Faculty Highlight: Kristy “Mbiish Kwe” Phillips, education

PART I

Kristy Phillips is the descendant of Anishinaabe people who worked hard navigating colonialism. Her great-great-grandmother ran away from Haskell’s residential boarding school for Native American children. Phillips’s great-grandmother and grandmother couldn’t evade the same horrifying fate either; yet her mother did, and her mother raised her with positive influences to have a good life. Decades later, Phillips can happily say that she’d done just that. She found a good life.

As a child, Phillips sewed with her sister, her mother, her grandmother, and her great-grandmother. “My grandmother and great-grandmother could do anything,” she said. “They taught us how to make our own clothes, regalia, beads, what have you. We’d make four to five shawls for a giveaway in one setting.” The next step for the shawls and the art Phillips created was finding them a home. “To make extra money growing up, I had to use my hands.” Potawatomi county Powwows, her cousin’s gift shop, and her school were three of many places where she made money selling her art. The profits went into buying school clothes.

Nonetheless, Phillips didn’t like what she learned at school and what her peers liked. “I often felt lonely and not good at anything—low self-esteem issues. Many people around me didn’t care for the things I liked: the arts and crafts and the Anishinaabe culture around us,” Phillips said. Instead, she enjoyed learning Native American language from her great grandparents and local elders. The elders around her caught on to her sticky memory, and by fifteen-years old, she snatched a summer job.

At the Potawatomi Language Department, fifteen-year-old Phillips was teaching Potawatomi and working with Potawatomi elders. Those elders had come from Kansas and Oklahoma. They came from Haskell Indian Nations University, which—years ago—was the same residential boarding school from which Phillips’s great-great-grandmother had escaped. The man who merged those elders into Phillip’s life went by the name Norman Kiker.

“Kiker was a very important connection to language in my story,” Phillips said.

PART II

Viki Dowd approached Phillips in 2011, at the time she was in limbo, within a big shift. They called from Hannahville, searching specifically for Phillips. Vicki went to Potawatomi Language Teacher training with Kiker in the nineties at Haskell, at the time Phillips was learning Potawatomi from him and the elders he’d brought along. Now, Phillips was on her way to start working for them.

Phillips stayed at the Hannahville Indian School for ten years. For ten years, she taught Potawatomi to students within a teaching model that convinced her, time and again, that her students would never properly learn the language until the program implemented a full-immersion model. Despite how inspiring it was for Phillips to teach there, despite how filled with love and purpose everyone who taught there was, full language immersion stood between the educators and producing a new generation of fluent Potawatomi speakers.

In due time, Phillips would come to know of a special place that lay all the way across from Lake Michigan, nestled in the beauty of Northern Wisconsin forests, a school filled with Anishinaabe elders and Ojibwe-speakers, teaching the next generation their severely endangered Ojibwe language within a groundbreaking full-immersion education model.

PART III

Waadookodaading in Ojibwe means, “the place where people help each other.” At Waadookodaading, young students did not learn about fish by looking at a picture in a book; they went ice fishing. They dissected the fish for the anatomy portion of their lesson—talking in Ojibwe the whole time. That was the kind of place Phillips sorely wanted to belong to. Except, Phillips had not heard of Lac Courte Oreilles’s Waadookodaading just yet.

“It took me three years between hearing about Waadookodaading and deciding to go there, because I loved Hannahville so much. But I kept asking myself one question: what level of Anishinaabemowin will my grandchildren speak? Once I made the decision to move, it took me merely two months to get there,” Phillips said.

It was her first day at Waadookodaading. Phillips’s employment grant funded her work as Waadookodaading’s new Curriculum Developer, and she wanted to see what she was working with. Nervous yet excited, Phillips surveyed the classrooms and was meeting with the teachers and the students. She stumbled on one scene that engraved itself into her memory. “There was a girl debating with her teacher about phone usage. A 13-year-old girl, debating about phones… in Ojibwe! That was advanced speaking,” Phillips said. “None of my kids at Hannahville ever reached that level. And it wasn’t just this one girl who spoke at that advanced level. It was the entire class.”

Things continued in good spirits—for two years. She never wanted to leave Waadookodaading, but Phillips’s grant ended in 2023. She decided to move next door: to Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe University (LCOOU), as the newest education faculty. Becoming a faculty member still allowed her to maintain her connections at Waadookodaading.

“I’m still helping there. Our program may have the capacity to develop immersion teachers, and whatever I could help with, I’m down for that. I’m glad I’m here because it would’ve broken my heart if I couldn’t be. There are Hannahville Potawatomi people who want to come to LCOOU and Waadookodaading.  Learning Potawatomi as an Ojibwe speaker is way easier than learning Potawatomi as an English speaker. So, what we’re doing here is helping everyone,” Phillips said.  

Phillips sees herself being at LCOOU for a long while. Her life wasn’t always easy. She’d made some enormous decisions concerning career, family, motherhood, and self-care. At every fork in the road, whether she trotted down the well-beaten path or chose the one less traveled by, Phillips’s journey slowly compiled into a story of a proud Potawatomi woman who is making great daily contributions to the education of the next generations of Potawatomi and Ojibwe speakers. Now more than ever, Phillips is realizing a crucial truth: “Education really heals people. Being a teacher—receiving and delivering education—well that’s all part of a beautiful healing process.”