Upstander Academy

The next Upstander Academy for Educators will take place in the summer of 2025.  We invite you to check back here for updates in the fall of 2024.

Upstander Academy 2023 was a success!

Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and support from the Charlotte Foundation, the 2023 Upstander Academy welcomed twenty-two educators from around the U.S. to Boston in July. Educators gathered for two weeks of learning and unlearning about Indigenous histories and futures in the Native Northeast. Highlights of our experience included field trips to the homelands of the Narragansett and Mashpee Wampanoag where we met with tribal leaders, teachers, and knowledge-keepers.

In addition, faculty presentations included topics such as: a Wampanoag view from the shore, decolonizing contributions, Indigenous knowledge systems, settler colonialism, genocide, engaging across divides, the Native Northeast and the origin story of the U.S., language as survivance, and the screening and discussion of several Upstander Project documentary films. Participants had time to reflect on key takeaways they will bring back to their schools and organizations. Scholars who started out as strangers became a strong and caring community, one in which everyone is sharing resources and seasoned educators are offering to support first year teachers. We are so fortunate to have this time each summer to go deep with educators who refer to their time at the Upstander Academy as transformational and life-changing. 

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Why upstander academy?

As the United States prepares to commemorate the 250th anniversary of its founding, we seek to recenter and contextualize the history of persons indigenous to the United States. For too long, the teaching of American history has elided, avoided, or distorted the history of the first peoples to inhabit this land: as evidenced in most U.S. History and Social Studies Core Standards and curricula, in the exhibitions and programming of museums and public history sites, and by how holidays like Columbus Day and Thanksgiving are taught and commemorated. This harms us all.

It harms those of us who are non-Native because it gives us a distorted sense of the past and our place in it, and it harms Native peoples because it demeans and erases them from the history of what is now the United States. For A More Perfect Union, we believe we must acknowledge that all voices and histories matter.

Some groups who may especially benefit from Upstander Academy:

  • K-12 humanities teachers and librarians

  • School or district administrators involved in curriculum design and teacher professional learning

  • Museum educators

WHAT WILL I DO AT UPSTANDER ACADEMY?

Upstander Academy participants are immersed in a variety of experiences and activities designed to promote deep reflection and transform learning environments:

  • Practice and model upstander skills.

  • Reflect on the impact of genocide against Native peoples.

  • Test innovative teaching methods that support critical and creative thinking.

  • Learn to interrogate primary sources and use diverse materials and tools.

  • Join a community of upstander educators.

Upstander Academy codirectors

endawnis Spears (Diné, Ojibwe, Chickasaw, Choctaw) (she/her) is the director of outreach and programming and a founding member of the Akomawt Educational Initiative, an Indigenous education and interpretive consultancy. She has worked with and for Native communities and museums across the country. Previously, endawnis worked in the education, marketing and development departments of the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Originally from Camp Verde, Arizona, she lives in Rhode Island with her husband Cassius Spears Jr., and their four children, Nizhoni, Sowaniu, Giizghig and Tishominko.

Mishy Lesser, Ed.D., (she/her) is the learning director for Upstander Project and an Emmy® award-winning researcher. She is also a Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies Affiliate and was an Education Fellow at the Dodd Human Rights Impact at the University of Connecticut. Mishy has authored Upstander Project’s many learning and viewer guides. She is a Circle Keeper and has been featured on WBUR (Boston) and PRI/BBC’s The World. Mishy was a Fulbright Scholar in Ecuador and spent 12 years learning and working in the Andes. She is a descendant of Ashkenazi Jews whose ancestral language is Yiddish.

