Brenda Beyal told the third graders she was visiting at Spanish Oaks Elementary to tune their ears and to repeat after her.
“Shí naashá,” Beyal said slowly and clearly in her native language. The students repeated the phrase, and Beyal explained that they were saying “I walk” in Navajo.
Beyal is Diné and an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation. She said that while “we like to call ourselves Diné,” other people gave them the name Navajo.
When Beyal told the class Navajo is one of the hardest languages to learn, they looked amazed. The students focused on copying her words exactly.
“You guys are awesome,” she told them, singling out a student with a zombie on their shirt. “Your ears hear Navajo or Diné, I heard you.”
After the students got the words to Shí Naashá down, they learned the melody.
What makes this lesson unique is every word of it was approved by the Navajo Nation’s Department of Diné Education and signed off on by Nation President Buu Nygren. It is part of Brigham Young University’s Native American Curriculum Initiative, which Beyal co-created.
Beyal worked in the classroom for many years and then was hired by BYU’s ARTS Partnership, which focuses on improving arts education in Utah elementary schools. While Beyal worked on arts-integrated lessons generally, she noticed that teachers would often ask her questions about cultural appropriation during classroom visits. She thinks they were prompted by the color of her skin.
“They felt like I had more credibility, maybe, I don’t know,” Beyal said.
The teacher of the Spanish Oaks third grade class, Heidi Dimmick, said when she previously taught about Indigenous people, she tried to do or own research but struggled to find resources and didn’t know what was appropriate.
For a while, Dimmick just did what her fellow educators were doing.
“And then I didn’t want to do something wrong or inappropriate, so then I just didn’t teach anything,” Dimmick said.
Beyal saw a clear need for teachers to feel confident teaching about Native people. She started with a couple of those types of lessons and presented them with a colleague at an arts education conference.
The response was positive and teachers wanted more, which sparked the creation of the initiative by BYU’s ARTS Partnership in collaboration with the Utah Division of Arts and Museums. They’ve received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Beyal said it was important to the team that they not only create lessons about Utah’s eight sovereign nations but that the curriculum amplified each tribe’s individual voice. They approached tribal leaders to ask, “What would you like the children of Utah to know about your ways? Your cultural ways, your history, your foods, your arts?”
Overall, there was one thing that each tribe in Utah wanted kids to know.
“They said, ‘that we are still here.’ Because most textbooks treat Native Americans as historical figures,” said Emily Soderborg, who is the initiative’s project manager and is not Indigenous.
In addition to the lessons, the initiative has a list of Native American artists in Utah who are available to visit elementary schools.
Outside of that, each tribe had different things they wanted students to know.
The Navajo Nation, for example, wanted students to learn about The Long Walk. In the 1800s, the U.S. military forced the Diné people to leave their homelands and walk hundreds of miles to Bosque Redondo, New Mexico. Beyal said the land was harsh and unfamiliar and hundreds died. It was a time of suffering, which Beyal said is how Diné people still refer to it.
Beyal explained to the Spanish Oaks class that the song Shí Naashá commemorates the Diné people returning to their land.
“They saw the beautiful, sacred mountains and they couldn’t contain themselves,” Beyal told the students. “It just brought such happiness to them that they were free from four years of being imprisoned.”
Other tribes wanted kids to know about water rights, their relationship with the environment, or their federal sovereignty. The initiative has so far published lessons with the Confederated Tribes of the Goshute, the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation and the Paiute Indian Tribe of Utah.
Soderborg said they’ve met with each of the eight nations, but only work with one at a time.
“Every sovereign nation that we are working with, it’s a different timeline, it’s a different process. And we go at their speed, not our speed,” Soderborg said.
The Navajo Nation lesson took years to create and get approved. When they work with tribes, they view it as a partnership.
Brenda Whitehorse, heritage language director at the San Juan School District, was appointed by the Navajo Nation to work with Soderborg and Beyal.
Whitehorse said teaching Utah students about The Long Walk, the strength of Diné people and that the Navajo Nation is still here, is meaningful.
“Because they [my ancestors] survived The Long Walk, we are able to be here and be present in today’s society and still have our voice heard, still have our government,” Whitehorse said.
Some songs are sacred to tribal nations and should not be shared in classrooms, Whitehorse said. By getting the approval of tribal leaders, she said it respects their authority to decide what should and should not be shared.
“We still have our elders and they still have their voice,” Whitehorse said. “They still hold that wisdom.”
Beyal said she and Soderborg “work hard to make sure that we are listening and not interpreting, but rather listening and sharing.”
Some history books will say how long different tribes have been around according to scientists. But Beyal said a cultural specialist for the Confederated Tribes of Goshute told them “we believe we have been here since time immemorial,” so that’s what they tell students.
The lessons integrate a variety of subjects — math, science, drama, English language arts, etc. — so teachers can use them all year long.
In the Spanish Oaks class, the lesson about Shí Naashá incorporated health standards. Beyal and Soderborg talk with the students about one particular word in the song: hózhǫ́, which means walking in beauty and is a core Diné belief. It doesn’t refer to physical beauty, they told the students, but to having balance in your life and walking on a path of goodness and gratitude.
They asked students to brainstorm ways they can manage stress in their lives and walk in beauty. Then they sat in a circle and sang the song again, except this time, they took turns singing out their way of managing stress.
“I’ll talk to my mom to feel happy,” one student sang and the rest of the group answered with “Ahala ahalá gó naashá” before moving on.
Others said they can play with their dog, talk with someone they trust, listen to music or read a book to clear their mind.
“Do you think we all have different hard things in our lives?” Soderborg asked. She talked about having empathy for others, even if the students don’t know exactly what they are going through.
Dimmick, the class’s teacher, said now her class talks about the eight sovereign nations a lot more. As a teacher, the lessons are empowering because she knows she is teaching something that is tribe-approved.
While the curriculum includes different subjects, Beyal said the arts are central because they can communicate things in a different way.
“It gets to the students' emotions, it helps them to make those connections and helps them to see what they have in common with the different tribal nations that we are creating these lessons with.”
And students are not just learning about the sovereign nations and their history, they’re learning from them and through their perspectives.
