Educators from around North Dakota traveled to the Capitol for the 2025 Indian Education Summit on Thursday and Friday. (Mary Steurer/North Dakota Monitor)
How do you get students to remember what they learn? According to Gladys Hawk, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, you tell them a story.
Hawk is one of dozens of tribal elders featured on the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction’s Teachings of Our Elders website, which now boasts more than 350 videos.
In an interview played for educators at the Department of Public Instruction’s annual Indian Education Summit in Bismarck on Friday, Hawk spoke of the bedtime stories her grandmother would tell her in Lakota growing up.
Hawk said at the end of each tale, her grandmother would tie in an important life lesson.
“She would say, ‘And that’s why I want you to be good — don’t be like this one in the story,’” said Hawk. “We have to listen to what our elders have to say, because usually they’re teaching us something important.”
Sharla Steever and Scott Simpson, who worked on the videos for North Dakota’s Native American Essential Understandings project, shared Hawk’s interview as one example of how attendees can integrate Native culture and history into the classroom.
“You can pull those stories in any time you want, if you want to focus in on a concept or a theme or something historical that the elder is speaking about,” Steever said of the Teaching of Our Elders videos.
Steever said in her experience, storytelling helps to create a sense of community in the classroom. Kids tend to retain information if they have a personal anecdote to connect it to, she said.
Under a law adopted by the state Legislature in 2021, K-12 schools in North Dakota are required to teach Native history. The website is one of a number of resources the Department of Public Instruction’s Office of Indian and Multicultural Education has developed that can support schools in this area, Steever said.
She said the Department of Public Instruction is still doing interviews with elders from time to time. However, it can be difficult to arrange.
While the agency likes to give elders who participate a stipend, there’s not a ton of funding available, Steever said.
“There’s never really been a budget for that,” she said. The department also has to squeeze in time for the interviews around its other work, she added.
Haiden Person, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and a recent graduate of Bismarck High School, delivers a youth address during the Indian Education Summit at the North Dakota Capitol in Bismarck. (Mary Steurer/North Dakota Monitor)
Steever said she’s working on an additional set of video interviews with Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate elders.
Haiden Person, a recent graduate from Bismarck High School and the conference’s youth speaker, said Friday that teaching more Native American culture and history in schools is key to combatting anti-Indigenous racism.
“They don’t know it’s wrong, you’ve just got to teach them,” said Person, a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.
Person recently graduated from Bismarck High School and plans to attend United Tribes Technical College in the fall. Person said mental health is an issue close to his heart, and that he plans to become a psychiatrist.
The summit also welcomed Daniel Kish, an expert in human echolocation — using sound to locate objects — and president of World Access for the Blind, for a keynote address.
Kish has been blind since he was a year old. He said he gained the ability to echolocate because his parents wanted him to be self-sufficient despite his disability. He now helps teach the skill to other blind people.
“It’s an ability that provides you with awareness of the environment that’s way out beyond the length of your cane,” he said.
He said a broader goal of his is studying how people develop a sense of personal identity and agency. Kish said he appreciated hearing Person talk about mental health and the importance of leaning on others in your community.
“Haiden had it right, don’t be afraid to ask for help,” Kish said.
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