Pupils work for greener future
LEUPP, Arizona— In the heart of Arizona’s high desert, one of America’s greenest schools is protecting the planet and its endangered culture by drawing inspiration from Native American values.
Classes at the STAR School, on the edge of the vast Navajo Nation reserve, are divided between English and — when the fast-paced curriculum allows — the local native language, known as din.
In kindergarten, a teacher shows a handful of toddlers traditional weaving, while the children of elementary school age, some in traditional braids, discuss the rudiments of fiction writing or computing.
The school’s stellar name — an acronym for “Service to all Relations” — emphasizes the Navajo philosophy that every living thing is connected, from the smallest plant to the largest mammal.
We teach children traditional peacemaking. We haven’t had a fist fight in eight years.” Mark Sorensen, the school’s founder
“We teach children traditional peacemaking. We haven’t had a fist fight in eight years,” said the school’s founder, Mark Sorensen.
The STAR, which caters to pupils of up to the end of middle school, generates all its electricity from two wind turbines and 300 solar panels.
It is an initiative born of ideology but also necessity, with no power grid out in the sticks, some 40 kilometers from the nearest city, Flagstaff.
“It has been estimated that between the Arizona and Nevada deserts (solar) panels could power half the country,” says Sorensen, an ecologist who has been “off the grid” for years.
‘Historical trauma’
He founded the STAR school 17 years ago with his wife, paying for the first building with his own credit card.
The campus is now home to 130 students and has added a gym and a greenhouse, where students grow vegetables and herbs that are used in the canteen.
They learn to live in “renewable” mode but also become familiar with techniques in cultivating vegetables that have almost disappeared from dinner tables in the remote region where food is scarce.
The Navajo community, plagued by poverty and rife with drug addiction, domestic violence and health problems such as diabetes, still suffers from “historical trauma”, as the locals term it.
In the mid-19th century, about 9,000 Navajos were driven off their land by the US military and marched hundreds of miles to be interned at Fort Sumner in New Mexico.
A treaty was signed in 1868 authorizing them to become part of a federally-recognized protected area, the Navajo Nation reservation.
The children were sent away to boarding schools, where they were bullied and their language proscribed.
The STAR School and others like it are at the forefront of attempts to revive a culture that has been eroded by the Anglo-Saxon influx onto native lands and keep the heritage alive.