Over the past 18 months, I’ve had the opportunity to dive deep into the landscape of Indigenous education and leadership alongside my co-host, Jason Cummins. Together, we’ve explored the nuances of culturally responsive classrooms and how communities are working to preserve their heritage through innovative education models. These conversations have been inspiring and eye-opening, and today’s episode is no different.

I’m thrilled to welcome Curtis Yarlott, Executive Director of St. Labre Indian School, to the podcast. Curtis brings decades of experience leading educational initiatives that go beyond academics, focusing on cultural revitalization and community healing. As both an educator and a member of the Crow Tribe, Curtis offers a unique perspective on how schools can serve as catalysts for change and reconciliation. His work with the Crow Language Consortium, the Northern Cheyenne Language Consortium, and the Language Conservancy is paving the way for Indigenous language preservation and revitalization efforts across North America.

We’ll explore how St. Labre Indian School is redefining what it means to be a school—supporting not just students but entire communities through culturally responsive teaching, language programs, and innovative approaches to education. Curtis shares powerful stories of impact, from young learners embracing their heritage to the school’s courageous efforts to confront its own history. This is a conversation about leadership, healing, and the critical role schools play in empowering communities to thrive.

Jason Cummins: I’m looking forward to our conversation. My name is Jason Cummins. I’m an assistant professor at Montana State University. I’m the program leader for the Educational Leadership Program and have been working along the same vein as our guest today in different areas. I’m really happy to have our guest with us. Curtis, can you introduce yourself?

Introduction to St. Labre School

Curtis Yarlott: My name’s Curtis Yarlott, Executive Director of St. Labre Indian School in Ashland, Montana. I’m a member of the Crow Tribe. My dad was Crow, and my mom was Korean. They met in Korea, married there, and then came to the Crow Reservation. My mother learned how to speak Crow, and all of us children spoke Crow from the time we were young kids and continue to this day. Well, I’m happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Mason Pashia: Thanks for being here. Curtis, paint us a picture of St. Labre School. Who do you serve? Tell us more about the school.

Curtis Yarlott: St. Labre has been around since 1884 and has been operating continuously since then. Our main campus is on the eastern edge of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation, and we serve primarily the Northern Cheyenne and Crow populations. We have two elementary schools on the Crow Reservation: Pretty Eagle Catholic Academy at St. Xavier and St. Charles Mission School at Pryor. We also operate a standalone Crow language immersion preschool in Lodge Grass, also on the Crow Reservation.

Mason Pashia: How many students are you serving?

Curtis Yarlott: Across our entire system, we have about 550 students.

Mason Pashia: Thank you.

Jason Cummins: That’s exciting and quite the reach. Under your leadership, the organizations have been at the forefront of a lot of issues, leading in the way of culturally responsive efforts, culturally sustaining efforts, and language revitalization. For me, it’s interesting to see how you’ve been able to balance that with the status quo of school as we know it because you still have to remain accredited and such—if you know what I’m trying to get at.

Curtis Yarlott: Right.

Jason Cummins: You’re meeting that, being innovative, and providing a healing experience for students.

Mason Pashia: I was struck when looking on the St. Labre website about the community outreach services you offer. Would you mind digging into the role the school plays within the community? Expanding this vision of what a school can be is something our audience thinks about all the time.

Curtis Yarlott: Absolutely. One of the things has been to be more than a school. Our core service has revolved around elementary and secondary education, preschool through 12th grade. But we’ve also provided services in human or social services. I started in our group home program at St. Labre. We had six group homes at the time. This is where children would live year-round—24/7, 365 days a year—at St. Labre. They were children who couldn’t live in their own homes for a variety of reasons. It could be that parents were unable to care for them, parents were deceased, or parents were incarcerated. Just a lot of different reasons. That’s one of the areas that we have.

