Phillips Indian Educators

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Phillips Indian Educators

Indigenous Educational Pedagogy Native students do poorly on standardized tests. However, their impact and success is limited by economics and demographics.

The Brief History of PIE
For many years, Native leaders have recognized that Native students are struggling within a public education system run by and for the dominant European American population. The suppression of Native culture and values and frequent misrepresentation of Native history contributes to the alienation and failure of Native students in mainstream educational systems. Native mobi

lity rates are the highest of any ethnic group and graduation rates are the lowest. In 2005, Minneapolis Native American educators and administrators in the Phillips neighborhood – who had been working in isolation at their various schools -- began connecting to discuss the challenges and opportunities that we all face -- whether at alternative, charter or public schools. Native educators, parents and community members have long recognized the need for change in order to secure success for Native children, but past reform efforts and strategies do not seem appropriate for the challenges we face today with a school system that is in a panic because of declining enrollment and the pressures resulting from the No Child Left Behind mandates

Historically, urban Native populations have embraced “survival schools” as a strategy to counter the dominant culture’s influence on our children. Survival schools emerged over three decades ago as part of a broad Native activist agenda that identified schools as a major institution of oppression. Ten years ago, charter schools emerged as another tool for Native people wanting to make the teaching and learning process further autonomous from school district oversight. Creating our own schools and taking control over education offered us a rare chance to develop education systems that honor Native history, culture, and teaching practices and provide a shelter from the systemic de-culturalization of our children. These survival schools, alternative and charter, have offered a significant way to reform education for Native youth, demonstrating the strength of culture as the basis for education. Most small schools cannot offer the variety of extracurricular programs and team sports that many Native youth want. Alternative and charter schools face budget challenges that are forcing them to decrease some of their unique offerings, such as experiential education, field trips, culture and language classes, supportive services and personal attention that is possible with low teacher/student ratios. Many Native youth remain in mainstream educational systems while others choose alternatives or charters and the transfer rate between schools is very high. A few Native educators who understood the need for a new kind of reform and believe we could offer guidance about how Native youth learn began reaching out to other Native teachers and administrators. This core group formed Phillips Indian Educators (PIE). “Everyone has a piece of the PIE,” says one of our members, noting that everyone has something to contribute and everyone has something to gain from participation. Native survival school educators have expertise in cultural programming and flexible methods that work with Native youth; Native teachers and administrators within the mainstream school system have the resources to invest in Native learners and relationships with decision-makers throughout the system. How PIE Works
PIE is an ad-hoc group of Native educators who are organized under the guidance of Joe Rice, Executive Director of Na-way-ee Center School and Elaine Salinas, President of Migizi Communications. Center School is the fiscal agent for PIE. Membership consists of a small but growing group of Native educators and administrators, and allies, who work in the Phillips neighborhood, including:

Joseph Rice Nawayee Center School
Louise Matson Division of Indian Work
Jennifer Simon Director of Indian Education (MPS)
Kelly Drummer Migizi Communications
Graham Hartley Educational Consultant
Laura Sullivan Anishinabe Academy
Joe Hobot Takoda Academy
Kim Ellison MPS Board of Education
Beth Seidel DIW
Mary Legarde Minneapolis Indian Center
Danielle Grant Achieve Mpls
Barb Drew Metropolitan Urban Indian Directors
Geeta Vora

08/13/2026

Long before written constitutions and formal parliaments, nations across the plains were governing themselves through structured councils built on debate, consensus, and deep respect for differing perspectives.

The council fire was not just a meeting place. It was where leadership was tested, where young men learned the weight of decision making, and where entire strategies for survival and diplomacy were shaped through hours of careful discussion. Every voice carried weight, and decisions were rarely made in haste.

These gatherings held together complex systems of governance that outsiders often dismissed or misunderstood entirely, yet they guided some of the most sophisticated political structures in North American history. What do you imagine those conversations sounded like on a night like this

08/09/2026

Do you know the legend of the Three Sisters Garden?

The Three Sisters Garden is a symbiotic relationship between bean, corn, and squash and how they only thrive when planted together.

Sister Corn is planted in the middle to provide a structure for Sister Bean to climb. Sister Bean provides nitrogen for Sister Corn to thrive while Sister Squash is planted on the outside to provide ground cover and moisture and protection from animals with it’s prickly stems.

There are several legends surrounding the Three Sisters; indeed, almost every American Indian nation seems to have its own. The Cherokee legend involves three women who helped each other stay fed, hydrated and strong on the Trail of Tears, a lesson that the Cherokee used in planting their crops when they arrived in the Oklahoma Territory. Another legend describes three sisters who bickered constantly until their mother gave each of them an egg cooked in a different way and showed the sisters that, although the textures of the eggs were different, they were still eggs.

