ALLOW ME TO GLOAT ABOUT MY NUMBER ONE DAUGHTER

(Ed.'s Note: The woman in the middle wearing the traditional Ojibway [Chippewa to you palefaces] is my first-born daughter Melissa Issac Montoya. Melissa heads the Michigan Department of Education's Indigenous Education Initiative and  also leads the Confederation of Michigan Tribal Education Departments and – as former director of education for the Saginaw Chippewa tribe – founded its Project AWARE program to increase awareness among teachers and staff and providing intervention to address the impact of trauma on Native American students. Project AWARE stands for Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education and the program provides grants across the U.S.

Melissa has been invited to the White House twice, once during the State of the Union Address when she sat at the First Lady's box just behind the ambassador from the Ukraine, and the other during Native American Month. Below is a story I wrote about her precociousness as a child.)

By Juan Montoya
When my kids were young, we lived for a few months with my ex and her in-laws in Central Michigan, and I would surround them with books and learning aids.

Whether it was hand-made blocks of wood representing ones and tens to help them learn numbers and the decimal system, alphabet cards, or children books, the kids were exposed to learning. Since they lived in a disadvantaged Native American community there were precious few role models for them to follow.

Nonetheless, my children learned to read and spell at an early age, even before they attended the schools on the Isabella Chippewa Tribal Reservation.

Whenever I was in town or passed by a garage sale, I would buy children's books and take them home for them to read. Sometimes I could not find something that was aimed at their age group but bought them anyway so they would have them available as they grew up. One particular children's dictionary had "Aardvark" for the letter A instead of "Apple." I took it and gave it to them anyway.

At home, they grew up surrounded by books.

One weekend I took the wife and kids and my father and mother-in-law to a Mexican restaurant in Lansing. It was in the early 1980s and Mexican food was not as readily available across the United States as it is today. We had lunch, the adults a  margarita, and then got in the car and headed home in the Michigan countryside about an hour away near Mt. Pleasant.

As we passed an empty parking lot, the kids' grandmother turned to our older girl – Melissa, aged about 5 or 6 – and said:

"Melissa, look, a kitty cat."
"Where, grandma?," the child asked.
"Over there," said her grandmother pointing to the parking lot.
The child turned and looked and said:
"No, grandma, that's not a kitty cat. That's a jaguar."

Her grandmother and grandfather have since passed away, and Melissa went on to become the director of education of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe and now director of Native American education in Michigan and a doctoral candidate at Central Michigan University.

Readers are leaders.