We also have, through our Youth and Family Services Program, a food pantry to serve the immediate needs of families who struggle with food insecurity. We have a donated items distribution center where donors send in items, mostly clothes. We call it the “clothes room”—maybe not really imaginative, but descriptive, just like the Crow language, right? And then we have the food pantry. We do outreach services. We assist folks who need money for firewood to heat their homes, propane, electricity, or water bills. They might need assistance with gasoline to get to appointments in Billings because the Indian Health Service doesn’t provide services closer to home. We also help with motel expenses. All of those are things we help provide. Sadly, we also provide assistance for funeral expenses, which seem to be inordinately high. It’s kind of normal because I grew up on the reservation, but for folks who move here from off-reservation, there seem to be an awful lot of funerals that happen for communities outside.

Jason Cummins: Serving in the way you’re doing is an ideal model for schools because a lot of times we forget that schools are related to their context—or they are in a context—and schools have the ability to heal communities over time and empower communities. One interesting thing to me is that St. Labre is a religious school, and in that system, I see you honoring the spirituality of the tribes involved. How has that balance been? Mason highlighted that part of your mission is stewardship and care for all of God’s creations and to use resources responsibly.

Curtis Yarlott: Right. We’re a school in the Roman Catholic tradition, and the Roman Catholic Church and Indigenous populations have not always had the best relationships or positive interactions. Here at St. Labre, we strive to integrate Native traditions and Catholic spirituality. We invite our students and staff to join us in praying in the Catholic tradition, but also, for example, during our large celebrations of Catholic Mass, we integrate elements of Native spirituality. Instead of incense, we smudge. Students dressed in traditional regalia will bring forward the gifts, set the table at the altar, and then bring forward the gifts. We have drumming in the processional and also the recessional.

A tribal member who was openly critical of St. Labre and the Catholic Church, for a variety of reasons, wound up enrolling their students in our school. Some months after enrolling their students, I bumped into him, and he said, “My kids have asked more about our traditions since they started at St. Labre than ever before.” That openness of inviting them to know God better—whether in the Catholic tradition or their own—is something we’ve tried to do consistently, at least as long as I have been here, and even before my entry into the role of being Executive Director.

Mason Pashia: Thanks for sharing that, Curtis. We share a lot about the portrait of a graduate at our organization—an outcome framework decided by the community of what are the attributes or the skills you want every learner who graduates to have. I think a lot of the time, those end up looking like the four C’s: collaboration, creativity, etc. Usually, when nested within a religious institution, they have things more along the lines of servant leadership and being community-centered. How do you think about those kinds of words and how they sit between the Roman Catholic tradition and your own? How do you come up with this language that is critical for helping learners understand what they should be or what the community needs them to be in the end?

Curtis Yarlott: Some of that mirrors what I’ve long heard in both the Crow and Cheyenne communities: to go out, get educated, and then come back and make things better for your people. That speaks to the servant leadership or service part of what you asked about. That’s a big part of what we try to do, and it certainly fits in with the Christian traditions as well—of making life better not just for yourself but also for the people around you.

The other thing we try to instill in our students is this: Do not limit yourself to what you have seen happen or what folks here have done in the past. Expand the horizons. We have students who’ve opened roads for those who follow—going to post-secondary institutions that, a generation ago, would have seemed out of reach for somebody from the communities that we serve. One of the stories that I like is about a young girl who, I believe, was a middle schooler. She came to one of our high school graduations. At that graduation, we just happened to have two of our graduating seniors—the valedictorian and salutatorian. One was going to Stanford, and the other to Dartmouth. I was told that the girl at that graduation decided, “I’m going to Dartmouth too.” And she wound up going to Dartmouth and graduating from there. None of us know what impact what we do will have on somebody who follows. That’s one of the things we try to instill in our graduates: to set a good path for those who come after you.

Jason Cummins: That’s a powerful story. Having that expectation for your students is evident to those who know the work you and your team do. One thing that’s impressive is how you maintain a connection to your students—not just where you track success based on the graduation rate, but you maintain that connection with students after they graduate and continue to offer support in their next phase of life. Do you want to speak to that?