This is one version of the Haudenosaunee legend of the Three Sisters:

Very long ago, there were three sisters who lived in a field. The youngest was so small she could not yet walk; she crawled along the ground, dressed in green. The middle sister wore a bright yellow dress and darted back and forth across the field. The eldest sister stood tall and straight, and her body bent with the wind. She had long yellow hair and wore a green shawl. The three sisters loved one another very much and could not imagine living without the others.

One day a little Indian boy came to the field. He was very handsome and knew the ways of the land. He could talk with the birds and the animals and was straight and fearless. The three sisters were very interested in this boy as they watched him use his stone knife to carve a bowl or hunt with his bow and arrow.

Late in the summer of the boy’s first visit to the field, the youngest of the three sisters disappeared. She was the one who could only creep along the ground; she could not even stand unless there was a stick she could cling to. But she was gone, and the other two sisters mourned her until the fall.

The Indian boy returned to the field to gather reeds that grew at the edge of a small stream. He used the reeds to make arrow shafts. The two remaining sisters again watched him, fascinated. That night, the second sister disappeared, the one who always wandered hither and yon.

Now there was only one sister left, the tall and straight sister. She did not bow her head in sorrow, though she mourned deeply and thought she could not live in the field alone without her sisters. As the days grew shorter and colder, her green shawl began to lose its color and her yellow hair became dry and tangled. Night and day she sighed for her sisters, but her voice was low like the wind, and no one heard her.

One day in the harvest season, the little Indian boy heard the third sister crying, and he felt sorry for her. He took her in his arms and carried her to his home, and there a delightful surprise awaited her: Her sisters were there in the lodge, safe and very glad to be reunited. They explained that they had been curious about the little Indian boy and had followed him home, and they had decided to stay because winter was coming and his home was warm and comfortable.

The sisters also were making themselves useful to the boy and his family. The youngest, now all grown up, kept the dinner pot full, while the second sister, still in her yellow dress, dried herself on the shelf so she could fill the dinner pot later in the winter. The eldest sister was so pleased to be with her sisters again and so impressed with the help they gave the boy that she too began drying herself so the family would have meal to use as the winter went on.

And from that day to this, the three sisters were never separated again.

Source: “The Three Sisters – Exploring an Iroquois Garden,” Cornell Cooperative Extension, 1997.

07/30/2026

The memorial site on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota honors Indigenous children who died at the government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. It features a dedicated bronze statue, a prominent visual hill display, and reinterment markers for nine children returned to their homelands in July 2021.

Repatriation and History

• The Return: After a six-year effort led by the Sicangu Youth Council, the remains of nine Lakota children (who died between 1880 and 1910) were brought home in a 1,500-mile caravan from Carlisle to Rosebud.

• The Children: The repatriated children included Dennis Strikes First, Rose Long Face, Lucy Take The Tail, Warren Painter, Ernest Knocks Off, Maud Little Girl, Alvan Kills Seven Horses, Friend Hollow Horn Bear, and Dora Her Pipe.

• Tiyata Glipi Anpetu: July 14th is recognized on the reservation as "They are back to the homelands day," an annual holiday and time of memorial runs and reflection.

Memorial Features

• Bronze Monument: A bronze statue depicting two children stands at the site to represent the youth who made the tragic journey.

• Hillside Display: A large photographic display on the hillside shows historical expressions of the children from 1890, capturing the sorrow and impact of the assimilation era.

• Final Resting Places: While several of the children were reinterred together at a dedicated site, others were placed in local tribal and family cemeteries near their living descendants.

If you're planning a visit or need specific archival details, let Google know if you would like information on local cultural protocols or contact details for the Rosebud Sioux Tribe historic preservation office.

07/27/2026

In a small Nebraska town called Genoa, there is a quiet field where children's names are still being recovered, one by one. For fifty years it was the site of one of the largest Indian boarding schools in the United States, and most Americans have never heard of it.

The Genoa Indian Industrial School opened in 1884 and took in more than four thousand children from over forty nations across its lifetime, some carried hundreds of miles from home. They arrived speaking their own languages and were forbidden to use them. Their hair was cut, their names were changed, their days were filled with labor and drills. Letters home were read. Many children never made it home at all, and for decades the location of the school cemetery was simply lost.

Today a dedicated project of researchers, descendants, and tribal nations is combing through old records to find the names of the children who died at Genoa and to locate where they were buried. It is slow, painful work, and every name recovered is a child given back to a family that never stopped grieving. This is not distant history. The last federal boarding schools closed within living memory.

So many of these schools have been erased from the textbooks entirely. Had you ever heard the name Genoa before today, and do you think places like it should be marked and remembered where they once stood?

