Why learning Kiowa is important to me:
Gohm-daw-gyah-maw ah kahn. Gkawy-maw ah daw. My grandmother named me “Windsong Woman” and I am enrolled in the Kiowa Tribe. As a daughter, sister, niece, and granddaughter, I am a married mother to five children ages ten to eighteen years-old and we each sing, dance, and participate in our Kiowa ceremonies. I grew up hearing stories about our people and immersed in our ways. My father was raised by his grandfather, Whitefox, a respected spiritual leader. His mother, Ruth Whitefox Redbird, was a renowned Kiowa singer. I also grew up hearing my mother’s stories of a childhood spent in foster care and dealing with a chronic illness. My mother told me that she learned about being Kiowa because she did not want us to feel disconnected from who we were. Growing up in southern California, I always felt I was returning home whenever we would travel to Oklahoma for our summer ceremonies.
Our language is severely endangered and only spoken by the great-grandparents. It has been my personal motivation to take up the charge left by our elders to ensure that our ways remain. When I was nineteen, I worked with the defunct Kiowa Language Preservation Program where I learned linguistic techniques, completed language classes, and learned three orthographic systems of Kiowa. Since moving to Oklahoma permanently to raise my children, I participated in Kiowa language revitalization for the past fourteen years. I have had the opportunity over the years to work with our remaining fluent speakers, across several dialects of Kiowa, to document their stories and our language.
I eventually fulfilled my dream to serve our people by working for our Tribal government. When I was hired as the director of the child care program, I searched for a framework to support our work towards Kiowa language immersion. Finding none, we began our journey to do our part in language revitalization, given minimal federal resources. Our goal, which took three years to achieve, along with countless hours of service from our dedicated elders and children’s families, was to implement Kiowa language immersion sessions in all of our child care classrooms from infants through 12 years-old. We began exploring the disconnect we felt between child development standards, such as developmentally-appropriate practice, and the historical Kiowa ways of parenting and learning. In Kiowa, our word for teaching and learning have the same root. The interaction between a teacher and a learner from a Kiowa perspective is different from the interactions found in the American approach to education. It was this realization that inspired the desire to define a Kiowa theory of learning.
My knowledge field is the intersection of early childhood education and Indigenous knowledge, specifically Kiowa knowledge of child growth and development, including language, culture, history, and contemporary life. I’ve recently completed my doctorate degree in early childhood education, with my dissertation research on curriculum development with four Indigenous early childhood language immersion programs. I utilized Tribally Based Participatory Research and my analysis was conducted through Indigenous Storywork using a framework based on my understanding of Kiowa-grounded storywork.
Professionally, I direct a team that provides training and technical assistance to support Tribal Nations across the country in meeting their goals for their child care programs. Personally, I focus on learning Kiowa as my heritage language and sharing what I have come to know about our language and Kiowa ways with my children, relatives, and our Kiowa community. With each graduate course I took, I found ways to make the final projects applicable to the work I was doing for my Tribe and our language. When one professor told me to make “school work for me,” I took that seriously and began engaging my staff, the children’s families, our elders, and community partners in these projects.
Over time, I connected with other community-based Kiowa language advocates, including linguistics and anthropologists at universities within and outside Oklahoma, and engaged with Kiowa language instructors at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Sciences and Arts of Oklahoma, where several Kiowa courses are taught. I’ve also worked closely with the administration and teachers at Anadarko Public Schools to support the Indian Education program and Kiowa language instructional efforts. I pursued additional funding to support the language revitalization efforts on behalf of our tribe.
We supported community efforts by collaborating and documenting our journey; we even co-presented at various conferences. These projects included: validating Indigenous knowledge as a theory of education, developing an instructional design model to support our language work, developing a curriculum framework with rationale, designing a teacher’s guide, completing pilot research studies using a tribally-based participatory research approach, and even conducting a comprehensive Kiowa language assessment. Each semester represented a new step in our journey.