Curtis Yarlott: Oh, yeah. I would say, 25 years ago, I have to confess, this was not my idea. But part of my job is to recognize a good idea when I see it, right? We had a couple of employees who brought forth the idea: “We need to have a mentoring program that will follow our students after they leave St. Labre.” We established a mentoring program—a post-secondary mentoring program. We have a person whose full-time job is to follow up with our graduates, assist them with their journey—their post-secondary journey—whether that’s college, trade school, military, or whatever it is. They stay in touch with them, see how they’re doing, and help if they need assistance with filling out applications. Some of our students’ parents may not have attended college, or maybe they tried and it wasn’t a good experience for them. Having somebody in their corner to advocate for them and guide them through these things is important.

For those of our graduates in post-secondary education, the mentor visits them at least once a year. If they’re in Montana or the surrounding states, it’s several times a year that he will travel to their school and visit with each of our graduates attending that school. I think that has helped a lot with providing a consistency of support and guidance, and it’s helped our students be successful after they leave St. Labre.

Mason Pashia: I love the ways that you’re approaching this. It really resonates with what Kara Bobroff shared in the last podcast that Jason and I did together. In that conversation, we were asking, “What does innovation mean in your context?” The ways in which you are innovating within your own community are just really beautiful and useful. I don’t think they’re always the first thing someone would say when you mention innovation. Personally, I think that’s for the better. That’s kind of a word that’s overly shiny too much of the time. But I appreciate what you’re doing. I know, Jason, in our early conversations, you mentioned St. Labre as a pretty incredible example. You’ve heard of them over time as this exemplar of what’s possible. Is that true?

Jason Cummins: An example of what’s possible in cultural strengthening and language revitalization—is that what we’re talking about?

Mason Pashia: Yeah. I think I’m curious to hear the story of St. Labre.

Jason Cummins: Okay.

Mason Pashia: How you’ve encountered it over time and the perception of this place within the Crow or Northern Cheyenne people.

Jason Cummins: Yeah. I was in our state’s capitol before, and there were people advocating for different issues. There were a lot of people—they had their agendas. Here’s St. Labre, and we want to do what St. Labre is doing.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Jason Cummins: In my mind, I was like, no, St. Labre is truly an anomaly. It’s easy for people to place organizations in a box—this is a Catholic school, or this is an Indian school. But I don’t think St. Labre really cleanly fits into any box. Curtis, share the story of St. Labre as an example of what can be.

Curtis Yarlott: I’m not sure that I would say we’re an anomaly. I’ve been here long enough that it’s like, yeah, this is just what we do. I’ve been in this job for 29 years and associated with St. Labre longer than that. The primary thing for us is we want to make things better. That’s really our driving motivation—to make things better on the Crow and Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservations. In order to do that, the vision has to be broader than just education.

St. Labre kind of sits in a sometimes unfortunate spot in the history of Indigenous peoples—or maybe it’s a spot that, because of the history of Catholic boarding schools and Indigenous populations, we have to ask: How do we grow from that? How do we look at that history and move toward being more of a healing entity? Put simply, how do we make things better? That’s been the driving force of what we do.

Jason Cummins: “Anomaly” wasn’t a good word. I should have said “an outlier ahead of the curve.”

Curtis Yarlott: Yeah, well…

Mason Pashia: I have a question, Curtis. How do you recruit educators with that goal? We have been guilty of saying schools need to be about more than education, especially within communities, and yet that is also oftentimes putting a lot on the shoulders of an educator who’s already asked to do a fairly, seemingly impossible task sometimes. So I’m just curious—what does that process look like for you, and how do you pull people in and actually invite them toward this kind of broader vision of what a school is?

Curtis Yarlott: We have challenges like other rural schools in Montana and, in particular, rural Indian reservation schools, in attracting faculty and folks who want to move here. I always tell people, if you’re coming to Ashland, Montana, you have to have some intentionality about getting to Ashland, Montana. We’re a little bit off the beaten path—well, we used to be off the beaten path until Highway 212, which runs about a mile south of us here, became a major thoroughfare for interstate trucking. So we have challenges in attracting faculty and staff here, just like other organizations in rural Montana.

