Where Do You Grow Great Teachers?

BROWNING, Montana—When June Bullshoe Tatsey’s father told other members of the Blackfeet tribe that he wanted his four daughters to become teachers, they laughed. It was the 1930s, during the Great Depression, and American Indians faced discrimination applying for the few available jobs. Public school teachers in the Blackfeet Indian Reservation’s main town of Browning were white. Native people simply did not become teachers.

But by the mid-1970s, Bullshoe’s daughters had all realized their father’s dream. All four left the reservation to earn a master’s degree in education, and all four returned to work in the Browning school district, which encompasses nine different schools. Today the community remembers them as the “trailblazing Bullshoe sisters”—and their legacy continues not only through June Bullshoe Tatsey, the one living sibling, but through her daughter and her granddaughter, both of whom now work as educators on the reservation.

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/tomorrows_test/2016/06/the_blackfeet_tribe_needs_more_teachers_so_it_s_letting_them_train_without.html