07/25/2026

🪶 When the Confederacy surrendered at Appomattox in 1865, the man who wrote out the final terms in a clean, careful hand was a Seneca, and most history books forgot to mention it.

Ely S. Parker, born Hasanoanda on the Tonawanda Seneca reservation in New York, trained as an engineer and studied law, though the bar refused to admit him because he was not then considered a citizen. He had befriended Ulysses S. Grant before the war, and when the fighting came he joined Grant's staff as his military secretary and rose to colonel. At Appomattox it was Parker who penned the surrender document. When Robert E. Lee realized Parker was Native American, he is said to have remarked that it was good to have a real American present.

After the war, Grant made him the first Native American Commissioner of Indian Affairs, where he tried, against fierce resistance, to bring some honesty to the government's dealings with the tribes.

A Seneca engineer at the very center of American history, and still so few know his name. Why do you think that is?

07/14/2026

🔭 FOR OVER 1,200 YEARS, NOBODY KNEW THE NAME OF A SINGLE MAYA SCIENTIST. AS OF TODAY, WE DO. 🇬🇹✨

His name was SAK TAHN WAAX — "White-chested Fox" — a Maya astronomer-mathematician who lived around 800 CE. And he just became the first named scientist in the history of the ancient Americas. 🦊📜

Archaeologists announced the discovery today, published in the peer-reviewed journal Antiquity. Inside a small painted room at Xultún, deep in the Petén jungle of Guatemala, researchers found more than 50 mathematical "microtexts" on a plaster wall — the rough drafts of Maya codices, like finding the sketchbook behind a masterpiece. 🖌️

Among them: a set of 11 hieroglyphs ending with the phrase "so says Sak Tahn Waax" — a signature attached to a sophisticated astronomical formula. For the first time ever, Maya science has a name and a face behind it. ✍️

And what a formula it was. His calculations synchronized FOUR different cycles at once:
🌞 The 365-day Haab solar year
🌀 The 260-day sacred Tzolk'in calendar
♀️ The 584-day cycle of Venus
♂️ The 780-day cycle of Mars

His formula reveals a mastery of the fractions and factors needed to weave these cycles together — anchored on a key alignment of 2,920 days: exactly 5 Venus cycles and 8 solar years, the number that locked the movements of Venus to the Maya calendar. He worked this out with no telescope — over 800 years before Galileo pointed a lens at the sky. 🤯

The research team — including epigrapher David Stuart, one of the world's leading decoders of Maya glyphs — says Sak Tahn Waax can now take his place alongside Pythagoras, Galileo and Newton in the story of world science. As project director Heather Hurst put it: an entire scientific tradition comes to life through a single individual. 🏛️

📌 ACCURACY NOTE: Some outlets are reporting the name as "Zactan B'aan." The research paper and the project's own epigraphers record it as Sak Tahn Waax ("White-chested Fox"). We go with the source. ✅

The Maya world stretched across southern Mexico — Yucatán, Quintana Roo, Campeche, Chiapas, Tabasco — and into Guatemala, Belize and beyond. This genius belongs to that shared Maya legacy, one still carried by millions of Maya people today. 🌎❤️

They were mapping the heavens with mathematics while their names stayed hidden for twelve centuries. Now, at last, one of them steps out of the shadows.

Say his name: SAK TAHN WAAX. 🦊🔭

07/09/2026

On October 5, 1813, Shawnee leader Tecumseh was killed at the Battle of the Thames during the War of 1812, marking the end of one of the greatest Indigenous resistance movements in North American history.

For years, Tecumseh had united dozens of Indigenous nations into a powerful confederacy dedicated to stopping the rapid expansion of the United States. Believing that no single tribe could survive alone, he argued that Native lands belonged to all Indigenous peoples collectively and could not be sold by individual tribes.

His alliance became Britain’s most valuable Indigenous partner during the War of 1812. Together they captured Detroit in 1812 and temporarily halted American expansion across the Old Northwest.

Everything changed after the American victory on Lake Erie cut British supply lines. Forced into a retreat through Upper Canada, British General Henry Procter ignored Tecumseh’s objections and continued withdrawing until American forces caught them near the Thames River.

The British line quickly collapsed under attack, leaving Tecumseh and roughly 500 warriors to fight largely on their own. During the fierce fighting, Tecumseh was killed. His body was never conclusively identified, and exactly who fired the fatal shot remains one of history’s enduring mysteries.

With Tecumseh gone, his confederacy rapidly dissolved. Although many Indigenous nations continued resisting in later conflicts, no leader again united so many tribes behind a single political and military vision.

Today, Tecumseh is remembered as one of the most respected military leaders and statesmen in Indigenous history, admired for his courage, diplomacy, and determination to defend his people’s homeland.

