Bayfield Middle School’s Native American Heritage Club is using events such as Native American Heritage Month, held in November, as a way to raise historical and cultural awareness and understanding.
Bayfield Middle School Dean of Students Kelly Erickson, a New Mexico native, started the club in November 2022 because he believes it is important that Native American students enjoy a connection to their heritage, according to a news release on the Bayfield School District’s website.
“I knew about the Pueblos, Apaches, Navajos and (Comanches) from first or second grade. We were always connected to the tribes and never thought anything of it,” Erickson said in the release.
The club builds those connections by inviting Native American guest speakers to its monthly meetings. Some notable speakers at recent meetings include Bayfield High School boys basketball coach Damon White Thunder.
“I wasn’t in tune with my culture growing up in a border town. It took me getting into the service to reach out and find my culture and my identity,” White Thunder said in the release.
Other guest speakers have included a Navajo woman who attended Fort Lewis College and then Marquette University, but “took great value in learning the traditions of her people” when she returned to care for her grandmother during the COVID-19 pandemic, the release said.
The students who participate in the club enjoy learning about various Native American cultures, and they appreciate using the club to share knowledge of those cultures with their friends, the release said.
“My grandma has worked at the Southern Ute bank my whole life, so she has always taught me about the Southern Ute, and I had a friend who is Navajo and knew everything about his tribe, so he always talked to me about that,” eighth grader Levi Vaughn, a member of the Choctaw Nation, said in the release.
Leading up to Native American Heritage Month, the club visited places like the Aztec Ruins, the Jicarilla Apache reservation and Mesa Verde National Park to explore the history of the region’s Native tribes, the release said.
“I really like going on the field trips and being able to go see other people and their personal culture. We’re all Native American, but the individuality (of the tribes) is important to me,” eighth grader Harmony Krug, who is part Alaska Native (Tlingit) and part Navajo, said in the release.
A central benefit club members receive from being involved with the club is a sense of pride and identity they find through the studies about their cultures, the release said.
mhollinshead@durangoherald.com
