Weaving A Cultural Tapestry
Kristin Monts at the site where the mythological "Changing Woman" is said to live.
By Jennifer Sicking
There’s a certain simplicity and timelessness to the environment in the Dinè, Arizona’s rugged land of the Navajo. Cracks scar the auburn ground that crumbles to powder at the slightest touch. The winds whip the powdery dust through the air, coloring all it lands on with a reddish tinge. The process goes on seemingly without end.
With its wind- and water-carved landscape of towering mesas and plunging canyons, the Dinè is about as far as one can imagine from the green and flat prairies of Illinois. But that’s just fine with Rockford, Ill., native and Indiana State alumna Kristin Monts. She was more than happy to call the Dinè home for the semester she spent as a student teacher at Many Farms High School. In fact, she couldn’t have asked for a better experience.
“I knew I could never work at a conventional or traditional school. So this teaching opportunity was exactly what I wanted. It got me out of the Midwest,” says Monts. “It was a great student teaching experience.”
The English education and English major was helped in realizing her dream by taking part in a new cooperative program between Indiana State and Indiana University’s Cultural Immersions Project that gives ISU students an opportunity for international student teaching.
“Several years ago in a conversation with a metropolitan school district superintendent in the Indianapolis area, it was mentioned that there were over 30 foreign languages spoken in that one district alone,” Brad Balch, College of Education dean, says. “I realized that our schools in Indiana are truly globalizing. When you look at the current standards for teachers, inter-cultural opportunities are extremely important. We know of no better way for them to accomplish those standards than to see life – see the teaching and learning life – through the eyes of others internationally.”
MONTS HEADS WEST
So for four months this past spring, Monts had an up close and personal perspective on Navajo life through living and working at the Many Farms campus. “I’m a cultural junkie so I love to immerse myself in cultures,” she said. “I think that’s the best way to learn about the world and learn about the people we live with.”
At Many Farms she benefited tremendously from the experiences of a trailblazer in the Cultural Immersions Project. Dave Lepkojus was part of the second group that went to Arizona from IU in 1974. He liked it so much he never left. Today, he is the head teacher at Many Farms.
“I was a geology major at Indiana and this is a geologist’s paradise out here,” he says. “I just felt comfortable here. I got out into the community and participated in ceremonies and participated in family activities and I got to really know a lot of people. That made me feel comfortable, and I was accepted.”
Monts’ experiences have followed a similar pattern.
“I found that the Navajo community is one of the most welcoming and warm communities I’ve ever been in,” she says. “When I get home at night I feel like I personally have learned more than what I’ve taught my students, and you can’t really ask for anything better than that.”
LEARNING SOME LESSONS
Kristin Monts leads a class at Many Farms
Many Farms senior Nathaniel Begay has been instrumental in Monts’ learning process, sharing his knowledge of the Navajo way of life and language with her and other student teachers.
“I want to give them a knowledge of our culture, how we survived, how we adapted to our native soil,” he says. “How we overcame. Their being here is a new thing, and I want to show them what we do and how we are as a culture and a tribe.”
Monts learned there is a harshness in many students’ lives that reflects that of the Navajo land itself.
“Working in the Midwest, I thought I had met students who had hard home lives. But I couldn’t even begin to compare the home lives of my students in Indiana with those of the students who live on the Navajo Nation. The Navajo have so much more to contend with,” Monts says. “They have to try to keep their traditions alive while trying to survive in the dominant Anglo or Western culture. It’s absolutely amazing, but poverty levels are high and many students live in the residence halls because their home lives are so challenging.”
“It’s really important for student teachers to understand that when they come here they’re going to be dealing with a 100 percent at-risk population,” Lepkojus says. “Motivating students is extremely important. You’ve got to be able to excite them into learning and staying in school.”
But if there is a ruggedness to the lives and land of the Navajo, the beauty of hope also exists alongside it much like a bloom on a cactus.
Begay is one Navajo student who has taken the message about the value of education to heart. He plans to continue his education after high school and study criminal justice in college before going into law enforcement.
“I have brothers and sisters who didn’t make it through high school; they dropped out. They have an alcohol problem,” he says. “For me, I’m trying to live up to something. I want to make things different for me.”
He sees that goal as a tribute to the grandmother who raised him and gave him the “blessing” of teaching him values and traditions.
“She’s passed on for quite a while now. She’s still in me and that’s why I want to succeed,” he says. “I’ll be the first one in my family to graduate from high school. Criminal justice is the right thing to do. I’ll be changing things here, not only in the people but in the environment as well.”
