When I was a seventh grade student at Great Colbert Middle School in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,

Mr. Joseph Thomas taught one of my favorite classes, English.

I love playing with words. As a kid, I often lost myself for hours reading. And Mr. Thomas

encouraged me to do both. Now, my parents also love to read, and in my house we had a lot of

books. There were my parents' textbooks from school, loads of nonfiction for their jobs,

novels that they enjoyed, and I eagerly pulled down book after book to find new worlds in their pages.

Like in many middle school English classes, we wrote a monthly book report. So I turned to the stacks that surrounded me at home.

On the bookshelf in their office, my parents had a bunch of native authored books.

I pulled down Louise Airdrick's love medicine.

I was drawn to it because Louise Airdrick is Turtle Mountain Ojibway, just like me.

Her writings were a mirror from my family, to borrow an image from Rudin Sims Bishop.

Growing up far away from our homelands, her books linked me to my native nation.

They gave me a connection to the rest of my community. So I read them

with love and excitement and joy. And when I turned in my book report, I was excited to share

these stories with my teacher. Imagine then my surprise when, instead of giving back my paper,

Mr. Thomas called me over to his desk for a teacher conference.

In my excitement about exploring the narratives that I'd been missing and that I'd found in Erdrich's book,

I hadn't considered that I might be a bit young for some of the content.

Of course, my teacher noticed.

So during the conference, he requested that I get prior approval for all my remaining books that year.

Today, as a former middle school English teacher myself, the story makes me laugh. It reminds me of my own precociousness and of my joy of reading and learning.

But it also reminds me of how lucky we are

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