11-15-2024 4:19am

Ridgely Teacher Shares

Ridgely Middle School art teacher shares her Indigenous heritage

By BCPS

Summer visits to the reservation

As a child, every summer, Raine Dawn Valentine, visual arts teacher at Ridgely Middle School, would visit the reservation in North Dakoka where her mother grew up as a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians.

“It is a vast plains area,” she says, “where most people live in trailer homes. There is a lot of land, but not much fertile land. I remember mostly just dusty roads. There are not a lot of schools or businesses. The convenience store is also the grocery store and gas station. Another building includes a diner and laundromat and space for entertainment. The nearest big city is three hours away.”

Raine Dawn Valentine

But for Valentine, these summer visits to the reservation were an opportunity to connect to family and culture. “We had family reunions, played cards, rode horses, roamed the plains, and found ways to be creative.” She remembers spending time “creating little worlds out of mud, sticks, and rocks.”

An especially significant summer trip occurred when Valentine was 11 years old. While her mother is Chippewa, her father is Scottish German, but both parents wanted Valentine and her two sisters to be connected to their Native American heritage.

“When I was 11, my younger sister and I had a naming ceremony on the reservation and received our spirit names. It was our initiation into adulthood.” – Valentine

“When I was 11, my younger sister and I had a naming ceremony on the reservation and received our spirit names,” Valentine says. “It was our initiation into adulthood.”

The day began with the community cooking for hours for a feast that evening. “Then the elders came,” Valentine remembers, “and the medicine woman. There is prayer and singing, and the medicine woman is very meditative. She is gifted with a vision of your name. She named me Raining in the Dawn Woman, which is practically the same as my given name Raine Dawn. The medicine woman said that the creator must have told my mother to name me that. It is rare that your spirit name is the same as your given name.”

Valentine's mother's side of the family at a family reunion in 2000

Valentine's father's side of the family

The ceremony ended with more songs and prayers and then a feast. According to Valentine, the feast included a few traditional Chippewa foods like tripe, a soup made with intestines and buffalo tongue, and fry bread, as well as other foods like mashed potatoes and vegetables.

For Valentine, that day “was like a door opening, and I just wanted to learn more.”

"The original ones"

The Chippewa tribe was known first as the Ojibwe tribe or "Anishinaabe" people. "Anishinaabe" means “the true people” or “the original ones.” The tribe began in what is now Canada and migrated to different areas breaking up into different tribes and then “bands” of tribes, including the Turtle Mountain, Red Lake, Pembina and Little Shell bands. The Chippewa are known for their birchbark canoes, beading, copper mining, maple syrup, and dreamcatchers.

Over time, when Europeans came to what is now America, the Chippewa were forced to sign treaties that took much of their land and restricted them from hunting and fishing. Many Native American children were sent to boarding schools, many run initially by the U.S. government, designed to Americanize them and separate them from their culture.

Valentine’s mother and 12 brothers and sisters all attended St. Joseph’s Indian School, a boarding school run by the Catholic Church. “Originally, when the government operated such schools, Native American children were forced to go, taken from their families sometimes without knowledge,” Valentine says. ‘When my mother attended, they were sent voluntarily because my grandparents thought it would give them the best opportunity for a good life.”

Valentine continues, “My mom said they cut her hair, took all her things, and didn’t allow children to talk to their brothers and sisters. They wanted to ‘get the native’ out of the children and didn’t allow them to speak native languages. My mom said that some of the older natives would sneak out to go to ceremonies. The younger children called them the ‘Big Indians,’ and were afraid of them. It caused a big divide.”

While Valentine’s oldest aunt passed away about 15 years ago, when she was around 80, Valentine’s mom, who is 74, says she is still processing all that she experienced at that boarding school, which she began attending at age 4.

Valentine’s mom became a barber and moved to Colorado, which is where she met Valentine’s father, who is from Maryland, the state that they later moved to.

Valentine's mother and her mother's brothers and sisters on the reservation

A young Valentine, in the middle in blue, with her older cousins on the reservation

Finding her path, researching her heritage

Growing up initially in Baltimore County, Valentine attended Hawthorne Elementary and Stemmers Run Middle schools before her family moved to Harford County. She remembers attending the BCPS summer art enrichment camp as a fifth grader and believes she still has some of the artwork she created that summer.

