Seal Meat in the Classroom: Indigenous Knowledge and School Mathematics

Abstract

Nancy Sharp, a Yup’ik educator from Manokotak, Alaska, describes herself as an elitnauristet maklagtutulit (Sharp, 1994, p. 8), meaning “a teacher who eats seal meat.” Unfortunately, she is an exception; most teachers of native students, the majority of whom are white, do not have the knowledge or cultural connections to live on traditional foods such as seal. Likewise, those who do subsist on seal most often do not teach in schools. However, such bridges are needed to bring together the world of indigenous culture with that of the classroom, creating new cultural spaces where both the mandated curriculum of schools and traditional cultural practices such as eating seal can thrive. While we may have left behind the era of education as simply a vehicle for the assimilation of native students, schools still have not found consistently meaningful ways to incorporate indigenous knowledge in the classroom (Kanu, 2006). In this chapter, I describe a successful approach to this task that gives teachers of indigenous students the understandings they need to become an elitnauristet maklagtutulit.