratios on where to tie the poles. Right. What's the best place for strength, where that tie has to be so that your teepee doesn't get blown over or anything like that. So they did an experiment like, okay, well, we'll tie them halfway. We'll tie them at three quarters. We'll tie them at a third way off. You know, so they were measuring their poles and saying, okay, well, if we tie them here, is that the strength? So they were doing strength testing. So that's your engineering again. Right. How did the Plains people know where to tie their poles? We went through and we looked at historic photographs of the teepees. And so they got to see where the old timers were tying their poles. And then they started recognizing, like, if they were tied right at the top, they were like, that teepee was probably fell down because it's tied right at the top and there's no strength. And so they were starting to recognize where the teepees were tied. And then you can see where, I guess, as we got more access to longer teepee poles, then we had to tie them. I think the ratio was that three quarters is where they found their best strength. Okay. So that three fourths of that pole, you know, they had to tie it. So that was how we got them to learn about the teepee. We introduced the ratio. Then we had to do surface area. How much canvas do we need to cover your pole, you know, your cone now? Because they established where they had to tie it, what the diameter was, what the height was. And then I showed them pictures. My husband, his classroom, he was a rappel language culture teacher at St. Stephen's. And they built a buffalo hide teepee. And so I had photographs of that teepee. Rolled it out on his gym floor and went up and took pictures of it. They built it off of a template of a teepee that was in the Smithsonian. So the Smithsonian actually have an Arapaho hide teepee. And so his school went back and they took kids, they unrolled it and they, you know, they had a tarp and they traced out that template on that. Wow. And then they brought it back and then they got buffalo hides and did all the work and cleaned them, skinned them, turned them into buckskin. And then they sewed them all together with the sinew and they built that teepee. And when I looked at it, it's half a circle. So that teepee laying out on his gym floor was half a circle. So I showed the kids this. I said, what do you know about diameters and radiuses and half circles and pies? And, you know, they didn't, they didn't. It was like speaking a foreign language to them. Right. They didn't know any of that. And so we introduced them to pie. How does pie work in a circle? Circumference. What the heck is a circumference? You know, what the heck is the radius? What is, what is the diameter? And then knowing that the teepee poles, when they come out, that pole that that's sticking out like that, that's tied in there, that that's the hypotenuse. And that's their, that becomes the radius of that circle. And so they, they learned that they had to measure from where it was tied to the bottom. And then that was their, their radius. And then they put it together. Then they had their diameter for their half circle. And then I told them to add maybe a couple of inches because of the circle that goes around the teepee poles. I said, we're going to cut out another little circle. So then it, it, it's around your, where you tied it. And we need to, you know, like, here's your radius here. Here's your radius here. But then in the middle, it's going to have that center circle. Right. And then my husband came over and we did that. We were out on the parking lot and we had all of that. I think it was like painting. Remember that paint canvas, that drop cloth, those canvas drop cloth. Oh yeah. So we sewed those together and we laid them out. And then my husband came in and he showed them, he said, this is how, this is how we draw circles. We put a stake in the ground. We add some rope to it. And that's our radius. And then we're going to draw, draw that circle. He said, this is how we've always, we have a red wool stake, but because we're on concrete, we're going to use this, this nail and they, they put it into the pavement and then they put their string on it. And then they got to practice their circle and they drew it out and we had them sew it all together. So they made about, I think the tipi stood about eight feet tall and the diameter was probably like about 10, 10 feet. So it wasn't too tall and it wasn't too wide, but they, they made it and they hand sewed it and put it together. But we had to do that from them collecting the tipi pole and then doing all of the mathematics backwards to figure out the surface area that they were going to need to cover it. Amazing. I mean, just another way of teaching how to problem solve. Yeah. And you're in the concept, this is very abstract, taking a three-dimensional space, making it a two-dimensional, just like you said, with the contour maps of the potato, we're thinking of that physical representation. And here they call this, I think Nets in the British curriculum, where they take two-dimensional things, fold them up into little boxes and stuff. And it's very abstract, but here is something that's very concrete that this is what, you know, you've got a two-dimensional cloth that you need to fit around a three-dimensional shape and you have to connect hypotenuses with radiuses and, and see how you go from a two-dimension to a three-dimensional shape, how things play out. And mathematically, that's a very, those are very important concepts. And yet they're taught in very abstract ways that students typically don't really understand with a great deal of depth. And yet here you've got a physical experiential way of them understanding it, not necessarily because they want to understand about pi or this or, or hypotenuses or radiuses, but because they want to tie back with their culture and see, okay, this is how they built the traveling tents and the teepees. And we want to be able to do that. Okay, so we have to learn these concepts. And I think that's the, from, from what I'm hearing from your journey and your, your experiences, that's, that seems to be the theme for me. And it's something I've always thought of that this is the right way to go about things is have these experiences and then develop your curriculum around the theme. But yet it's coming from a purely Western academic side for me has always been a hard thing for me to see exactly how to do it. And I guess you get some advantages by having students being of the same culture and having that same interest. And maybe that advantage of these are the students who maybe who have had more of the problems and maybe