In addition to enjoying visual arts, she played recreation league softball and then high school softball and volleyball and took studio art classes.

Of her three sisters, Valentine is the only one with both brown hair and brown eyes. “People look at me and know I am not a typical Caucasian,” she says. “Usually, they ask me if I am Hispanic. Sometimes they even speak to me in Spanish. It has always been that way.”

Valentine and her mother at the 2023 Baltimore American Indian Center Pow-Wow

When she tells folks that she is Native American, she says, “often people glorify our culture, see me as a kind of trinket. Indigenous culture has been romanticized in many ways, has been made into a fantasy culture.”

As she grew older, Valentine started researching more about her heritage. “In 2016, during the Standing Rock Protest [about an oil pipeline], I went and spent the week before Thanksgiving on the reservation where my mother’s family lives,” Valentine says. “I sat with the medicine woman who gave me my name from 8 a.m. one morning until 2 a.m. the following morning. She gifted me with a ceremonial moon bundle [a medicine bag containing sacred objects] and shared so much knowledge with me. The things she told me were things I knew internally but had not connected to my Indigenous heritage.”

“I sat with the medicine woman who gave me my name from 8 a.m. one morning until 2 a.m. the following morning. She gifted me with a ceremonial moon bundle [a medicine bag containing sacred objects] and shared so much knowledge with me.” – Valentine

When the time came for Valentine to go to college, she chose a Christian college in Texas, determined to become a youth pastor. “I grew up a Christian,” she says. “My parents went to a Catholic church and then stopped. Then I got my family to join a Pentecostal church. I was especially active as a youth leader. I found myself drawn to working with youth. The pastor’s wife told me that she had a dream about me leading hundreds of youth.”

Once at the college, however, Valentine was struck with the sense that there was something more for her. “So much that resonated with me about the stories in the Bible related also to the ancient Chippewa spiritual teachings. That was eye-opening to me.”

Valentine holding her painting "Seven Generations," which is about transmuting the generational trauma from boarding school experiences

"A beautiful cycle of creating and sharing"

Valentine returned to Maryland with an associate degree in psychology, then she earned an associate degree in art studies at Harford Community College before transferring to Towson University to complete a bachelor’s degree in art education.

Upon her graduation, she was initially hired for a part-time teaching position at Middle River Middle School, a school her dad and older sister had attended. Then, the Friday before she was to begin work, she was offered a full-time position at Ridgely Middle School, which is where she has been ever since.

“Art is the way we can understand ourselves better and express ourselves, which in turn helps others understand themselves.” – Valentine

“I love teaching middle school art,” Valentine says. “Art is the way we can understand ourselves better and express ourselves, which in turn helps others understand themselves. It is a beautiful cycle of creating and sharing. Also, you can teach all subjects through art because art is everything!”

She continues, “Middle school kids are at such an important stage of their development. I want them to learn and feel that they are and always will be creators.”

Valentine, standing in blue, with some of her students

Valentine with students in her classroom

Valentine at the 2024 BCPS Middle School Juried Art Exhibition, where her 8th grade student won 2nd place for her food culture project

Valentine describes her approach to teaching as “choice based.” “I teach students to use different tools and then allow them choice in what they create,” she says. “I teach through themes. For example, every year, I begin with the theme of identity. As the school year starts, we are learning about each other. I want them to see me as an artist and to learn about my culture. Some students don’t know the difference between ethnicity and race. I teach them that and help them break down ideas of who they are. They share their identities through their creations.”

“Last year,” she continues, “we also explored the importance of food culture and how it changes over time and through history. I shared with them how Native American food culture changed after colonization, and I encourage them to dive into their own family food cultures.”

“Raine creates experiences that empower students to rely on their creativity, expression, and personal context to drive their own exploration in the arts.” – Ryan Twentey, BCPS coordinator of visual arts and digital media

Ryan Twentey, BCPS coordinator of visual arts and digital media, says, “Raine creates experiences that empower students to rely on their creativity, expression, and personal context to drive their own exploration in the arts. Students have opportunities to make artworks that are not reliant on expectations but instead focus on what students bring from their own voice and choice. The classroom climate reflects Raine’s passion for expression through art and drives her interest in developing more equitable and diverse arts education throughout the state and nation. Having her own experiences of being part of a marginalized group, Raine has developed a passion for advocating for space for students to be able to create and build confidence and authenticity in their work.”

