As a kid, growing up in the open sky and high desert of New Mexico, Val Kie learned early on how to play the game of “School.”
The daughter of a teen mother on the Laguna Pueblo, Kie noticed all the things her mom didn’t get to do—and resolved to achieve them on her behalf. That drive led her to become not just the first person in her family to graduate from college, but to do so from Stanford. Yet almost as soon as she left the comfort of her community, she felt like she didn’t belong.
“Everyone was so awash in privilege and theory,” she explained to me. “And I was so homesick. But my community got me through.”
She found Indigenous professors, built community with other Native students, and conducted research on the uranium mine that had been poisoning her pueblo for generations. And then, when she graduated, she decided to make sure kids like her never had to feel like they were “not enough.”
“At that time,” she said, “most Indigenous schools were still federally run. There wasn’t much happening that was focused on the needs and the development of our youth in ways that really grounded them in their culture and identity.”
Shortly after returning home, she heard an ad on the radio for a new charter school—Native American Community Academy (NACA)—promising to answer what Kie felt was the question: How can public education embrace the future while sustaining Native identities, culture, and traditions?
It launched with a small set of portable classrooms on the campus of an Albuquerque middle school—and a faculty that felt driven to create a curriculum in which the school’s Indigenous students could better understand their place in the world.
“In any school,” Kie offered, “students need to see themselves. Do that well, and the rest will follow.”
Over time, NACA grew, anchoring its program in “land-based healing and learning”—and getting kids outdoors. “What we’re trying to set in motion is the fullest possible community-led education and development program,” Kie explained. “Our goal is to ensure that all students are holistically well, and to prepare them to be caretakers of the land. We need to imbue Native youth with a sense of who they have been, without shutting off their ability to imagine who they might ultimately want to become. Even here, the othering of Native culture is so pervasive. It’s not all dreamcatchers and mysticism.”
To extend her influence, Kie left the school to join a NACA-inspired national network that was tasked with helping other communities design their own vehicles for strengthening culture and identity. This year, that network, which spans six states and includes fifteen schools, became one of twelve pilot sites to explore, with Education Reimagined, what it means to establish a thriving learner-centered ecosystem.
That effort remains rooted in the original NACA, whose high school is housed in a spacious new building on the campus of Central New Mexico Community College. A portion of the school’s logo is a wellness wheel, providing a constant reminder that its purpose is to nurture the physical, intellectual, social, emotional, and communal health of its 500 students.
To augment its full-time faculty, NACA deploys a wide range of “knowledge keepers”—community liaisons who bring their wisdom about land, place, and culture into the school and share it with the students. These keepers—who specialize in knowledge relating to mountains, water, stories, medicine, and food—are at the center of the school’s land-based healing and learning program. “It’s part of our effort to bring about a resurgence of Indigenous knowledge,” Kie explained. “We’re not just learning these things; we’re remembering them.”
Later that morning, I witnessed just how central the notion of remembering is to the community at a Morning Circle meeting of the entire school.
It’s the last day of the year, and a large number of students have just left for a two-week sojourn to visit the Maori in New Zealand, part of a regular exchange program between NACA and other Indigenous communities around the world. Those who remain file into the gymnasium for a grounding ceremony before heading to a nearby park for a celebratory picnic.
One of the school’s beloved teachers, Mr. John, presides over the meeting. Tall and jovial, he stands in the center of the room with his sun hat in his hands, singing a traditional song before ceding the floor to a young girl named Keira, who shares a poem she wrote that she will soon deliver at a nationwide festival.
My name is dark hair
A song hidden in its smoke
A key to a door
My name is a kingdom that once stood
My name is dirt roads I have never run on
I am healing, I am identified
Later, I find Keira and ask about her experiences at the school. “I’ve been here since the first grade,” she begins. “My family moved here just so I could attend. I’ve come to experience the land and the world in a different way. It’s become such a heavy influence—and for a lot of us, that knowledge is something we can share with our parents, who never got the opportunity.”
Indeed, at NACA’s elementary and middle school campus, a short drive across town, students are still learning in spaces that are symbols of an oppressive past. One building is the site of the former “Indian School,” while the other is housed in the former missionary church. The neighborhood lacks green spaces, running alongside a busy stretch of Highway 40, and yet in recent years, the school took an empty parking lot and turned it into a thriving Hoop House, where students are now growing a wide range of vegetables and medicinal plants. A short drive away, an Indigenous Farm Hub provides a more expansive (and verdant) site for the school’s land-based healing work.