07/07/2026

💜***SWEETGRASS***💜

The elders tell us that it takes longer for us to heal today and the reason is because the old trails our ancestors used to use to find us have been destroyed....so now our ancestors are having a hard time finding us to help us heal.

I ,Jay ….. want to share this so it is not forgotten!!!!!!!

We are also told that was the first plant to grow on Mother Earth
When we harvest Sweetgrass,we get three bunches of seven strands
So there will be 21 pieces of grass,,
We do not pull it, this is the hair of Mother Earth.
We braid the three strands of seven pieces right there on Mother Earth
Then we gently cut it
If we want to state our intentions,, we can bring to***co as to bring Creator in on our words as to how we will use this
For an offering we can offer something the plant can use,, like water,
So offer the relations around it, it’s brothers and sisters,mother and father
And so on,give them a gift of water.

When we burn sweetgrass, remember these things:
Its a kindness medicine...with a sweet gentle aroma when we light it.

Its symbolic...
There are 21 strands used to make a braid...
The first 7 strands represent those 7 generations behind us~
Our parents
Our grandparents
Our great grandparents and so on for
7 generations behind us~who we are and what we are is because of them~they've brushed and made the trails we have been walking up til now...but the trails have been destroyed, we have lost our connection.
The time has come to heal and reconnect with our ancestors.

The next 7 represent the 7 sacred teachings...
Love, Respect, Honesty, Courage, Wisdom, Truth and Humility.

The elders tell us how simple, powerful and beautiful the teaching are:

1 Love: unconditional affection with no limits or conditions that starts with loving yourself.

2 Respect: due regard for the feelings, wishes, rights or traditions of other, with consideration, thoughtfulness, attentiveness, politeness, courtesy, civility, deference.

3 Honestly: have a character of integrity, and honor be free from fraud or deception, legitimate truthful.

4 Courage: bravery, permitting one to face extreme dangers with boldness withstanding danger, fear or difficulty

5 Wisdom: the quality of having experience, knowledge and good judgment the quality of being wise.

6 Truth: the face of the matter, veracity, sincere, candor and genuineness
a determined in principle entirely by how it relates to things

7 Humility: freedom from pride or arrogance, being humble, when we truly understand the teaching of humility, that we are not any better then anyone else and you are not any better then me. that at the end of the day we are simply human beings, this is what makes this teaching powerful and beautiful.

The last 7 strands are those of the 7 generations in front of us~
Our children .....
Our grandchildren .....
Our great grandchildren .....
as well as those children yet to be born.
It is important because everything we do to Mother earth will one day effect them...

We have lost our way, Mother Earth gives us everything we need to heal ourselves and the earth.
We must go back to our roots and bloom.
💜💟💜💟💜

07/05/2026

On a bitterly cold morning in January 1870, US cavalry rode up on a Blackfeet camp along the Marias River in Montana. ❄️ The soldiers were looking for a band suspected of raids. The camp they found instead belonged to a peaceful leader named Heavy Runner, and many of its people were already sick with smallpox.

Heavy Runner reportedly walked toward the soldiers holding papers that vouched for his friendship, trusting that the truth would protect him. It did not. In the attack that followed, around two hundred Blackfeet were killed, most of them women, children, and the elderly. It became one of the deadliest single days for Native people in the history of the American West, and yet almost no one has heard its name.

The Blackfeet remember it as the Baker Massacre, and each year descendants gather to honor those who were lost on that frozen riverbank. 🕯️ Their presence today is its own kind of answer to what was done. Why do you think some tragedies get remembered in every textbook while others, just as terrible, slip into silence?

07/03/2026

California has its own Trail of Tears, and almost no one learns its name. 🌫️ In the fall of 1863, more than 400 Native people, mostly Concow Maidu, were forced to march roughly 100 miles from Chico to the Round Valley Reservation in the rugged mountains of northern California. It became known as the Nome Cult Trail.

The march was brutal. People walked for around two weeks over steep terrain with little food, and the sick and the elderly who could not keep up were left behind or worse. By the time the survivors reached Round Valley, only about 277 of the more than 400 who started remained. It was one chapter in a wider campaign of removal and violence against California's first peoples during the Gold Rush era. ⛰️

Every year, descendants of those who walked retrace the Nome Cult Trail on foot to honor the ones who did not survive. They walk so that the story is not forgotten, so that the children who died along the way are remembered by name and by footstep. California's history holds this grief too, even if its textbooks stay silent. 🕯️

Did you know that California had forced marches of its own, and why do you think this history is so rarely told?

Address

2421 Bloomington Avenue S
Minneapolis, MN
55404

Telephone

+16127211655

Website

http://www.pieducators.com/

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