The Pawhuska High School honored its students who completed the first Osage language class which started last fall.
Martin Parks, who is the school’s assistant principal and athletic director, presented a wooden plaque with the school’s orange and black colors to Osage Nation Language Department officials and language student Robynn Rulo on July 9. The names of 12 students who took the course were engraved into the plaque.
Parks praised the students who participated in the Osage I class this past year. “These teenagers are involved in a lot of extracurricular activities,” he said adding school is a great venue to teach more Osage students the language.
Pawhuska High is the first high school on the Osage Reservation to offer the tribe’s language class, said Mary Bighorse who is the Language Department’s event director. Skiatook High School offers Osage language classes to its students, but the school is not within the reservation boundary, she said.
Rulo, 17, said during this semester, the class learned Osage words and phrases to describe people (drumkeeper, for example) and objects that are involved during the June In-Lon-Schka dances at the three Indian villages. “Now (the students) know what was happening, what was taking part,” she said.
Rulo and fellow student Jamison Cass were the top students in the class this year.
“Robynn was my back-up when (course instructor) Talee Red Corn was away,” said Parks who was a substitute teacher while Red Corn, who served on the Osage Minerals Council until last month, was away for council business.
“I enjoy watching young people learn,” Red Corn said of teaching youth. “This is something that’s valuable to our Osage youth, something to be proud of.”
Other Osage language students who took the 2009-2010 course were: Norris Allred, Christen Ballard, Charlsie Cunningham, Josephine Horsechief, Jessica Hutson, Joe Pratt, Trey Rulo, Jeremie Tuller, Michela White, and Dora Williams.
Polacca worked for more than two years at The Forum newspaper, which covers the Fargo and Moorhead, Minn., metropolitan area as a weeknight reporter. Polacca previously worked as a reporter for reznetnews.org, an online newspaper. He holds an English degree from Arizona State University and studied news writing at the American Indian Journalism Institute at the University of South Dakota.