Together, all these efforts are designed to help young people feel more connected, self-sufficient, and part of the natural cycle of the world when it is in balance. “We are re-storying our heartplaces,” said Zane Rosette, NACA’s executive director. “But this work can’t only be about the past. We must be given space to dream new ways of being, too. What you’re seeing, in real time, is young people pulling the curtain of the world back so we can behold it as it is—and make it better.”
Our goal is to ensure that all students are holistically well, and to prepare them to be caretakers of the land. We need to imbue Native youth with a sense of who they have been, without shutting off their ability to imagine who they might ultimately want to become. Even here, the othering of Native culture is so pervasive. It’s not all dreamcatchers and mysticism.
Val Kie
The next morning, we drive an hour away to visit another community in the NACA-inspired ecosystem—the Kha’Po’ Community School in Española. It’s located on the Santa Clara Pueblo, amidst a dense network of cottonwood trees, single-story homes, and a narrow, bubbling stretch of the Rio Grande.
The school’s executive director, Porter Swentzell, greets us when we arrive. It’s the first official day of summer—the students were all dismissed the day before—so the campus is quiet, but the desert heat is already making itself known. Swentzell, with a freshly shaved head and spectacles, welcomes us into his office and tells us the story of his school.
“Pueblos tend to be pretty conservative,” he begins. “We like to do the same things over and over again here, and people who do things differently tend to get smushed.”
For generations, that description applied to this school as well, which was federally run—and culturally genocidal. “The former principal refused to even allow native language teachers on campus. Eventually, we realized drastic action needed to be taken.”
That action came in 2015, when some key members in the community triggered a 1975 law, the Indian Self Determination & Education Act, which allows interested tribes to assume control of their own schools. And in 2022, they hired Swentzell, who, by his own admission, was a curious choice. “I’m not your normal school leader,” he said. “I don’t even really believe in school.”
In fact, Swentzell was home-schooled for the bulk of his childhood —if you can even call it that. “I grew up in a house with no electricity,” he explained. “My mom didn’t want my sister and I engaged in anything that felt like a distraction from our traditional way of life. We had to hide in an irrigation ditch to read. So I can look at a medieval picture of peasants threshing wheat and know exactly what that felt like.”
After a long and winding educational path, however, Swentzell earned his PhD, researching different ways to remedy the loss of Native languages. And under his leadership, Kha’Po’ has re-established itself as a dual language school—English and Tewa—centered on values and culture.
“We’ve experienced tremendous language loss,” Swentzell explained as his staff packed up their belongings for the summer. “And our language is the quintessential component of our culture. This is not a recipe for continuance.”
Now, however, each of Kha’Po’s 104 students is immersed in a learning program that’s explicitly designed to re-center them in their culture—and hold space for them to imagine a future that is not merely backwards-oriented.
“Our curriculum is scaffolded to emphasize different forms of learning—in the home, in the village, in the hills and mountains and fields, and at an expert level. And we have lots of traditional arts—basket-making, pottery, making moccasins—so that when students graduate from here, they can be dressed from head to toe in things they actually made.”
The best parts of that curriculum, along with all other relevant insights, get shared across all fifteen schools in the network, which hosts immersive fellowships throughout the year to build a deeper collective capacity. “Without those connections, a lot of these innovations would just exist in isolated pockets,” Kie explained. “But we’re not a charter management organization. Our primary goal is to set community-wide conditions for learning, so that we can support the creation of true student-centered ecosystems—and ensure that they are fully community-led.”
For Swentzell, that local orientation is a lesson every school in America should heed.
“It’s always been a task to find the tools and innovations we need to exist in our particular place. It’s one of the fundamental challenges of modernity, which homogenizes the world, and divorces us from our specific centers and places. Yet as humans, we’ve always had these inheritances about how to clothe ourselves and survive.
“That’s what we do: we grow stuff and we build things. But we’ve become separated from that wisdom—all of us. So our places of education must be about helping the people of that place regain their inheritances, and learn how to thrive in that place. Our ancestors had specific instructions from the earth about what our purpose was. We’re returning back to those original instructions, which are ultimately about how to be a human being.”
Then Swentzell paused, as tears welled up in his eyes. “We’re making sure that even as we remember who we’ve been, we allow ourselves to wonder a different question: “What if our best days are still in front of us?”