because they didn't feel like they were being listened to. And as you listen to them, all this, it seems like that's the key is you listen to the students and they know the solution. Maybe too often teachers are looking for solutions to students' problems, but they never listen to the students who actually know the right solutions to take. And how do you motivate a student? Well, listen to them. It's a very, that's, I think, a very important lesson for, for all educators. Yeah, yeah, they were probably like the biggest, you know, you have a professional development question and I was like, you know, I've been, I sat through a lot of math training, especially with, you know, intervention. How do you get them on grade level? But none of those professional developments that listen to the students, you know, they don't sit there and say, you know, what is it that your student wants to engage in? And then how do you develop? It's almost like building a ILP for them, the individual learning plan for them. And so that they become, that was like in all of Indigenous education, the students are often told what they have to do, not what they want to do. Right. And it's that assimilation that's always been there. And then you have the community who, because of the boarding school that, you know, they have that view of they're trying to make you white. You know, you have those pockets of families who have that belief. And then you have the other families who are like, if you don't get educated, how are you going to still be a warrior? Because this is where the fight is. This is where we have to fight for our resources because you have to learn their education because they're going to come with you with paper. How are you going to know how to read that paper? You have to know what their type of war, I guess, against you or the tribes, you know, because we're still, we're one of the tribes that still have a big reservation and, you know, we're still fighting Wyoming over the water. That's right. That's right. Yeah, I remember I took a class on American Indian education, the history of American Indian from Dr. Loma Wima here, who had written a book on her father's experience at boarding school. And I remember one of the readings talked about the difference between the way puritanical society looked at children, which is children should be quiet. They were almost looked at as a problem just to get them through the childhood. And when they become adults, then that's when they're really humans, you know. But it treated children as, you know, they don't know what's good for them. They, you know, they should just keep quiet. Whereas Indigenous cultures, within it, it's listen to the child and reason with the child. And I think back to my own upbringing, you know, my mother was the one who was a third mountain chippewa. It was from, even though my grandparents had gone through boarding school and maybe, you know, we had lost some of our culture, it was still, she was the one that always listened to me. And she would reason with me. And whereas my father was Saxon, it was, no, I'm the boss, you keep quiet and I'll tell you what's right. And so I had that two different ways of, and I always found my mother, I may not have always agreed with her, but at least she reasoned with me and she gave me that sort of right to disagree if I wanted to. But usually in the end, I realized she was right. She had more experience, but I came to appreciate her more than my father who just told me, oh, you're wrong and listen to me and I know what's right. And so that approach of listening and allowing them to experiment, maybe make some mistakes along the way. It goes back to that story about get your eyeballs off of me. Yeah, exactly. Don't look at me. Look inside yourself. Yeah, that's amazing. Elder, because she was the first realization of how our people had to change, you know, listening. Listening is really big in our indigenous communities, but yet it's in the school systems. Listening, it has a different meaning and we have to learn that meaning when we get put in there. And seeing that play out with an elder who isn't used to that kind of teaching or, you know, and they teach you that in teacher school, you know, you have to have the students look at you. You know, because I went through teacher school, that was one of the things that's on your evaluation to be a teacher, like all eyes on me. You know, you have those little prompts that they teach these teachers to say and to start training those kids how to engage with you as the, I guess, authoritarian. That's what the teacher is, right? Right. So that, you know, some of your questions were like how my experiences with non-Western and Western approaches in education, you know, that's one of the biggest things. And you can see all through the professional development I sit through and it kind of came up in Fire Circle where how do I get the students engaged or how do I get them to be there? You know, when I'm teaching, how do I get them to be there? But are they really looking at like a lot of my students who were not either looking at me or didn't say anything to me or didn't answer any of my questions? They were listening to me. You know, they may have had their head down. They may have been looking at the thing or, you know, how they kind of just, you have those students in your classroom that they don't look at you. They look down. They look at their shoe. They look at the floor. They look at the ceiling, you know, those ones. But yet they're listening. Yes. And they understood everything I taught them. And then when I needed them to look, it was always look at the whiteboard. You know, I never directly said, look at me. I said, look at the whiteboard. This is how these are the steps on how to solve this problem. Here's step one. Here's step two. I would always drive the janitors crazy because every classroom I moved into, I said, I need I need a whiteboard on that wall. And do you have another whiteboard for that wall? Because I left up my those processes so that they could have those steps. Right. They hated me because they're like, do you want another whiteboard? As my students were learning, they wanted to see it as a visual learner. And they need those processes. And then I noticed that middle school level, if they didn't know their multiplication tables, we would do an activity where we would build our multiplication table. I taught him how to do that. You know, if you go into a test and you don't know your multiplications or if you're used to using a multiplication table, here's how you build your own. Then you get a scratch paper. You can build your own multiplication table and you'll get through those