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Milwaukee's Indian children have a school where they are free to be Indians
5:56 PM
7/24/02
Susan Lampert Smith Wisconsin State Journal
indent MILWAUKEE - You won't find the heart of Wisconsin's "Indian Country" in a North Woods forest or near a wild-rice lake.
indentMore of Wisconsin's Indians live in the urban neighborhoods of Milwaukee than any other single place: Census numbers show that 9,116 of the state's 69,386 Indians, or about 14 percent, live in the city.
indent"When I was a kid, 'Indian Country' stretched from 15th and State out to 35th and Wisconsin, and north to Cherry (Street)," said Andy Connors, a 45-year-old staff member at Milwaukee's Indian Community School, which was born in 1968 out of three mothers' despair at the high numbers of urban Indian children dropping out of school. "I could walk through the neighborhood and hit a friend or relative living in a house in every block."
indentThe neighborhood, part of Milwaukee's inner city, attracted Indian veterans back from World War II and the Korean War, who looked to Milwaukee's industries for jobs to support their families.
indentThese days, Connors said, the heart of Milwaukee's Indian Country has shifted "south of the viaduct" - Milwaukee-speak for across the industrial Menomonee River Valley, to the area around the Mitchell Park conservancy.
indent"Our people are always on the move," Connors said.
indentBut while the move from the reservations to the city helped families financially, their kids did not thrive in the urban schools. Connors says that culture shock - the reservation values of respecting elders, avoiding competition and not speaking up in public - led teachers to "believe that our kids were unteachable."
indentThis combined with the dangerous neighborhoods and the racial unrest of Milwaukee in the 1960s, meant city kids, and some of their parents, "saw no reason to go to school."
indentIndian Community School was conceived in a car, near the intersection of 33rd Street and Lisbon Avenue, one day in 1968. Three Oneida women - Marge Funmaker, Darlene Neconish and Marge Stevens - were driving along, when they spotted a young man who should have been in school.
indent"They thought - 'This is ridiculous, we have to get our kids educated,'" Connors said. The Indian Community School started in the women's homes, then moved to a school, a church and finally to the abandoned U.S. Coast Guard station on Milwaukee's lakefront, which the Indians took over as unclaimed federal land.
indentThe school was a shoestring operation at first - teachers weren't always paid and children were fed with donated food. Then came Indian gambling - and almost unimaginable riches. As part of obtaining a gaming compact to run a casino in downtown Milwaukee, the Forest County Potawatomi agreed to donate a percentage of profits - currently about $27 million a year - to the Indian Community School. It's a 20-year agreement that gives the school one of the richest endowments in the state. Today, any child of Indian descent - defined as having one Indian grandparent - can attend the school for free.
indentThe endowment money raises eyebrows among Indians outside Milwaukee, but school CEO Linda Sue Warner said the money is invested so that it will be there to provide an education for the grandchildren of today's 344 students, who range from 4-year-olds in pre-kindergarten to eighth-graders.
indent"It (the agreement) ends in 2010, and after that we don't get another dime," Warner said. "That's why we're reluctant to fund everyone who asks us for money."
indentIn the mid-1980s, the school moved to the former grounds of Concordia College at State and 31st streets. Tall fences, gates and security guards keep neighborhood dangers at bay, insulating a leafy grounds of about a dozen brick buildings from the outside world.
indent"At home, these kids are dodging bullets," Connors said. "We try to make it safe here."
indentSome things would look familiar to the Missouri Synod Lutherans, who built the college in the late 19th century, before moving north to suburban Mequon. But nestled in the courtyard is a sweat lodge used for ceremonies, nearby is a pile of wood used to heat the rocks. School cultural director Paula Fernandez, a Menominee, said that students go on field trips to farms outside Milwaukee to collect the "grandfather" rocks that are heated to warm the lodge.
indent"They learn how to hold them and treat them not as rocks, but as grandfathers," she said.
indentYearly field trips connect city kids with their traditional culture. Fourth-graders camp at the Ho-Chunk's buffalo ranch along the Wisconsin River near Muscoda. Fifth-graders learn to fish at the Wa-Swa-Goning traditional wigwam village on the Lac du Flambeau reservation west of Minocqua. Sixth-graders learn traditional maple syrup making at the sugar bush on the Oneida Reservation near Green Bay, and seventh-graders go wild rice collecting on the Menominee Reservation north of Green Bay. Eighth-graders vote on their class trip - this year's group went camping in Ontario to learn survival skills and test a birch bark canoe they built in school.
indent"The number one thing parents say they want is culture," said Warner, a member of the Comanche Tribe of Oklahoma and a faculty member in the University of Missouri's School of Education.
indentBut Warner has instituted other changes in her 3 years at the school, including a discipline policy that has improved attendance and is keyed to a "medicine wheel" of seven core values - bravery, love, wisdom, respect, truth, humility and loyalty - and four key relationships - to self, to family and community, to the Earth, and to the spirit world.
indentClassrooms are geared to active learning, with students moving between work stations. And each student has an individualized education plan, used in public schools mostly for students with special needs, so learning is judged by the student's individual goals.
indentDeputy Education Secretary William Hansen, who visited earlier this summer, called it the best Indian school in the country. In addition, Indian Community School donated $1 million to endow one of two urban Indian education professorships at UW-Milwaukee, and it has sponsored nationwide conferences on educating Indian students, out of which likely will come a book on best practices.
indentThis summer, Warner is working with faculty from Vanderbilt University and the University of Missouri to develop a standardized test parallel to the state's public school tests.
indent"Instead of complaining that our kids don't do well on tests, let's quit whining and create a standardized test that is for Indian kids," she said.
indentFinally, Milwaukee's Indian community is on the move - again. Recently, the school bought land in Franklin, a suburb south of Milwaukee, and it is working on plans to build a permanent campus for children ranging from infants through eighth grade. As at the current school, Warner said she wants to make sure Milwaukee's entire Indian community feels a part of the campus and uses it for gatherings. Building bridges between school and community is a key goal.
indent"Schooling itself is looked at with some skepticism in Indian Country," Warner said.
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