Different kind of teacher: Native elder draws on experience

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (AP) – She always wanted to be a teacher, it just didn’t happen the way the quick-learning little girl from Alatna could have ever imagined.

At the age of 80, Elizabeth Fleagle is in the prime of her teaching career.

Last week was in the classroom with a small group of students at the Interior-Aleutians Campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ College of Rural and Community Development. She works in the Rural Human Services program as an Alaska Native elder in the classroom, helping professors prepare students for social work in rural Alaska.

It’s been a long road to the classroom. One marked with pain, but also hard work and a big dose of luck and faith.

“I became a teacher, just a different kind,” she said. “A cultural and an inner, spiritual teacher. Teaching people how to be heal within so you can be well enough to listen to your clients.”

She’s drawn on a lifetime of experience and traditional knowledge to help students get ready for a career of social work in rural Alaska.

A survivor of domestic abuse and alcoholism, she said she knows first-hand the problems facing people in small villages, but also that there can be healing through tradition and spirituality.

“I got my life and turned it over to God because I had made a mess out of my life and I healed within before I started working with people,” she said. “That’s why I’m working in this program now. I have a lot of insight in healing.”

She moved to Fairbanks in 1979, leaving behind her previous life and looking to strike it out on her own. She found a job as a janitor at the university, and spent nearly 20 years cleaning the dorms.

When she retired and was at a loss of what to do next, she turned to God.

“Before I retired I thought, ‘What will I do with my life?”’ she said. “I got dressed at 2:30 in the morning, got dressed and I sat down. I didn’t have keys and I didn’t have anything. I sat down and cried, ‘What do I do now?”’

It was then, in the following days and weeks and months, that her phone began to ring.

Her educational career began with Howard Luke’s culture camp, teaching students to bead and reconnect with their cultural roots.

“That’s where they made me into who I am,” she said. “They taught me patience because they were troubled.”

Beadwork has always been important to Fleagle and in the classroom, she is usually working on something.

“I don’t know how to sit still without doing anything,” she said with a laugh. “That’s part of my healing and that is part of the cultural healing.”

She would later transition into the Rural Human Services program, where she helps with social work and psychology programs.

In the classroom she serves as a mentor, helping students bridge cultural barriers. But perhaps her most important role is as a counselor of sorts for the students, pulling struggling students aside and helping them work through their own problems to become an effective counselor themselves.

“I remind them to never forget where they come from and don’t try to be who they aren’t,” she said. “That’s the main thing. You have to be who you are on the inside.”

And while she may be imparting valuable lessons and healing to the students, she said she’s often learning just as much or more than them.

“They think I’m helping them, but they’re helping me be in the classroom,” she said.

She said she has no plans to slow down any time soon. She frequently travels to the Lower 48 to help other elders enter the classroom in a similar way she has.

“There’s so much need in this world. I can’t do everything but I’ll do what I can,” she said.

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Information from: Fairbanks (Alaska) Daily News-Miner, http://www.newsminer.com