Class of 2024: Teena Starlight reflects on her commitment to embedding Tsuut’ina culture in education

Even at an early age, Werklund School of Education graduate Dr. Teena Starlight, BEd'99, PhD’24, understood that the education system did not reflect her community.

“Since I was five, even before I entered school, I wanted to be a school teacher,” she says. “By the time I was 12, I started noticing that there were no Indigenous teachers.”

The exception was what Starlight refers to as a Tsuut'ina cultural course, but others labelled a special needs program. Once a week, Indigenous instructors led classes that included language learning, storytelling and craft-making. Her aunt was one of these instructors. When Starlight asked her why she did not teach all the subjects, her aunt explained that they were only permitted to teach the Indigenous course.   

Starlight was now determined to be the teacher she never had as a student. “I wanted to become one of those teachers that teach all the classes.”

Learning from Elders

Starlight acknowledges that she felt out of place while pursuing her Bachelor of Education degree at the University of Calgary. Misperceptions about Indigenous communities shared in classes, coupled with being the only Indigenous student until the fourth year of her program, made finding her voice challenging.

“I really struggled even to put my hand up in the first year of university,” she says.

“Just to come out and talk one-on-one was really difficult.”

Despite these hindrances, she completed her undergraduate degree and, after teaching at O.S. Geiger School for two years, accepted a job with the Kainai Board of Education. She remained with Kainai for 14 years, during which time she earned a master’s degree at the University of Lethbridge. 

Starlight credits the opportunity to work closely with Blackfoot Elders and Knowledge Keepers during this program for helping her to understand why teachers might feel uncertain when engaging with Indigenous communities. 

“It was so intimidating,” she says. “This is where I could appreciate why so many teachers, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, are hesitant. You don't want to offend.”

Embedding Tsuut'ina ways into the curriculum

Starlight returned home to Tsuut’ina in 2016 as a teacher and then vice-principal at Chiila Elementary School. When a position as curriculum developer became available, she jumped at the chance.

“I was like: ‘Oh, I can do this!’ These are my own people. These are our schools,” Starlight says.

It was in this role that Starlight applied all the knowledge she had gained over the years to ensure Tsuut’ina culture would be fully embedded in all aspects of the school curriculum. 

Working with the education director, she set out first to help school staff better understand Tsuut’ina culture. Starlight began by consulting with Elders. They spoke about Tsuut’ina protocols and traditions, their people’s place on the land, the need to understand how to survive off the land, and respect.

From these insights, she developed guidelines that explained protocols pertaining to ceremony, for approaching an Elder and for inviting them into the school or classroom, among other practices. Each year following, she taught the guidelines to school staff.

Next, she worked with Elders to create a cultural calendar that introduced traditional ways and customs into the Head Start to Grade 12 curriculum, teaching how and why these traditional practices and rituals were performed at specific times.

“We started making sure that students were on the land on a daily basis ... taking them out to traditional sites that were important to Tsuut'ina people. Putting pipe ceremonies back into the schools, so that they knew the Elders and they knew the protocols around them.”

Starlight ensured the teachers working in Tsuut'ina schools learned alongside the students. 

“We took the teachers out, so they were actually experiencing it themselves, able to ask questions, able to understand and make direct connections to the curriculum that they were teaching,” she says.

When a few teachers suggested that these activities were taking valuable time away from other classes, Starlight, adamant that Tsuut’ina culture would not be sidelined, illustrated how it could all come together.    

“I would sit with them and say, ‘Well, actually, here's your science connection and your math connection and your social studies connection,’" she says. "I knew that curriculum in and out, so I could show, per grade and per subject, how it connected.”

Dr. Starlight 

In part because of the pushback she received, Starlight decided it was the ideal time for her next challenge. She returned to the Werklund School in the PhD program. This time, her experience was much more positive, but not without challenge. 

Her plan was to engage pre-service teachers in sharing circles and Beaver Bundle Ceremonies in order to prepare them to implement Indigenous teachings in their practice. When the proposal was rejected by both the Tsuut'ina and Kainai boards of education, Starlight informed her supervisor that she was ready to quit the program.

“I told her all I ever wanted to do was give back to all of the Elders that taught me and helped me to become the teacher that I am today.”.

She did not quit. Instead, she shifted her approach and met with the Elders. Starlight valued the opportunity to reconnect with those she had built relationships with decades earlier.   

“The Tsuut'ina Elders that I interviewed were the same ones that, in 1993, said they wanted the language and culture to be the foundation of Tsuut'ina. The same ones that helped me build the guidelines, as well,” she says.

The stories the Elders shared became a key component of Starlight’s thesis, which explores ways to sustain, validate and legitimize Tsuut'ina way of life, and restore land-based practices within Tsuut’ina Nation schools. 

A new name

Crossing the stage at this year’s convocation makes Starlight the first member of the Tsuut'ina Nation to earn a doctorate. She is in good company, as her uncle, Bruce Starlight, received an honorary doctorate from Mount Royal University. 

In recognition of her significant accomplishments, Starlight was gifted a headdress at a transfer ceremony this summer. At the same event, she was given a Tsuut'ina name by her uncle, Gerald Meguinis. Both acknowledgements are high honours in Indigenous communities and quite meaningful to Starlight. 

Starlight says her gifted name, Ádadadló Ts’ika, is an ancient and complex word that can be applied to both men and women.  

“When you use it for a female, it implies strength because women go through different trials and different barriers than men,” she says. “It entails a lot, so the best translation that we came up with that might explain everything was, ‘Strives to complete goals beyond all barriers woman.’”