Reaching more students by teaching teachers

Beyond her work at Ridgely, Valentine also teaches “Secondary Methods in Art Education” at Notre Dame of Maryland University. “In my art career as a teacher, I feel passionate about also teaching adults,” Valentine says. “I am in year 17 of being a teacher, but I only reach the few hundred students I get each year. By teaching graduate students who are becoming art teachers, I can reach more students.”

Valentine stresses that she wants her graduate school students to see teaching from a different point of view. “I want them to know,” she says, “that, as teachers, you are shaping human beings, not just teaching art. I share the perspective of putting the student first. I tell them that as teachers they will be life coaches, helping students learn how to be good human beings through art.”

“I want [my graduate students] to know that, as teachers, you are shaping human beings, not just teaching art.” – Valentine

Another way that Valentine is supporting art educators is through the Connected Arts Networks. In 2022, Valentine was one of just 15 national teacher leaders selected to represent art educators in the new Connected Arts Networks, a federally funded, 5-year grant project of the Educational Theater Association, National Association for Music Education, National Dance Education Organization, and National Art Education Association (NAEA).

Through this initiative, Valentine meets monthly with a professional learning community of 10 arts educators from throughout the nation and leads them in discussions about how to bring more inclusion, diversity, and social-emotional learning into arts classrooms.

Valentine with students in South Africa after they completed an art project about their cultural identity

Valentine in September 2024 as a guest artist at the Baltimore Museum of Art’s Indigenous community day.

In 2021, Valentine was invited to be a part of the 5th Annual Artizen international Conference on Art for Social Transformation, held in South Africa. “She served on a team of Indigenous artists who presented and shared ancestral teachings,” Twentey says. “This powerful experience offered tremendous opportunities to demonstrate how art is important and relevant to everyone in helping to heal and allow stories to be told to new generations – an opportunity to allow all stories to be heard, not hindered.”

Valentine now serves as committee chair for the NAEA’s Caucus on the Spiritual in Art Education. She has participated in NAEA Town Hall Conversations as a Crayola Creativity Ambassador, which among many roles, carries the message that the arts are for all students and should reflect their experiences, stories, and needs. Most recently, she was accepted into the 2024 cohort of the NAEA School for Art Leaders, which offers additional opportunities to learn and strengthen her approach in equity, diversity, and inclusion work.

Theo, Landyn, Raine Dawn, and Element

Valentine, her mother, and her daughter

Raine Dawn, her younger sister, mother, and older sister

Beyond her many art education responsibilities, Valentine is busy with her home in Pennsylvania, her partner, Theo, her son, Landyn, an 11th grader, and her daughter, Element, a 7th grader. She enjoys sharing Indigenous culture with them, and she looks forward to taking them to the reservation and bringing them into ceremony to receive their spirit names. In addition, she serves on the board of Historic Hampton Incorporated and as executive director of Creative Balance Institute, a holistic learning center.

On Saturday, November 16, Valentine will be live painting at the Baltimore American Indian Center’s 48th Annual Pow-Wow at Maryland State Fairgrounds.

Through Wednesday, November 20, the Baltimore County Arts Guild is exhibiting work by Valentine and another artist, Roberto Max Dyea. The exhibition is titled “Resonance: Indigenous Roots, Modern Expressions,” and is being held to celebrate Indigenous Heritage Month.

“My biggest goal is to remind everyone that we are all connected. Art is so powerful for transforming how we see each other. We need to share our differences to see how connected we are.” – Valentine

Throughout all that she does, Valentine aspires to share the spirituality that she considers the most important aspect of her Chippewa culture. “We learn,” she says, “that the nature is our religion and earth is our church…that we are all a part of each other. The great mystery, Gitchi Manitou, is like our god. For us, God is everything, all creatures. That means I see the sacredness of the world and know that I am an important part of it. I know that what I do affects others. My biggest goal is to remind everyone that we are all connected. Art is so powerful for transforming how we see each other. We need to share our differences to see how connected we are.”