One of the things we like to say in our recruiting materials is that it’s more than a job—it’s a mission. And what does that mean? Well, one, it is a little bit of a play on words because folks refer to St. Labre as “the mission,” right? St. Labre Indian Mission. A little bit of a play on the words, but it’s also an imagery of it being more than just coming here to work—to have a job that pays you a salary. It’s about coming here to accomplish a mission, to make real and lasting change in the communities we serve with the children who come through our doors and their families. That’s part of the messaging we try to get out there with those folks that we’re seeking to attract to come here.

Jason Cummins: Thanks for that. We know that the history with education in North America for Indigenous students is really complicated and complex, and your organization was proactive in looking at its story with regard to boarding schools. Would you like to share about that and how you approached that rather than shying away?

Confronting Boarding School History

Curtis Yarlott: The history of St. Labre as a Catholic Indian boarding school has been an issue of conversation, conflict, and criticism over the years. But, you know, when news came out of Canada about the possibility of unmarked burials of children who were sent to residential schools in Canada, that really raised the question of whether that could have happened at any of our schools here within the St. Labre system. That was the founding question: Could that have happened? And so, you know, we moved toward, “Okay, so we want to know.” I have to credit my board of directors for having the courage to say, “You know, we want to know the truth.”

The board of directors set up an independent commission to look into this and hired an independent research firm. The commission was comprised of some individuals who had been openly critical of the Catholic Church in the past. I think that was very important in establishing the credibility of the work they were going to do. If the board had selected cheerleaders for St. Labre, their work would’ve had zero credibility.

The lead researcher with the independent research firm also had a history of his grandmother having been sent off to a boarding school. All of that was important to, as the board said, learn the truth—whatever it is. That was the mandate that went through in conducting research into the history of St. Labre, what was the St. Xavier Mission boarding school (now known as Pretty Eagle Catholic Academy), and St. Charles Mission School, a Catholic boarding school for a short period. Research was conducted over 18 months, accessing archives from across the country where there were records of boarding schools or government records. The Catholic religious orders who were here also opened their archives to the independent researcher because they knew what was happening here and the research that was being done.

There were children who died while they were in our care or shortly after they left our care. When I say “our,” I’m talking about all three of our locations. What the research did not uncover was that there were children who died as a result of the actions or inaction of the religious or lay staff, which we were grateful for. In talking with Cheyenne elders—pretty much all of whom have passed on now—over the years, they spoke about some of the abuse types of things where they were punished for speaking their language, made to kneel on wooden rods, and those types of things. You know, the things that would not be tolerated today and should not have been tolerated back then. But I had not heard from those elders that any kids were killed by the faculty, staff, religious priests, nuns, or brothers here. The research seemed to confirm what I had not heard from those elders. So that was a relief, to be honest.

Jason Cummins: I think it’s just a testament to courageous leadership from the board of directors and yourself. It’s fascinating that students used to be punished for their language, and now the same organization is supporting the language. It shows how you can transform an organization.

Curtis Yarlott: I think that’s part of the healing I mentioned earlier—making things better. There were historic injuries visited upon the population St. Labre was supposed to serve. If we’re going to get better, we need to address those. One, we need to acknowledge that they happened. That was part of what that research project did—acknowledge these things happened. Out of those interviews, we got more people saying, “Yeah, we were punished for speaking our language. Yeah, we had our hair cut.” All these things happened. That was part of acknowledging these bad things happened at our schools. But you can’t just stay looking at the past and all the bad things. How do you move forward? How do you heal? How do you restore? How do you make things better?

Jason Cummins: Yeah, I like that. And it wasn’t just your school—it was happening across the nation in public schools. I remember as a student, you would get in trouble if people were speaking the language. And I’m pretty young—I’m just kidding. Even there, sometimes misguided administrators forbade Indigenous languages. But I agree—how do we get better? How do we learn? How do we grow? Your organization is an example of that. Do you want to talk about some of the language work you’re involved in? Because I think that’s a way to grow and to heal. Research shows language revitalization heals trauma, you know?

Curtis Yarlott: Right.

Language Revitalization Work

Curtis Yarlott: Personally, I grew up speaking Crow. I had a Korean mother who came to the United States and learned Crow. I’ve always had an interest in Crow language and Indigenous languages. As I worked here at St. Labre, we’ve been involved in efforts to not just preserve but revitalize both the Crow and Cheyenne languages.

