This spring, my friend Peter Baron of AdmissionQUEST visited campus to make a short video of school life. In the process, he met and interviewed a junior named Aaron Thomas. As can happen, a short time with one remarkable student can change everything! Proctor has a Native American program? How did that happen at a little school in New Hampshire? Peter asked me to write an article that is currently posted on the AdmissionQuest site, and I expand on it in the paragraphs below. One important point: this story fails to recognize the efforts and passions of all who made Proctor's celebration of Native American culture a reality, (David Fowler, Bert Hinkley and many others.) Here we go:

Programs that shape the heart, soul and character of schools are often born in administrative retreats, curriculum huddles or department meetings. But Proctor Academy’s Native American Program traces a long and surprising path from an incident at one of the nation’s poorest communities: Wounded Knee, South Dakota.

 

George Emeny, a young Hotchkiss-educated geometry teacher at Proctor, was running a study hall from his dormitory apartment when a boy asked him to proofread a history paper. Three weeks prior, on February 27, 1973, members of the American Indian Movement, with the help of local Oglala Lakota (Sioux) occupied the town of Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The student’s paper attempted to address the resulting stand off with U.S. Marshalls. Reading the paper, George—who had spent childhood summers hunting, trapping minnows and building canoes with the Athabascan people of central Canada—was struck by the student’s inability to capture the true angst of Native existence. “I went to [Head of School] David Fowler and asked to teach a term of Native American history,” he recalls.

 

What followed is testament to the power of vision, commitment and passion. Aware of his own limited experience of Native cultures, George spent the next eight summers studying with Lakota language professor Albert White Hat at Sinte Gleska University in Mission, South Dakota. His contacts with Native leaders expanded. Albert became a visiting professor at Proctor, where he serves as a Trustee, today. Below, he addresses a Trustee committee on the value of the knowledge and perspectives of Native peoples.



He hosted trustee/faculty/staff  retreats on the Rosebud Reservation.  Albert’s children attended Proctor. Proctor students spent trimesters at Wounded Knee High School. Albert’s adopted brother, John Around Him, traveled annually to Andover, New Hampshire from his teaching post at Oglala Lakota College, to instruct Proctor students in Native culture and spirituality. Teachers learned to conduct traditional “inipi” sweat lodge ceremonies on the shores of a school pond. Dartmouth College cooperated with annual pow-wows featuring traditional dance ceremonies and exhibits. The cultures of Navaho, Hopi and local Aquinnah (Wampanoag) peoples were reflected in the student body, and Harvard University’s Tim Begay (Navaho) spent two years teaching, advising and recruiting for the school. Below, Albert poses with George Emeny and Jacqui White Hat '87.

The effect of the initiative is subtle yet pervasive on campus. Addressing the community in 2009, Albert offered this: “When I was young, I went out to the canyons on a vision quest. Looking up, everywhere I saw eagles. Each was an individual and different, but they filled the sky. When I returned, I told a tribal elder what I had seen. He said, ‘You are the fortunate one to have seen the Eagle Nation.’ When I look at you students today, I feel that I am witnessing the Eagle Nation: each different, but making a whole that is complete.”

 

In the 1990s, a Native American Scholarship Fund was created to support attendance by Native students in perpetuity. The Assistant School Leader for the 2010-11 school year is Aaron Thomas, an articulate, proud Navaho. And to complete a circle…Aaron will be a mentor to Albert’s grandson, Mark White Hat, who will graduate in 2014.

Below, Emily White Hat '94, her son Mark (who will be a ninth grader at Proctor this year,) George Emeny, Albert White Hat and Aaron Thomas '11.