Monts says that although on the surface Navajo students may appear like many others across the United States, there are deep differences.
“They’ll have Metallica T-shirts on; they’ll have dyed purple hair; and they’ll walk around with their skateboards, but when you go beyond that, they are extremely traditional when it comes to their home lives,” she says. “Their elders or their grandparents have tried to keep their traditional ceremonies as close as possible to what has been passed down, and students still go home every day and herd sheep, milk the cows and cut wood for their families.”
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GAINING A NEW PERSPECTIVE
For a month of her student teaching, Monts worked with Mick Fedullo, who teaches creative writing on reservations throughout the United States and Canada. She credits him with showing her a whole new perspective on education. “He breaks every single barrier that I’ve ever known when it comes to teaching,” Monts says. “He will do whatever he possibly can to reach a student and to motivate them and it’s completely inspirational.”
From his perspective, Fedullo believes it’s a good idea for education majors to come to the reservation “before there’s any pre-conceived idea about what life is like on a reservation or what the students are like.
“I think that when you’re a young student teacher like Kristin Monts, you’re fortunate to be able to learn a whole lot, but she’s teaching a whole lot,” he continues. “It becomes a symbiotic relationship, and it’s nicer nowadays that young people don’t have the same kinds of agendas that a lot of educators did in the old days; you know, coming onto a reservation to save the Indians and put religion in their hearts. That’s not what teachers are here for. Teachers are here to educate and a lot of these new student teachers know that. They’re in it with a spirit of wanting to experience a different culture, have a bicultural experience and learn as much as they are teaching.”
Brian Bell, a native Hoosier who came to the Navajo Nation through IU’s program and who served as Monts’ host teacher, has spent the past 18 years in Many Farms teaching freshman English. He watched Monts undergo a ritual of acceptance.
“They don’t have a problem just sitting there staring at you and trying to figure you out,” Bell says of the Navajo students. “In one class in particular, they were really standoffish (toward Monts). They wouldn’t say anything, they wouldn’t respond, most wouldn’t even look in her direction. At the beginning of class it was just stone cold silent and she was just kind of working with it. Even through the assignment, she was addressing and talking to the kids individually, and I think they started, even in that one hour, to being to know each other as individuals. By the end of the hour the kids were answering questions; they were participating.”
A WELL-ROUNDED EXPERIENCE
There was a whole lot more to Monts’ experiences at Many Farms than the time she spent in the classroom. By sharing an apartment in the girls’ residence hall with another student teacher, she had the opportunity to get to know the students through daily interaction. She helped serve meals in the cafeteria to the students and tutored them after school and in the evening. She participated in evening activities such as the bonfire and class games during homecoming week, attended the school’s basketball games or played “rez ball” – the reservation version of basketball – with the boys.
“I was teaching her some basketball with some of my friends and she’s good at shooting, but not at threes,” Ramon Toadlena, a freshman in one of Monts’ classes, says with a laugh. “I’m not sure if she ever ate a Navajo burger or something like that so I’m trying to get her into that.”
“You could say she’s a friend, a tutor,” says Many Farms sophomore Amanda Joe, whom Monts has helped apply to an Upward Bound program. “She’s like the older sister I never had. I can talk to her about anything.”
When the students go home for the weekend, Monts chooses to explore the area with Navajo friends instead of driving the almost two hours to the closest town with a Wal-Mart. On a recent weekend she visited Canyon de Chelly and Spider Rock before driving into the nearby mountains.
“It’s highly, highly significant, right at this very spot,” she says standing at the overlook where a large red rock column, with a crack running from the top to almost its base, stands away from the canyon’s walls. The area is where Navajo stories tell that “Changing Woman,” a mythological female, lives.
With mountains in the distance, mesas and arroyos nearby and the canyon cutting through the red earth providing dramatic interludes in the high desert land, Monts can’t help but reflect on her experiences.
“You have to be here and you have to experience it. It has been by far one of the most exhilarating and meaningful events I’ve had,” Monts said. “I think education majors should take an opportunity like this because you’re exposing yourself to diversity, which is one of the major things that we as educators need to get used to. To expose yourself to a culture where you are the minority and then to have the experience of doing your work knowing that you are the minority is more than any school in the Midwest or any conventional school can offer.”
(Jennifer Sicking is assistant director of media relations at ISU. To view a photo gallery about Monts’ experiences in Arizona, please visit the online photo gallery. To learn more about the College of Education, visit http://www.indstate.edu/coe/. Since this article was written, Monts ‘09 landed a job as a seventh-grade language arts teacher at Pinon Middle School in Pinon, Ariz.)