An Ojibwe elder who has taught for many years in local schools, Ona Kingbird teaches the same way she learned as a child—through stories. Many of the students who learned language and culture from Ona have adopted her as a grandmother, someone whose affectionate teachings helped change their lives. Raised in a traditional village, Ona is a rare treasure, a teacher whose gift is providing her students with lessons from the elders who taught her how to speak and live as an Ojibwe. Her stories are a reminder that education is more about learning than it is about pedagogy, and there is no substitute for life experience. Ona teaches values as an integral part of her lessons, blending vivid images, teachings, and humor in each of her stories.
When asked to share something about herself, Ona spoke at length, painting a rich, detailed portrait of what it meant to grow up in a traditional community where people called each other by their spirit names. A captivating storyteller, Ona’s words stood in sharp contrast to the school office where we sat, the hallways empty of Native students who struggle each day to survive in two worlds. By sharing her family story and her knowledge as a teacher, Ona offers her students a deeper understanding of what it means to be Ojibwe, a lesson that cannot be found in any textbook.
Ona Kingbird was born in a “wigwam” on the Upper Red Lake while her family was catching fish for the winter, a way of life that she shared until she was 15. Ona grew up learning to fish and hunt, make maple syrup, and plant gardens with big fields of corn, potatoes, beans, squash and other vegetables. She learned to preserve foods in the old way, drying fish and deer meat, braiding corn, drying cattails for flour, and making patties with crushed chokecherries. The elders taught her to make birch bark baskets and utensils, and how to boil soup in the basket by adding hot rocks. When she was 10 years old, they began teaching her how to gather medicine plants in the woods. The nearest hospital was 35 miles away and nobody had a car, so the plants were essential to the health of the community.
While Ona’s family on her mother’s side belonged to the Midewin society, practicing traditional ceremonies that are part of Ojibwe religion, from her father she learned how to survive. He taught her how to fast, to listen to the birds, and to watch the stars for indications of the weather that was coming. “Today when a kid asks you, you tell him the story of why it’s happening,” Ona said. But when Ona was young, she was expected to listen quietly, without asking questions. “They told us a story and we had to figure out exactly what happened. They kind of trained our mind to absorb what was said to us.”
While ceremonies were an important part of their lives, children had to earn the right to attend. Sometimes the elders would sit with them while ceremonies were held somewhere else, telling them stories about long ago, how people survived, how a good life includes music and laughter. And through it all, in every experience and every lesson, the elders were reinforcing the values that form the foundation of their culture. Later, as a teacher, Ona would do the same; observing how the children who learned their values at home were quiet and well behaved, while the ones who acted up had never been taught how to behave.
“You know what, the value system is the old Midewin religion, that’s all it’s made of,” Ona said. “Honesty, truth, wisdom, sharing, caring, loving. They tell you when you go through the initiation, you got to practice or live up to one or two of them every day.” You have to keep reinforcing these lessons, Ona said, even when it seems like the students are hardly paying attention because some of them may be absorbing it in unexpected ways. In the late 1970s, Ona taught a family of four Apache kids, teaching one little boy how to hoop dance. In 2005, he wrote to thank her for all that she taught him, saying it was coming back to him in dreams. “Here I thought he wasn’t even paying attention,” Ona said.
To engage her students’ interest, Ona provided hands-on learning that appealed to the longing many share for learning their culture and their language. She taught them to make dream catchers, then urged the students to observe how they worked, were they careful or did they rush, a process that encouraged self-reflection. She taught them how to hoop dance and to make fry bread. When her students wanted to put on a play, they learned first to fundraise by delivering Indian tacos around town, and then to find creative ways of making costumes and props. Ona paid for two of them to learn ventriloquism from a visiting artist, a skill that was put to use in the play. She also organized a science camp up north with several different schools, teaching students to recognize plants and trees, how to make salves and medicines, and even to replant wild rice using balls of clay.
One of Ona’s gifts as a teacher is her ability to respond intuitively and with compassion to students who acted out in ways that made them difficult for other teachers to deal with. “That’s why my room was always full of kids,” Ona said. One boy, who was a bully and a terror in his other classes, was asked to be her helper, on the condition that he be courteous to the other kids, watch over them, and give up swearing and fighting. When another teacher observed the change in him, she asked Ona what she had done. “I treat him like a human being,” Ona replied.
When the older boys almost started fighting one day in her room, Ona dropped her book hard on her desk and stood up. “That’s it,” she cried. “You’re going to force me to use my karate chops on you guys!” They started laughing and the tension was released. “I teased them and I lectured them and I complimented them. I hugged them too. They had a rule, don’t hug the kids. I couldn’t help it.” She also talked to them straight about their behavior. When a boy came in with his pants hanging low in gangster style, she told him to go fix his pants. Afterwards she told them to treasure their bodies as a sacred soul. “I don’t beat around the bush,” Ona said. “I just tell them the way it is. I don’t try to make it simple. I make it like the way the elders taught me.”
In her early years of teaching the Ojibwe language at AIM Survival School, Ona instructed her students to memorize individual words. As she gained experience, she saw how limited they were by not being able to speak full sentences. She began teaching them how to communicate, so that rather than simply knowing the word for “bear,” they could say, “I see a bear coming.” Sometimes she would laugh at the comical mispronunciations her students came up with, and sometimes her students would correct her. “They used to like to correct me once in a while,” Ona said. She told them, “Even though I’m your teacher, I’m not above you. We’re all equal.” In every aspect of her teaching, Ona found ways to reinforce values.
Remember, too, that stories have a powerful effect; holding students’ attention while instructing them about the world around us. Just as she was taught through stories, Ona offers the same gift to her students, providing a glimpse into a traditional way of life that is their birthright. She has a wealth of stories about animal behavior and the lessons they teach us, many of them drawn directly from her childhood at Red Lake. With the spellbinding cadence of a natural storyteller, Ona’s voice shifts with each character, holding the listener close. Her father sometimes rescued animals, like the bear cubs who lost their mother and were held in a cage until her dad swapped a pig for their release. When they scratched at their front door that first night, he said, let them in, and then they slept under Ona’s bed. Or the bobcat he brought home that liked to follow her mother to the outhouse, chasing away the dogs. Even when her son let a horse eat the corn in her garden, she couldn’t stay mad because he was showing respect for the animal, recognizing that the horse was hungry.
When asked if she had suggestions for teachers, Ona’s immediate reply was, “Don’t embezzle the kids’ money,” her words revealing the sharp bite of her anger over the closing of Heart of the Earth school. To have betrayed the trust of such vulnerable students, children Ona counseled when they were troubled, who returned with their babies and called her grandmother, was an unthinkable breach of values.
Beyond this obvious lesson, however, there are many, smaller taboos that need to be understood about teaching traditional children. They are taught not to point because then they’re throwing the power of their spirit at a person. And to not make eye contact because it’s considered impolite to stare. Most important, Ona said, always, always greet the students with a smile. No matter what trouble they’re experiencing at home, when they come to school they need to see a positive, welcoming smile from their teacher. As Ona continues to teach, that’s something they know they’ll find in her classroom.