Here is an article from a local native newspaper about my wife and I's good friend Hope Flanagan Teacher brings tradition to addiction education.
"The
kindergarteners sit in a circle on the floor, where guest teacher Hope
Flanagan has laid out a venn diagram – two overlapping wooden hoops.
She has explained that students should put items that can be used in a
good way within one circle, and items that can be used in a bad way
within the other. “If it’s both, put it in the middle.”
Flanagan hands one girl, Jocelyn LeGarde, a tin of American Spirit tobacco. The girl puts it in the overlapping region.
“Why’d you put it there?” Hope asks.
“Because you can pray with it,” LeGarde says, “but you can also smoke cigarettes with it.”
Flanagan’s role at Anishinabe Academy, a pre-K through 10th grade school in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis that focuses on American Indian values, includes teaching the various classes about tobacco in all its forms and uses. She has many props that she’s collected, traditional blends of tobacco that have been sent to her, roots, red willow cuttings, “rabbit” tobacco, sumac, red osier dogwood, nicotiana rustica, and more. Flanagan can talk about each of these plants, and their uses, in depth.
Her position is Storyteller and Alcohol, Tobacco and Drug Prevention Specialist 1, though much of what Flanagan (Seneca) does at Anishinabe Academy consists of forming and building students’ connections to their heritage early on."
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