{"id":6283,"date":"2015-04-22T07:30:22","date_gmt":"2015-04-22T13:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=6283"},"modified":"2016-04-28T13:09:57","modified_gmt":"2016-04-28T19:09:57","slug":"tribal-teacher-army-of-one-hailed-on-eve-of-retirement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2015\/04\/tribal-teacher-army-of-one-hailed-on-eve-of-retirement\/","title":{"rendered":"Tribal teacher, ‘army of one’ hailed on eve of retirement"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Vina\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Vina Smith stands on the upper deck of the Poplar High School gym, where Earth Activities were being presented for area schoolchildren Tuesday. This will be the last Earth Day program Smith presides over. She is retiring next week after 18 years as the environmental educator for the Fort Peck Tribes.<\/p><\/div>\n

POPLAR \u2014 Starting next week, after she retires on May 1, Vina Smith intends to slow down. Those who know her well will believe it when they see it.<\/p>\n

For 18 years, as the environmental educator for the Fort Peck Tribes, she has been a tireless teacher, role model and activist. She has helped plant thousands of trees, organized annual cleanup days, started recycling programs and made presentations at conferences across the country.<\/p>\n

More than anything, though, she has touched the lives of thousands of schoolchildren from all over the northeast corner of Montana, planting the seeds of environmental awareness and teaching them the importance of clean air, water and soil.<\/p>\n

John Miller, a retired biology teacher at West High in Billings and a former president of the Montana Environmental Educators Association, used the word \u201ctenacity\u201d several times while speaking of Smith.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s just something about a personality like that,\u201d he said. \u201cNothing\u2019s going to stop her from doing what she needs to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cat Lynch, formerly the director of education at ZooMontana in Billings, calls Smith \u201can army of one\u201d and \u201cone of those amazing lifelong learners.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lynch was one of nine presenters on hand Tuesday for an Earth Day event that Smith founded 16 years ago. As in the past, the event was offered Tuesday in the Poplar High School gym, with a similar event scheduled for Wednesday in Wolf Point.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Smith invites schools from all over the Fort Peck Indian Reservation to send their students to the event, but she also welcomes schools from Plentywood, Culbertson, Bainville, Nashua and other communities. The event generally draws 500 to 800 students in preschool through 12th grade, and during at least one year, more than 1,000.<\/p>\n

\u201cI just love the kids,\u201d Smith said. \u201cThey\u2019re innocent, full of wonder.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe kids call me \u2018the bug lady,\u2019\u201d she added, and on Tuesday she was wearing her dragonfly earrings and a necklace with a dragonfly pendant.<\/p>\n

This year, at different stations in the high school gym, the young visitors received hands-on lessons about weather, trees, biocontrol of weeds and insect pests, natural insect repellents, Montana fish and more. Presenters were from the Bureau of Land Management, Fish, Wildlife and Parks, the Department of Agriculture and other agencies.<\/p>\n

As Smith said to one teacher asking about what was on tap Tuesday, \u201cWe\u2019ve got weeds, we\u2019ve got weather, we\u2019ve got fish in the foyer.\u201d<\/p>\n

When she was a student in Poplar herself, Smith, 66, had dreams of becoming a fashion designer. She earned a degree in home economics with a minor in fashion design from the University of Nevada, Reno, and she worked in Nevada briefly before deciding to go back home.<\/p>\n

\"Tree\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Cat Lynch, formerly the director of education at ZooMontana in Billings, illustrates the growth of trees by wrapping Ashlynn Bullchief, a Poplar first-grader, in simulated tree layers, topped with a crown of foliage.<\/p><\/div>\n

Jobs were scarce on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, as they still are. Smith managed to find a few odd jobs before being hired 22 years ago by the Fort Peck Office of Environmental Protection as a researcher in the minerals office.<\/p>\n

Then, 18 years ago, Deb Madison, the environmental program manager, decided to establish the environmental educator position, and she hired Smith to fill it. Smith said she was the first tribal environmental educator in the country, and to this day no other tribe in Montana has a full-time position like hers.<\/p>\n

