Two Portland State students received high awards in Native American education at the Annual Oregon Indian Education Association conference on April 2 and 3. Art practices senior Shilo George received the award for Outstanding Volunteer of the Year, and Sky Hopinka received the award for Outstanding Student in Higher Education.
Both George and Hopinka were nominated by current members of the association and were awarded based on the votes of nearly 100 association members. George was the only student nominated for the award, and Hopinka was one of four students nominated. “These two students just demonstrated outstanding leadership and really innovative approaches to integrating culture and education through both their advocate achievement and their volunteerism and advocacy,” said Se-ah-dom Edmo, vice president of the OIEA and chair of the awards committee.
George, a descendant of the Southern Cheyenne-Arapaho, is a non-traditional student who came back to school after taking a nearly five-year break. George grew up with her mother’s side of the family, who are not Native American. When she started going to college at Portland Community College, she joined a native student club, becoming particularly interested in education and low Native American graduation rates. “We were close knit, like a family. I was connecting with a part of me that I had not understood or known about before,” George said.
Through the club, she got a job at the Native American Youth and Family Center, where she spent two years teaching cultural art and fell in love with teaching. While there, she helped with several programs that encouraged Native American students to attend college. George said it felt strange to tell others to finish college while she had not yet graduated herself. It was then that she decided to attend PSU as a full-time student and eventually became a McNair Scholar.
George has taken classes in the Indigenous Nations studies program, which she said are very conducive to the Indigenous way of thinking and being. “Who you are as a person is embedded in the curriculum and talked about everyday in class,” George said.
Education is important for the native people, George said. Forced to go to a Native American boarding school, her great-grandmother eventually denied her heritage. As a result, George’s grandfather and then her father didn’t have much exposure to native culture. “Education can be liberating for native people,” George said. “It can change a history of assimilation into a powerful experience, something I am experiencing here.”
Recently elected to the OIEA as the higher education representative, George is also very active in the urban Native American community, where she volunteers for events. “Volunteer work is very important, so you can give back to the community that gives so much to you,” she said.
Her plans for the future are to become a teacher, and she is considering becoming involved in the Teach for America program, which has a couple of placements in tribal communities in the Southwest. Afterward, she said she might pursue a doctorate in order to create curriculum for elementary and high school classes. George is particularly interested in working in small, alternative education communities that are more flexible.
A member of the Ho-Chunk Nation, Hopinka enjoys making movies and wants to help save endangered and dying languages. At the beginning of the 2011–12 academic year, Hopinka and a few other students began teaching a Chinuk Wawa class, a native trade language spoken along the Columbia River and in Portland.
“The group started out as, and still is, very informal,” wrote Hopinka in an email. “We are not a student group or under any organization; we are just a group of students who want to hang out and speak the language.”
Hopinka had always wanted to learn how to speak one of his native languages, but the task had been too daunting. However, in the summer of 2010, he met Evan Gardner, who said he could teach Hopinka how to speak Chinuk Wawa. This fulfilled two purposes for Hopinka: to meet his foreign language requirement and to gain the skills needed to learn his own native language.
He began his studies in Chinuk Wawa in February 2011. Gardner had developed a method for teaching and learning languages called “Where Are Your Keys?” It focuses on gaining fluency and teaching the language while learning it. “I was able to learn the language faster than I ever thought someone could learn a language, and it was fun and easy,” Hopinka said.
Gardner encouraged him to teach Chinuk Wawa because the language was endangered. This prompted Hopinka to begin the Chinuk Wawa group. “One thing I kept in mind as the group was going, was that I do not want to be the only speaker, or teacher, and I want those that come to be able to do what I was taught,” Hopinka said. “As of now, the class is being run and taught by people that I taught, and that is a wonderful thing.”
Like George, Hopinka believes education is very important to Native Americans. “It empowers native youth to take pride in their identity, to learn about their culture and history, and prepare themselves for the future—for the future of all of us,” he said.
This summer, Hopinka will be in Montana on the Flathead Reservation working with speakers of the Kootenai language. After that, he said he might try submitting some films to a few festivals.
Nine federally recognized Native American tribes call Oregon home. Urban areas in Oregon have high numbers of Native Americans, and 33 percent of the native population in Multnomah County is under 18.
“More than half—53 percent of native students in Multnomah County—do not graduate from high school, and of those who do, only 54 percent attempt higher education,” said Tana Atchley, secretary on the executive board of the Oregon Indian Education Association.“These numbers are very disturbing to me as an educator. Sadly, it is a similar story in other parts around the state of Oregon. OIEA exists to help address these disparities,” she added.
The Oregon Indian Education Association is made up of 33 elected board members in Oregon. It exists to strengthen the foundation of Native American education in Oregon, increase understanding of indigenous traditions and knowledge, promote positive cultural behavioral supports, and implement and support indigenous models of teaching and learning in curriculum.