Dakota Writing Project

by Lil Manthei, Takini School

This experience certainly rewrote my definition of what it means to be rural. For me, rural has always been the vast West River prairie and the seemingly endless fields of corn and beans that cover East River, South Dakota. At this conference, I was introduced to other areas of this country that are just as rural as my sacred South Dakota. The mountains of West Virginia; the peninsula in Washington State; the farmlands of Ohio; the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and Montana; Maine; and even the state of New York can claim rural status. Writing projects in these areas face many of the same issues that we deal with in South Dakota.

The issue of distance and time that is required of teachers to attend summer institutes. In South Dakota, some teachers have been required to travel distances of over 400 miles to attend an institute. Teachers that have families have found this to be difficult, if not at time impossible for them to accomplish. Other states also acknowledge this problem. In West Virginia, teachers would travel over two hours one way twice a month to attend a writing project function. This issue and others were addresses at one of the breakout sessions that I attended. The session was presented by members of the West Virginia Writing Project and Santee Wateree Project from South Carolina. Their solutions including combining student writing retreats along with teacher writing retreats. The teacher strand would include demonstrations. The South Carolina Project does a series of two-hour sessions monthly, beginning in January and ending in May. Their focus was on teacher inquiry.

Along with enlarging my sense of ruralness (new word: not yet in any dictionary but mine), I learned that the issue of poverty is characteristic of many of the areas represented at the Rural Sites Conference. The Puget Sound Writing Project in Washington state presented their annotated bibliography for teaching and working with students who live in some level of poverty. Given that two of the three highest poverty-level counties in the country are located in South Dakota, I feel that this annotated bibliography has a wealth of resources for educators throughout our state.

Other aspects of the journey to New Mexico included a trip to see the Acoma Pueblo and visit with a tour guide of the Pueblo who had attended Haskell Indian School with a friend of mine from Pine Ridge. We also took a tour of Sky City Elementary School, where the native language is integrated completely into a third-grade classroom. I also participated in a “walk, shop, and talk” trip through Old Town, where a sidewalk vendor told me the story of the day that he made a turquois cross that I purchased from him. It was a Palm Sunday, and he was watching parishioners entering and exiting the San Felipe Mission.

All-in-all, I was completely enchanted by the “land of enchantment” that is Arizona.