This is Roger White Jr., from Fort Peck, Montana. His Assiniboine name is “Little Eagle.” He resides in Frazer, Montana and has been in education for 15 years, and currently instructs Native American Studies at Frazer High School, Kindergarten to grade 12. In the past, he worked with the University of Montana at the Native Children’s Trauma Centre. During this work, he began looking into the different Western approaches to deal with children’s trauma and came to the realization they often resulted in zero or minimal impact on Indigenous children. He decided to look into what Indigenous children need at home – that is when he began logging qualitative data on behaviour and competency of Indigenous children.

Roger learned of Total Physical Response (TPR), a method of teaching language developed by James Asher, that coordinates language with physical movements such as hand signs. Roger credits the experiential component of education as the cause of a long lasting memory.

Roger started a project called, ENIT (Empowering Native Indigenous Tribes), with the underlying concept of cognitive experiential immersion. This concept of learning by experience can be implemented by different approaches – TPR is an example.