- Students and educators at Promontory School emphasize Indigenous education year-round.
- Field trips enhance learning, like a visit to Fremont Indian State Park and Museum.
- Experts say Indigenous education combats racism and builds empathy across cultures.
PERRY, Box Elder County — To mark Indigenous Peoples' Day, students and educators on Monday reflected on the importance of Indigenous education in furthering understanding, combating racism and building empathy for other cultures.
At Promontory School of Expeditionary Learning, administrators said teaching about Indigenous people is a year-round effort that even includes field trips — or "field work" — to far-out locations of cultural and historical significance.
"We actually do have some students that are indigenous," said director's administrative assistant Darcy Young. "We're trying to better understand their culture and express that to other students as well."
Young said the teaching progressively increases as children at the charter school get older to give them a broader understanding of American history.
"Most schools will do a brief, over-the-top of what it's about, where our school will dive deep into that," said teacher Glenna Petersen. "We really want the kids to know it and be able to get really interested in it and become experts."
Part of that process recently included a field trip to Fremont Indian State Park and Museum in Sevier County, where fifth graders like Bridger Hemphill, Kendra Mitchell, Sawyer Riley and Yukon Murray learned how life was long ago.
"We saw lots of petroglyphs and tons of stuff," Mitchell exclaimed.
Murray described his experience of learning to make bread, while Riley remarked about seeing "really old corn" and arrowheads.
"They had these spears called atlatls," Hemphill said during an interview with KSL-TV. "They used them to hunt, and they had small arrowheads and big arrowheads. The bigger ones were for the bigger animals, and the smaller ones were for the smaller animals."
Coach Rob Stewart served as an expedition leader for the excursion.
"They were able to learn about the human history of basically a disappeared culture," Stewart said. "Why do these cultures disappear? Do they actually disappear, or do they morph or blend into something different? The teachers had them very well prepared to receive the experience."
Academics maintain that Indigenous education like the kind received by children at Promontory is sorely needed everywhere. A 2019 survey even showed 87% of state standards fail to include Native American history after 1900, and 54% of states ignore it in K-12 curriculum.
"Our culture has never been highlighted — we've never been talked about in our history books," said Darren Parry, educator, author and former chairman of the Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation.
Parry called it "wonderful" to see schools that embrace other cultures, and he said he believed it could help build empathy and combat things like racism.
"I think it can only make the world a better place," he said. "Teaching Indigenous cultures and other cultures is vitally important if we really heal the divides that we have in the world today."
In the meantime, students said they enjoyed their time learning about Indigenous cultures.
"It was a really good experience to go find more about them," Hemphill said.