Outside of work and school, I attended weekly Kiowa language classes, held family nights to teach Kiowa to the children’s families, conducted community, tribal partnership and coalition meetings, and studied Kiowa language so that I could model for my staff and the families. Finally, after leading the language assessment project, I partnered with university, community-based language efforts, Kiowa tribal programs; coordinated with each Kiowa community that offered Kiowa language classes to adults including Carnegie, Anadarko, Cache, Lawton, Hobart, Norman, Moore, and Tulsa; and, applied for an Administration for Native Americans Native Language Community Coordination demonstration grant, which the Tribe was awarded to pilot our approach from 2016-2021. In addition to working on these various collaborative Kiowa language projects over the years, I have also attended many of the community and university classes offered, including attending weekly Kiowa language mentor sessions in Anadarko since 2017, to continue my own learning. Through each of these interactions, I have listened, learned, and evolved, especially in my conceptualization of Indigenous pedagogy, the intersection between curriculum and instruction, specifically Kiowa pedagogical approaches. Through these efforts I have learned about the importance of collaboration in language work. It was never just me, it was always us, a core group to plan and complete these projects. These lessons drive me forward.
About my Luce Fellowship Project:
My grandmother once told me that the day we stop speaking our language is the day we cease to exist as Kiowa people. My true passion is bringing our language back to life and reestablishing intergenerational transmission of our language and our Kiowa knowledge systems embedded within it. Personally, I wish to ensure that our Kiowa community has a foundation on which to embrace our Kiowa knowledge and bring our Kiowa understanding of child development back into being. Professionally, I hope to establish a foundation that future Kiowa and Indigenous scholars can build upon as they develop their own perceptions of their Indigenous early childhood knowledge systems. Our Tribe and Language have been heavily researched over the years, primarily by non-Kiowa, non-Indigenous researchers, ethnographers, and anthropologists.
Through various roles, I honed my passion for empowering children and families to reach their full potential. There is a need for a comprehensive theory of learning specifically from the Kiowa perspective in order to combat historical trauma, to empower Kiowa children and their families to embrace their resilience, and to perpetuate Kiowa ways of knowing into the future generations of Kiowa people, specifically through culturally-revitalizing curriculum implementation approaches.
Despite my collaborative experiences, I have yet to find someone in our Kiowa community at-large who has established a Kiowa specific theory of knowledge for early childhood education. The person who came closest was Ms. Alecia Keahbone Gonzales, first language Kiowa speaker and educator, who developed a Kiowa curriculum, complete with Kiowa translations, for the Kiowa Tribe Head Start program in the 1990s, wrote a Kiowa language textbook for students, and was the instructor for high school and college Kiowa language classes before her passing. My team and I at the Kiowa Child Care Center resurrected her forgotten curriculum and incorporated it into our journey towards developing our own curriculum nearly a decade ago. Through engaging staff, families, Kiowa Elders, and Kiowa community members over a three-year span, we proved it was possible to implement Kiowa language immersion with young children through a curriculum grounded in Kiowa knowledge. Since then, I’ve shared these lessons learned with other Tribal Nations starting this process. My experience has demonstrated that we should be empowered to establish our own standards for teaching our children as we assert that our Indigenous knowledge is just as valid as other knowledge systems. Despite these efforts, there has not yet been a comprehensive framework developed for a Kiowa theory of learning grounded in decolonized educational theory.
