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But he won’t back down, especially to his mother in front of therest of the boys. He says he wants to go to the office. So she sends him.
            The moment has passed. The rest of the boys settle down. But it is Friday, almost lunchtime and too late for the lesson. The period is a wash.
            Black Eagle takes a long pull from a coffee mug, stares at the back wall and sighs. “That’s why we go,” she says, referring to teachers leaving.
            “And guess what?” she says. “These are all my nephews and nieces.”
            Yesterday Black Eagle beamed at the sonorous way the 3rd graders belted out their Assiniboine language.
            “Nambe chimnuzinkt,” (“I will shake your hand”) they say in unison, the large words familiar to them.
            But she laments the change she witnesses after grammar school. Once they hit 9th grade, the influence of white culture and of thug culture work on the kids, she says. There is no one to teach them how to exist as Indians in America.
            “These guys got to do both worlds and it’s harder on them,” she says of the juniors. Still, she takes heart in their class. Despite how they challenge her “at least they’re here.” 
            Black Eagle praises the hard work of some of her white colleagues.
            “Giesler is like a father figure to many that have none,” she says and also praises Ginter’s attempts to teach about culture.
            The lack of cultural training for new teachers upsets her. But worse, the nature of the school itself runs counter to the customs of Native Americans, she says. In school, she explains, students are taught to give the quick answer, the precise answer, the first answer.
            But Indian culture teaches that it’s more important to give the best answer, no matter how long it takes. New teachers rarely understand, she says, that “it’s not in European culture to take two years to answer your grandfather with the best answer.”
            Black Eagle hopes to incorporate beading and drumming into her coursework. She considers that possibility when she weighs whether to return.
            Black Eagle doesn’t want to be a teacher who leaves. Many students knock on her door at night to watch TV and get help with their homework when things aren’t good in their homes, she says.
            It’s March and Black Eagle hasn’t taken the medical entry exams nor applied to medical school. At her age, it would be highly unusual for a program to accept her: She would be nearly 50 by the time she finished residency. But she won’t admit that.
            “Should I stay?” she asks. “Should I be a doctor?”
After the day’s final bell rings, with the kids out of the room, Black Eagle begins to tremble, and tears of anger rise up in her eyes.
            “Can these kids read like they’re supposed to? No,” she spits. “Why are we on the bottom?” She swings her arm out, toward the rest of the school, toward the windy town outside her classroom.
            “What’s going to happen to our language? What’s going to happen to our culture?” she asks with narrowed eyes.
            But she feels the weight of responsibility on her shoulders.
            “What price will I pay on the other side when they say, ‘But you knew the language?'”

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