The things that break us are not the not the core stuff. It's the ancillary stuff. An order of Benedictine nuns came to Yankton, South Dakota in the 1880's and has been a mainstay of the town along the Missouri River ever since. Today they share a campus with Mt. Marty University and the largest [...]
Were Muddy Mo’s a campus cafe there would be bad folk singers on a microphone late in the evening; and were it a bar it would be the kind with local brews on tap where everybody knows your name. Instead it is a simple coffee shop in an old brick building on one of the [...]
About four years ago I visited and reported on the personalized learning in elementary and middle schools in Harrisburg (South Dakota) School District. Since then I have pointed all of my school network colleagues to Harrisburg; if you want to see what a transformed school of today/future looks and works like, get on a plane [...]
I live near San Diego where rain any more is as rare as Leap Days; a weather report of “partly cloudy and 25% chance of rain”means that all the prayers in the world won’t get those squalls to spin south below Los Angeles". On the Dakota prairie, that same weather report means something else entirely. [...]
Back then, you told your kids to take care of their health, your house and your food. That's the three things should be your most concern. Everything else should be secondary. Mary Thomsen is a spry 95, still working every day at the local Community Action center, mostly coordinating food and supply donations to those [...]
I got the first vague idea for this Wisdom Road journey when I heard Tamera Miyasato give a workshop to South Dakota educators about five years ago. She has developed s curriculum around core values of Lakota wisdom traditions. I felt that virtually every educator I had ever met would see the value of learning [...]
We will heal our country by first healing ourselves. Mona Miyasato is the archetype I came on this journey to find. She is a Dakota elder and life-long educator. Now 80, she describes herself as growing up "aculturated" to the dominant, or White, society. Mona's father was a child around the time of the last [...]
Small-time horse rancher, Brad Bush "Let’s just pray that 100 years from now, a couple guys can stand in this yard and have a decent conversation and share ideas like we just did. Then we’ll know we made it.” I spent the night in the side yard of Brad Busch's little farm near [...]
The Perino family have been ranching horses and cattle near Newcastle, Wyoming for several generations. I got to spend a couple of hours around the kitchen table with two of those generations, including an invitation to a wonderful lunch. I will report in more detail, but this was such a key takeaway: Patriarch Matt Perino [...]
I have walked many forest paths; until now perhaps the most viscerally mythical was the trail through moss-hung trees in central Nepal after which Tolkien modeled his Elfin Lothlorien. A walk in the Paha Sapa, what most of us now call the Black Hills of South Dakota, rivals that. The veil between what-was and what-is [...]
