Not Your Run-of-the-Mill School

Ojibwe Charter School on Bay Mills Indian Community.

By JAMIE OPPENHEIM

Like ducks following their mother, seven kindergarten and first-grade students walked closely behind their culture teacher, Jennifer Anziano, through the woods in the back of their school to the student-built wigwam — a dome comprised of several tree branches and rope with a plastic tarp overhead.

“How do we travel, class?” Anziano asked her students. “Quietly,” they said in unison. “We don’t disturb creation,” Anziano added.

Once inside the structure, the Ojibwe Charter School students listened as Anziano asked them to close their eyes and listen to the different sounds.

Anziano then questioned the group about what animals they heard, and she asked them to respond with the Ojibwe name.

“Benasheqwe,” said one student. “Benasheqwe” means “bird” in Ojibwe, and that’s coincidentally Anziano’s nickname.

On the walk to the wigwam, one of the school’s principals, Marcia Malloy, pointed out that her grandmother once lived in the woods surrounding the school with the other elders of the tribe near a small lake. They lived there because it was warmer — across from the school is Lake Superior, and it’s hard to escape that cold.

The tribe, which lives on the Bay Mills Indian Reservation 20 miles outside of Sault Ste. Marie, Mich., has talked about creating a nature walk behind the school with placards on trees indicating the tree name in Anishnabe, a dialect and clan of the Ojibwe tribe and language, and where the tribe’s elders once lived, Malloy said.

Malloy said they are trying to undertake this task sooner rather than later before her grandmother’s generation passes on, because with them goes the tribe’s generational memory.

But there is one bad memory from the past that has not faded with time, and that is the tribe’s contentious experience with American schools. Malloy’s grandmother was sent to an Indian boarding school and was forbidden to speak Ojibwe, she said. Her mother was not allowed to attend the neighboring town’s public school because she was Native American.

That negative perception of education has stuck with the younger generation, despite the tribe’s own renewed emphasis on education. The tribe has its own community college on the reservation, Bay Mills Community College, and the school has authorized 39 charter schools throughout the state of Michigan, including the Ojibwe Charter School.

Still, the high school dropout rate for members of the tribe remains troublingly high, Malloy said, although she didn’t have specific numbers. She said the charter school has helped to decrease the number of students who drop out from high school,even though the number is small. Every little bit matters.

— Jamie Oppenheim