Portland State Magazine Winter 2013

WINTER 2013 PORTLAND STATE MAGAZINE 23 One youngster might need to practice raising his hand before speaking; another might need to remember not to interrupt others. As each child talks about his or her goal for the day, Reed asks the other students to consider ways to help the student achieve that goal. Just as in her own upbringing, she says, teaching involves the community. At the end of the school day, the class again forms a circle and talks about what worked and what didn’t, with all students participating as a community in helping each other reflect on how they did in making—or not making—progress toward their goals. “It’s very Native to bring the entire community into the process,” says Reed. “As a community we focus on helping each other succeed in our goals. It’s part of your DNA. You don’t think, ‘How can I be separate from you?’ You think, ‘How can I be part of you?’” WHILE EACH NATIVE TRIBE has its own customs, Reed sees common threads. The family unit and respect for elders, she says, are common to all tribes. And while specific legends and stories are different, all tribes embrace storytelling, often to pass down their history and beliefs. And tribal people favor experiential learning, she says, an approach she uses in her classroom. For instance, when her students were learning about the solar system, Reed had them make planets out of clay as she talked. “You have to do that with Native kids or they will get lost,” she says, “but it helps all kids.” The AIUTP also emphasizes the need to educate communities about Native American culture. Reed did just that during her first year of teaching in Oregon’s Dallas School District. Her class of emotionally and behaviorally disturbed children, had never been on a field trip, which Reed decided to rectify. But she didn’t take just the class; she made it into a family event. Each child was accompanied by at least one adult family member, whether a parent, grandparent, aunt or uncle. And Reed asked each family member to bring food to share. “I created something my family would have done,” says Reed. “‘Let’s all get together and bring food.’” Because of limited district funding, Reed paid for the trip to a ranch specializing in thera- peutic horses for children. The event was a success for the kids, and for the adults who, she says, saw the children having fun and socializing happily with each other—a rarity when a child bears the label “emotionally or behaviorally disturbed.” Reed also introduced all the adults to one another, and, as was common with her own extended family, suggested mak- ing play dates for the children. This, she says, helped parents see how to continue the process after the field trip. She sees such community building as part of the tradition of her family and her culture. “In what I do,” she says, “I’m honoring those who came before me, who taught me, and I’m passing that on.”  Melissa Steineger is a Portland freelance writer and a regular contributor to Portland State Magazine. When Terri Reed’s mother and father married in 1963, it was still illegal for a “white” person to marry a Native American in much of the United States. They married in Oregon, where all laws banning interracial marriage were repealed in 1951. Terri Reed’s grandmother and aunts and uncles posed for this photo in Oregon in 1948, a time in the state’s history when Native American children were sometimes taken from their parents and placed in boarding schools.