I wish to provide something that is Kiowa specific, developed for and by Kiowa people. There is a desire among Kiowa people to reconnect with our history and our traditional understandings of child development; however, there has not yet been a dedicated effort to focus on that task. I want to empower young Kiowa parents to learn about our Kiowa ways. Our traditional knowledge of children’s development follows a specific trajectory; our Kiowa values are embedded in our traditional children’s songs and accompanying stories. My plan is to gather and compile the knowledge and wisdom that has been shared with me by our Elders over the years. First, I would draft a written document, a guide, containing outlines of suggested progressions of Kiowa songs, stories, dances, and traditional developmental milestones that can be referenced both in print and digitally. Then, I would develop various videos to explain and demonstrate the written resources. The guide would be intended to be used in homes by families or in classrooms by teachers. The expected outcome would be to have a written progression and accompanying videos that Kiowa parents and teachers of Kiowa students can use to guide their work with Kiowa children. Ultimately, I want to produce a written Kiowa theory of child development, that can serve as a bridge between our historical knowledge and the contemporary experiences of Kiowa children.
I meet weekly with first language speaker and storyteller, Mrs. Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune, who has worked with me since I first started the Kiowa curriculum journey. Mrs. DeLaune knows all of our traditional children’s songs, stories, and dances, and enjoys explaining these in Kiowa. I will work closely with Kiowa elders and fluent Kiowa language speakers to document their perceptions and experiences as well as to translate existing Kiowa archival records to define historical Kiowa child-rearing and parenting practices. I want to honor both Ms. Gonzales’ legacy and document the memories maintained by Mrs. DeLaune for future Kiowa generations. This will involve weekly sessions from January to December which will be recorded and transcribed for future reference and analysis. Starting in June, I plan to hold monthly meetings with Kiowa Tribal educators from Kiowa tribal programs, local school districts, and universities to ultimately define a Kiowa theory of learning to be used as a foundation for developing Kiowa language immersion curriculum rationale, scope, sequence, and learning materials to be used with children ages birth through third grade and older.
This theory of learning will be made available to the Kiowa people through current community-based language revitalization efforts, such as the kiowatalk.org website, the Kiowa Tribe Education Program, the Kiowa Tribe Head Start, the Kiowa Tribe Child Care Program, and the Kiowa Language and Culture Revitalization Program, with a copy being deposited at the Sam Noble Museum and the Kiowa Tribal Museum archives. I will also share the documents with the local school districts with large Kiowa student populations in Oklahoma including Anadarko Public Schools, then Carnegie Public Schools, Norman Public Schools, Lawton Public Schools, and Tulsa Public Schools, as an opportunity to provide culturally-sustaining curriculum specific to the Kiowa people. Additionally, coaching, mentoring, and in-service trainings on curriculum implementation and culturally-sustaining pedagogical approaches will be offered to interested school districts, tribal programs, and community-based language revitalization programs.
This fellowship would provide an opportunity for us to build on the work completed over the years and finalize a theory of learning that could be used by future educators to perpetuate Kiowa knowledge of child growth and development through various educational settings.
Click the following link to read an article about my project in the Kiowa Tribe’s newsletter, Kiowa News – August 2023: Click Here for Article
About the Luce Fellowship 2022
As an educator with the 2022 Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship cohort, through the First Nations Development Institute and the Henry Luce Foundation, my knowledge field is the intersection of early childhood education and Indigenous knowledge, specifically Kiowa knowledge of child growth and development, including language, culture, history, and contemporary life, basically, Indigenous Pedagogy. I am interested in spending the time during the Fellowship in conversations from Kiowa Elders to identify a Kiowa theory of knowledge for early childhood education. The expected outcome of this Fellowship would be to have a written progression and accompanying videos that Kiowa parents and teachers of Kiowa students can use to guide their work with Kiowa children. Ultimately, I want to produce a written Kiowa theory of child development, that can serve as a bridge between our historical knowledge and the contemporary experiences of Kiowa children.
The Luce Indigenous Knowledge Fellowship program was launched in 2019 by First Nations Development Institute and the Henry Luce Foundation. The fellowship program provides support to 10 Indigenous knowledge holders and knowledge makers who have the potential to move forward their fields in ways that can lead to broad, transformative impacts for Indigenous communities. To learn more about the fellowship program, please visit https://www.firstnations.org/2022-luce-indigenous-knowledge-fellows/