problems quicker if you have that little tool. And so we would do that. And then after a while, we would get that big sticky note paper and put it on them, you know, put it on the wall. So then they referenced it. But then I would get kids, because we accepted every kid on the reservation, that if they were caught looking at that paper, I would say caught because that's what it made me feel like. I'd like, you know, they would think they would have like a guilty. One of their teachers put guilt on them to look at that anchor poster, you know, and I would tell them, you know, that's your tool. You have to use it until you know it. That's what you have to use. And it's not cheating. No. And so somewhere along their educational path, they were trained that if they looked at the things around them, that it was cheating and they should know what they should know already because they're in sixth grade. They're in seventh grade. They're in eighth grade. They're in ninth grade. And I couldn't figure out, like, why do educators do that to children? And that's another thing that is different than, you know, an Indigenous teaching, is that we see them as tools. I wouldn't put it up there if I didn't want you to look at it, you know, because it's there. But when I was a math coach, some of the classrooms I would go into, the teacher would have the multiplication table up there. She would have the fraction chart. They would have this. But then she prohibited the children to not look at them. And I couldn't figure that out. And it was like, how do I retrain this teacher that these are tools? And Indigenous learners, Indigenous teachers were always using tools to help us build our understanding of that. And that was one of the things that I came across in my career. I don't know if people experienced that. Exactly. In fact, that's one of the things I use at the college level, is with notes, because students say, oh, I can't use my notes on the test. But I said, well, it's a tool. Because that's what I did, is I would have all those notes and this is how you do this and that. I would lay them out as I did my homework. And I would find that over time I didn't need them anymore. But the tools were helpful until the time that I actually learned it. But it was on my own timetable, not necessarily some teacher's. Or it wasn't that I could stare at those tools long enough and just memorize everything and then not need them. But they just sort of over time. And so that's one of the things I tell, yeah, you need your tools there. It's OK to look at those as part of the learning process. And when you actually do learn it, you probably won't need that tool again, or at least for a while until, you know, maybe you need it when you look at it next semester or something. That idea of kind of in your own time, you'll find when you need the tools and when you're able to put them away. But it shouldn't be some authoritarian figure who tells you, no, don't look at those. And the students would let me know, like, OK, you can take that down now, but we need this up now. I mean, you know, it was a relationship that we find in our Indigenous communities. You know, those kinship systems where I think I was able to develop that with them because they would come up and say, hey, my mom said we're related. Or, hey, my grandpa said that we're related. Or, you know, so they were building and looking for that relationship with me, too. And then pretty soon it was like, hey, you can take that poster down now, we don't need it. And it was like, that's the difference, too, within our communities, you know, walking in as a community member into those classrooms. They see us as that auntie, that uncle, that grandma, that grandpa, because, you know, we have those relationships like that. The thing that teacher programming doesn't, they see that teacher as an isolated person that you don't build a relationship with because they're that authoritarian person. Right. You don't, they're cold, I guess. They're taught to be that cold, don't approach me, I'm the boss type of thing that you were talking about in Indigenous communities. It's not like that. It's about mentoring and because they see you as their mentor. Today they're adults now and they still like, hey, I remember when you taught me that and that helped me. Where I taught some of them, like one of my students came up to me and he was like, I got accepted into the South Dakota School of Mines, but I don't think I'm going to go. And I'm like, why not? And he said, well, I don't know if I can. Even though he got a full scholarship, he's still around here fooling around. I don't know what's going on. But, you know, they're so talented in mathematics that they don't understand that they could come back and still work here, but they need to move on for a little time and move off of the reservation for a little time to become and go learn about that world a little bit more and then come back and then apply it here again. They don't understand that. Interesting. I want to thank you for the wealth of information you've given and new perspectives from hearing your story, your progress through. And I just kind of want to give you anything that you have advice for those teaching in Indigenous areas or Indigenous educators who are feeling isolated because we don't see anyone else like us or teaching like us. Any advice you have or words of wisdom you'd like to share with the folks who are listening to this podcast? I think for like Indigenous educators out there, we often don't use our voice in those settings and not to be afraid to use their voice, you know, because that's what that's what our students need to see us. They need to see us as the leaders in those classrooms, in those spaces, in those within and among our colleagues in those schools that we're working in. We know them best and then we can help the other teachers in our building how to build those relations, those stronger relationships with our students and not just, you know, continue to write them up and send them to the office and or set them out in the halls or put them in the far, far corners of our classrooms just to get them away because we always have those students. But for the Indigenous educators is to always find your leadership voice, find that voice to help because your students are watching you. And that's what I would that's what I would say. Thank you so much. The power of listening, listening to the voice of our students and then in turn, being able to speak in a way that opens up the doors, opens up the opportunities for our students. I hope you've enjoyed this episode, these insights brought to us by Eva Moss. Thank you so much for your time and your consideration.