Perched along the Western border near Niagara Falls, Tuscarora Nation School looks much like every other mid-century rural school in New York state. Red brick. Rolling lawns. Flagpole out front. But the flag it flies is for a different nation. And the name out front isn’t written in English.
Tuscarora Nation School, Skarù·ręʔ Yerihętyáʔthaʔ, is one of three New York state primary schools within the Haudenosaunee or Iroquois Confederacy, which is composed of six Indigenous nations — the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca and Tuscarora.
“We give our students a grounding in who they are as Tuscarora,” said Tuscarora culture teacher Alexandra Printup, Niagara Wheatfield Teachers Association, of the pre-K through sixth grade school.
To counteract generations of forced assimilation into white American culture, the grounding is important. School lessons include Tuscarora language instruction for kindergarten and second graders, and Tuscarora language and culture instruction for older students alongside standard elementary skills.
Nation schools contract with local districts and New York state to educate Indigenous children who later attend district middle and high schools. New York’s other Indigenous schools are the Saint Regis Mohawk School affiliated with the Salmon River Central School District near the Canadian border, and the Onondaga Nation School contracted with the LaFayette Central School District near Syracuse.
Tuscarora is affiliated with the Niagara Wheatfield Central School District.
At Tuscarora Nation School, weeks start and end with a Tuscarora Thanksgiving Address, Kanehęrathé·čreh, paying tribute to various aspects of the natural world, from the ground to the sky.
“It’s a really beautiful way to begin and end our week and how we begin and end every important gathering or meeting in the confederacy,” said Printup, who attended the school and hopes her lessons will inspire other Indigenous students to return to the community and give back. “It helps bring our minds as one, and express gratitude for the natural world.”
Field trips further connect students with Tuscarora culture and history, from canoeing to learning about plants, foraging and survival skills to walking to “Seven Clan,” a community space used to commune with nature.
“It’s always about teaching students to have respect for and be thankful for nature,” said Printup. “In our culture we call the earth our mother; the sun is your elder brother and the moon, our grandmother.”
Overcoming a brutal legacy
Educating their own is important to the Haudenosaunee. For hundreds of years, the American government sought to stamp out Indigenous culture through a variety of brutal policies. Most destructive of all was a boarding schooling system in place from 1819 through the 1970s, that forcibly took Native American, Alaskan and Hawaiian children from their homes and placed them in far-flung residential schools with an eye to assimilate them into white American culture. The official policy was “kill the Indian, save the man.”
“They cut their hair, took their traditional clothes and forced them to learn English,” said Caitlin Phillips, Niagara Wheatfield TA, a former student and Tuscarora language teacher at the school. Stripping the children of their cultural identity and family connections had disastrous results, and students also often experienced emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
The memories are still fresh. Many of the building’s students, educators and staff have grandparents or other relatives who attended boarding schools.
“It’s important that we honor those children who went through that treatment and survived,” continued Phillips noting that Orange Shirt Day, Sept. 30, is a day of remembrance for the community, marked with songs, dances and other cultural traditions.
Reclaiming a lost language
In addition to teaching a full slate of classes, Phillips weaves Tuscarora into lessons throughout the day with pre-K through second graders. She uses Tuscarora food words during kitchen play, identifies colors during Lego time and provides Tuscarora vocabulary during counting and calendar lessons.
“When the kindergarten teacher reads books aloud, she’ll stop at each page to see what words I want to add in so we can teach vocabulary with them,” said Phillips, explaining that since young children’s brains are wired for language acquisition, introducing new vocabulary is important. “I just try to use words with them all the time and since they’re so young they’re willing to try and use the language.”
To boost her personal fluency, she attends the Nęyękwawętaʔθkwashek Tuscarora Language Program, a grant-funded, nonprofit immersion group of language advocates seeking to revive the language within the Tuscarora Nation.
“We have some advanced mid- to high-level speakers, but probably no one [in the nation] would say they are fluent yet … we lost a lot of our fluent speakers about one generation ago,” said Phillips who rates her own fluency as intermediate mid to high according to ACTFL proficiency guidelines, which rate a speaker’s listening, speaking, reading and writing abilities.
Students who continue Tuscarora language study into grades 7–12 are eligible to earn a New York State Seal of Biliteracy, said Darla Schultz-Bubar, Niagara Wheatfield TA president. As a non-Indigenous educator, Schultz-Bubar attended cultural awareness training when she began teaching at the school to foster sensitivity and learn about the Tuscarora Nation. The experience was eye-opening.
“One of the first things we were told is there’s a reason Indigenous children fear white people,” she said. “It’s not because you look different, it’s because of what their families experienced through boarding schools.”
It’s a history that is largely untaught in mainstream American schools but is vital for Tuscarora Nation School educators to know, said Printup.
“The intentional removal of our language and culture in the boarding schools is part of our history,” she said. That Tuscarora children can now learn about their history, culture and language as part of their school day is significant, Printup added.
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