Introducing Mystery Class #1
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Hinikaragiwino! We are students in the combined 7th and 8th grade classroom at St. Augustine's Indian Mission School, located on the Winnebago Reservation in northeast Nebraska. Our teacher is Ms. Murphy. Our school had it's 100th Anniversary during this 2009-2010 school year, so we are especially pleased and proud to have been a Mystery Class this year. We hope you had fun looking for us, and hope you enjoy getting to know a little more about our school, culture and community! Here is some additional information that might be of interest to you.
St. Augustine School as it appeared in early 1900's
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| Our Location and Our Sovereign Nation | ||||||||
The Winnebago Reservation is the home to The Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, a sovereign Nation that is also known as Ho-Chunk. It is located in northeast Nebraska in Thurston County. The Missouri River borders us on the east. Adjacent to us is the reservation the Omaha Tribe of Nebraska.
The Winnebago Reservation is located in
On the native grasslands of the Reservation, the Winnebago Tribe is involved in restoring bison to the lands.
Our weather here includes cold winters and hot summers, usually. In spring and early summer, this part of the country is also known as "Tornado Alley", because of the frequency of tornadoes that can come.
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| Our Village | ||||||||
Our village of Winnebago is the largest community on the Winnebago Reservation, and it is located on the eastern side of the Reservation. In fact, it is located where two highways join, specifically Highways 75 and 77.
Winnebago is home to most Winnebago tribal members and accounts for almost thirty percent of the Reservation's resident population. Recent population figures show there are about 768 people that live in Winnebago In our village, we have several facilities that are important to the community including a hospital, two stores, a gift shop, art gallery, fire department, police station, a two-year college, an indoor swimming pool, a museum, library, culture center, and two schools. The college is Little Priest Tribal College. The museum is the Angel DeCora Museum. The culture center is a large hall where people gather for cultural events which range from wakes and funerals to other community doings and it is called, simply, the Ho-Chunk Center. One of the largest events for our Tribe each year is the annual Homecoming or Pow-Wow.
It occurs every year in July, and this year the Pow-Wow will happen on July 22-25, 2010. This will be the 144th Homecoming celebration. It is the oldest Pow-Wow in North America.
People come from all around to celebrate, dance, and visit with relatives and friends. There are traditional drumming and singing demonstrations also. |
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| Our School | ||||||||
St Augustine's Indian Mission School is located on the north side of the village of Winnebago. In addition to students from the Winnebago Reservation, students from the Omaha Reservation also attend the school. We don’t have a school mascot, but this year our Ho-Chunk language team adopted the name "The Crusaders.”
The school sits up on a small rise with woods behind it. Our compound consists of a K – 8 elementary school, a Catholic Church (where we go to mass each Wednesday), the school museum, a language and culture building, and another small building that is vacant that will eventually be used as a class room. Our school has 7 main classrooms and 2 smaller ones, a library, a gym, a school office, and the Mission Office. Meals are prepared and served in the church basement just down the hill from the school. We also have a playground. Our school also opened a museum to help honor the 100 year history of the school. It is located in a building just to the west of the school. It is actually a 1900's classroom, complete with an image of St. Katharine Drexel at the head of the room.
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| Our Class | ||||||||
We are a combined 7th and 8th grade classroom. This year we have a small class, just seven students, two in 8th and five in 7th grade. Three of our students participated in sports this year, basketball and track, through the public school. Keith likes the Celtics, the Red Sox and Utah Jazz. Isaiah likes the Phoenix Suns and the New York Yankees. Our teacher, Ms. Murphy, used to live in Massachusetts. She likes the Red Sox. We also have an art teacher, Mr. Nissen. He is cool and fun. Learning our Tribal Language and Culture: Ho-Chunk language is taught four days a week by an elder, Harold Cleveland Sr., who comes in and teaches new words and phrases and also plays games. It is the plan of our school to eventually find an Omaha language teacher so Omaha students will also be able to learn their own language at school. Both these Native languages are endangered, which means they could be lost if more people don’t learn to speak and save it. Knowing your language means being able to understand more of the traditions and songs and prayers. People get named in their own language and sometimes ceremonies are conducted using the language too. It is good to know your heritage and language. Since Journey North program helps students learn about the four seasons, we want to teach you the names of the seasons in the Ho-Chunk language. The seasons are:
All of the students in our class are Native Americans. Some like to do beadwork. Some like to dance at pow-wows. Some go to sweat ceremonies or other events. Here are a few photos from our school website showing young people in traditional tribal clothing.
Our school has a Native American drum group named the Kateri Warriors. They sing for other people and teach people that the drum speaks. They bring along dancers to dance with the drum. People also learn about the different dances we do and different regalia we wear this way. The drum group performed for the Pope John Paul II in Rome several years ago. |
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| Visitors and Field Trips | ||||||||
We had a special visitor come to the school this year to help celebrate our school's 100th Anniversary. Do you know who it was? It was Joba Chamberlain (Ho-Chunk pitcher for the World Champion N.Y. Yankees). He came to our school the day before Christmas break and he brought us all gifts, including the teachers! Many students got their pictures taken with him. It was cool!
Our class on a recent field trip to Washington D.C. Of course field trips are always our favorite activity and this year we went on a big one! We went to Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia, PA last month. In D.C. we got to see the White House, the Capitol, the Vietnam War Memorial, The Washington Monument, and Smithsonian Museums including the Museum of the Native American. We went to a lot of other places there too. After that, we went to Pennsylvania and got to visit the convent started by Saint Katherine Drexel, the sister who built our school and church over 100 years ago! Then it was on to have a day to tour sites in Philadelphia before we had to fly back to Nebraska. It was a fun trip!
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| Books We Like | ||||||||
Here are some of the books we enjoyed reading this year:
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| Games and Foods We Like | ||||||||
Some games we like are basketball and Guitar Hero, but there is also the game of Kasu (a Ho-Chunk/Winnebago dice game). Some of the foods we like to eat are fry bread (that’s bread dough fried in oil), Indian tacos (taco meat and fixings on top of fry bread), Indian dogs (hot dogs in fry bread), corn soup (Indian corn and meat in a broth), mahic soup (made from the top leaves of milkweed early in the spring), and hominy soup. As you can probably tell, we really like fry bread!
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| Hanickjawino! | ||||||||
We sure had fun being a Mystery Classroom and hope you will write and ask questions or share some information about yourself with us! You can write to our teacher Ms. Murphy. But write soon, or write next year, because just like you we will all be away for summer vacation. But, it would be fun for other grades in our school to find Buddy Classrooms for next year!
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