The
CRADLEBOARD
Teaching Project
What do you get when you cross an Academy Award winning songwriter with
a teacher’s degree, and thirty positive years of travel throughout
Indian reservations and the concert stages of the world? Buffy Sainte-Marie's
Cradleboard Teaching Project.
Cradleboard is about raising self-esteem and self-identity in all school
children through the direct study of Native American culture. This Project
puts Native American educators in the driver’s seat of delivering
accurate, enriching Indian curriculum into the hands of mainstream teachers
at all grade levels.
The Cradleboard Teaching Project provides teachers with a rich and accurate
curriculum, lesson plans, videos, and tapes, and something more. Non-Indian
children are given a chance to learn with and through their long distance
Native American peers on Indian reservations across the continent, in
a private, protected online environment. Indian children are encouraged
to let the world know who they really are.
“Cradleboard is truly live and interactive, and that’s what
makes the difference”, Sainte-Marie says. “We combine the power
of the internet with content and lesson plans developed by Native American
educators. It’s a lot of fun for kids to study something as rich
and cohesive as Indian cultures with the people themselves.”
When her own son was in grade five, his teacher, Ms. Adrya Siebring of
Kauai, asked for help in presenting a better Indian Unit to her students
at Island School in Hawaii. Year after year Sainte-Marie, a 5-year "Sesame
Street" veteran, added to the wealth of the teaching unit, and in
1990 she began partnering classes at Island School with classes of Indian
students in Saskatchewan, Canada. “It made everything come alive.
It became real and fun and gave a sense of positive reality to what up
until then had always felt like dead text.”
In 1993, after 11 years of running the Project with no funding at all,
Buffy helped schools to connect through the internet on their computers.
In the fall of 1996, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan,
announced a two-year major grant to Buffy's Nihewan Foundation for American
Indian Education for the Cradleboard Teaching Project. At the moment,
participating mainstream children in New York, Hawaii, Washington D.C.,
and Washington state are partnering with children at five Cradleboard
Pilot Sites: Mohawk, Coast Salish, Ojibwe, Cree, and Lakota.
“It hurts to be misperceived all your life,” Sainte-Marie says
about Indian people of all ages. “Cradleboard reaches both Indian
and non-Indian children with positive realities while they are young.
This is the cultural ‘real deal’ that comes out of the Indian
community to youngsters half a globe away, in time, we hope to benefit
the lives of Indian children who wonder ‘Who am I?... and who do
others think I am?’ ”
Like the cradleboard (a child carrier) for which the project is named,
the Cradleboard Teaching Project is a frame, designed for the benefit
of children, flexible in use, protective and decorative, and usable far
beyond its source of origin. It comes out of Indian country but reaches
far beyond, into the mainstream classroom and into the future of education.
Cradleboard turns on the lights in public education about Native American
culture - past, present, and most important for the children - the future.
Now, through the White House, the President's Initiative on Race links
to the Cradleboard Teaching Project as an example of "Best Practices".
The Cradleboard Teaching Project is an initiative of the Nihewan Foundation
for American Indian Education, a nonprofit scholarship foundation, founded
by Buffy Sainte-Marie in 1969.