Roger Paul (Passamaquoddy, Wolastoq) (he/his) was born to a Passamaquoddy mother who, soon afterward, walked on to the spirit world. His father, who was Wolastoq, went to great lengths to protect him from state “child welfare” officials who wanted to send him away to a boarding school or place him in the foster care system. Thus, Roger grew up on various reservations throughout Maine and New Brunswick. His older brothers and sister were not as fortunate. They were taken and sent to the residential school at Shubenecadie. Roger holds a master’s degree in linguistics from MIT and works as a Wabanaki Languages teacher with the Penobscot Nation, the University of Maine at Orono, and the University of Southern Maine. He takes an active and diligent role towards the preservation, continuing growth, and prosperity of the Wabanaki language, culture, and people.

Upstander Academy faculty

Upstander Academy faculty are experienced Native Studies scholars, genocide educators, documentary filmmakers, and museum educators with deep knowledge about the issues we address.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker (Colville Confederated Tribes) (she/her) is a lecturer of American Indian Studies at California State University San Marcos and a consultant and educator in environmental justice policy planning. Dina’s research focuses on Indigenous nationalism, self-determination, environmental justice, and education. Dina is co-author with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz of All the Real Indians Died Off and 20 Other Myths About Native Americans and author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock.

Claudia A. Fox Tree (Iukaieke Guainia Taino-Arawak) (she/ her) is a multiracial/multicultural professional educator who speaks nationally and internationally on decolonizing anti-racism. She has been a workshop and course facilitator for IDEAS (Initiative for Developing Equity and Achievement for Students) and a middle school special education teacher for three decades. Claudia earned her Master’s Degree in Education from Northeastern University and is currently a doctoral student at Lesley University, both on unceded Massa-adchu-es-et and Pawtucket territory. She has been a board member of the Massachusetts Center for Native American Awareness (MCNAA) since 2000 and a Massachusetts liaison for the United Confederation of Taino People (UCTP) since 1998.

Adam Mazo (he/his) is the creative director of Upstander Project and an Emmy® Award-winning social issue documentarian. Adam has (co)directed and/or produced all of Upstander Project’s films, including Dawnland, which won an Emmy® Award in 2018. His films have been broadcast on domestic and international television, programmed at film festivals and international conferences, and screened at universities and K-12 schools, where they are also often used in curricula.

Dr. Sarah B. Shear is an assistant professor of social studies and multicultural education at the University of Washington-Bothell. Sarah examines K-12 social studies curricula within Indigenous contexts, as well as race/ism and settler colonialism in K-12 social studies teacher education, popular media, and qualitative methodologies. As a member of the Turtle Island Social Studies Collective, Sarah is committed to collective action to combat oppression in education and academia. In addition, Sarah co-edited (Re)Imagining Elementary Social Studies: A Controversial Issues Reader (Information Age Press, 2018) and Marking the Invisible: Articulating Whiteness in Social Studies Education (Information Age Press, inc. press).

Chris Newell (Passamaquoddy) (he/his) is Tribal Community Member-in-Residence for the University of Connecticut and cofounder/director of education for Akomawt Educational Initiative; a majority Native-owned educational consultancy based in Connecticut. He is a multi-award-winning museum professional born and raised in Motahkmikuhk (Indian Township, ME) and a proud citizen of the Passamaquoddy Tribe at Indian Township. He also serves on the Board of Trustees for the New England Museum Association, Tides Institute, Maine Public, and the New England Foundation for the Arts. Chris is a long-time singer with the acclaimed Mystic River singers based out of Connecticut and has travelled the US and Canada singing and participating in cultural celebrations, pow wows, and live stage performance. Chris was the Senior Advisor for the Emmy-award winning documentary Dawnland and participant and co-director of the short documentary Weckuwapok: The Approaching Dawn (2022) chronicling a historic sunrise concert collaboration in 2021 with Wabanaki musicians/storytellers and 19-time Grammy-winning cellist Yo-Yo Ma. In addition, Chris is a published author of the Scholastic book If You Lived During the Plimoth Thanksgiving, a non-fiction historical children’s picture book focusing on the history of encounters with Wampanoag peoples and early English colonists which earned starred reviews from the School Library Journal and Kirkus Reviews.

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