She said she had to develop the program on the fly, by trial and error. She learned early on that it was difficult to instill her message of environmental awareness in adults.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so many people not right in their minds, so many people in survival mode that they just don\u2019t care,\u201d she said. \u201cLitter is the least of their problems.\u201d But she figured if she could get through to the children, they would take their lessons home with them.<\/p>\n

Another thing she learned, she said, was that \u201cwords were really important. I found out, you call it \u2018workshop\u2019 and nobody comes. Call it \u2018festival\u2019 and everybody turns out.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Earth Day program, in fact, was known as the Water Festival when Smith started offering it in 2000. Clean water has always been one of her passions.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would like my grandchildren to be able to drink the water out of the river like I did as a child,\u201d she said. \u201cI want my great-grandchildren to remember me for my fight to save their water.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to her Earth Day activities, she regularly takes schoolchildren on outdoor adventures, where they look for bugs, trees, birds, flowers, plants and wetlands. She has taken them fishing, camping, swimming and star-gazing. And everything she teaches them is fact-based, grounded solidly in science.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t talk religion,\u201d she said. \u201cI don\u2019t talk politics. The only political thing I say is, \u2018when you turn 18, vote.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Kari Gunderson, a retired wilderness ranger now teaching in the Forestry Department at the University of Montana in Missoula, knew Smith well through their membership in the Montana Environmental Education Association.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat really touches me most is what a powerful role model she is for school-age children,\u201d Gunderson said.<\/p>\n

\"Poplar\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick\/Last Best News<\/p>

Poplar first-graders listen attentively to a presentation on weeds and insect pests during Earth Day activities at Poplar High School.<\/p><\/div>\n

She also remembers Smith for her beautiful star quilts. Smith always attended the annual conferences of the MEEA, and many times she donated one of her handmade quilts for the association\u2019s silent auction.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen and where she finds time to do that on top of everything else, I don\u2019t know,\u201d Gunderson said.<\/p>\n

Gunderson and Miller both spoke of the time Smith persuaded the MEEA leadership to hold its annual conference in Wolf Point. The conferences were usually in western Montana, and if they went east at all, it wasn\u2019t any farther than Billings. But who was going to say no to Vina Smith?<\/p>\n

\u201cShe really tried hard to bring both sides of the state together,\u201d Gunderson said.<\/p>\n

Miller remembers how Smith took a caravan of fellow educators for a tour of the reservation. Smith said she drove them to the badlands near Brockton, then north to a spot on the Poplar River, where they did some water-quality testing and some sampling to see what species lived in the river.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was the first time I was able to see into that culture, to see it through her eyes,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n

As she nears retirement, Smith is looking forward to writing children\u2019s books with an environmental theme. She already has the first book nearly done and has plans for others. She also wants to get back to making quilts and sewing fancy clothes like prom dresses and wedding dresses. She said she was burnt-out on sewing and hasn\u2019t done any of it for two years.<\/p>\n

She also has four daughters, 14 grandchildren and one great-granddaughter to keep her busy.<\/p>\n

Shirley Marchwick, a first-grade teacher in the Poplar school system for 16 years, has been bringing her young pupils to Smith\u2019s Earth Day events since the first one, and she was there again Tuesday morning. She said her kids look forward to it every year.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s so good,\u201d Marchwick said. \u201cI\u2019m really, really going to miss her.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

POPLAR \u2014 Starting next week, after she retires on May 1, Vina Smith intends to slow down. Those who know her well will believe it when they see it. For 18 years, as the environmental educator for the Fort Peck Tribes, she has been a tireless teacher, role model and activist. She has helped plant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6284,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,14],"tags":[2383,2382,2381,2384,2385,2386,2380],"class_list":["post-6283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-montana","category-news","tag-cat-lynch","tag-earth-day","tag-fort-peck-tribes","tag-john-miller","tag-kari-gunderson","tag-montana-environmental-educators-association","tag-vina-smith","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}