We’ve been engaged with the Language Conservancy. They produce beautiful materials—books, picture books, textbooks, and dictionaries. We’ve worked with them for years in both the Crow and the Northern Cheyenne languages. We’ve not been the lead agency on the Crow language efforts—that’s the tribal college at Crow Agency—but our language instructors and Crow-speaking staff have been very involved from the beginning. We continue to be involved today.

With the Northern Cheyenne language, through the Northern Cheyenne Language Consortium, we’ve so far developed 11 picture books, a level one textbook (which had not previously existed), and we’re next going to be working on an e-learning platform. There’s already one for the Crow language, and actually, one of our employees has done a whole lot of the recordings for that e-learning app.

In our strategic plan, we have a Native languages goal, and it’s got three parts that we’re acting on. One is preservation. The reality is we are losing fluent first-language speakers of tribal languages at a great rate. As a Crow tribal member, there are still an estimated 2,500 speakers of Crow. With the Northern Cheyenne, the estimate now is that we are down to about 200 first-language speakers of the language.

The second part of the goal is to expand access and capacity. That means getting more individuals involved in these efforts, certainly, but also more individuals actively working to speak the language. The third part is sustainability—how do you sustain these efforts over time? How do you make sure these are ongoing and can continue to sustain themselves? Those are the three parts we work on with the three entities I’m presently involved with.

Mason Pashia: With this language conservation work, do you have young students participating? Are the students from St. Lbare doing any gathering of words or any element of the conservation?

Curtis Yarlott: So far, most of the gathering of words has been done by adults who are not in school. Certainly, the young folks have been primarily involved in learning the language.

Mason Pashia: Right.

Curtis Yarlott: We have some high school-age or recently graduated individuals involved in the language work, primarily on the Crow language side. We want to expand that on the Northern Cheyenne side as well.

If I could share what, to me, is an exciting development that I’ve seen just this fall: Last year, at the opening day of school, I was talking to all the faculty and staff in the school and saying, “I want to see more of the languages used throughout the day—not just in the Cheyenne language class, not just in the Crow language class, but throughout the day—so that our students have more contact time with the languages.” In our elementary school, they have a daily meeting. One of the things they do is go over Cheyenne and Crow language as well.

One of the exciting things that happened was, two weeks ago, I had some Cheyenne parents come to me and say, “Our kids are coming home speaking Crow to us.” Historically, Cheyennes and Crows were enemies, but the parents were pretty cool with their kids coming home speaking Crow because they’re also speaking Cheyenne, which they’re learning in school. But they’re also coming home and speaking Crow. Part of that is the students learning, “Okay, what’s the difference between Crow and Cheyenne?” Because then the parents say, “I’m Cheyenne, so this is what we say. This is how we say it.” So we’ve just opened the door for the parents to share more about the language.

This is how we say it as Cheyenne. That’s the Crow way of saying it. This is how Cheyennes would say it. You’re engaging parents more in that. In some cases, parents are learning from their child because they didn’t speak it growing up. To me, that’s exciting. The reason it’s exciting is that this shows if we broaden the exposure to these languages for these young kids, they will learn.

I just had our preschool teacher in here. She’s saying, “Those kids are learning so fast.” And she’s a learner of her language as well. She’s saying, “They’re going to pass me up soon.” I said, “Then you better get with your grandma and learn some more words, right?” She laughed and said, “Yeah, I better.” So it’s not the teacher pulling the kids along, right? We have the students who are pushing this teacher to learn more. If we can expand that, I’m very hopeful we will have young people who are at least conversational because they’re encouraged to use the Cheyenne and Crow languages out on the playground and when interacting with their peers.

We have non-Native individuals who teach in the school. We have some teachers from the Philippines who teach in our school, and they’re all using Crow and Cheyenne phrases. The students are responding in kind. To me, that’s exciting.

Jason Cummins: I agree. That’s exciting. Good job to the staff and everybody there. I had a similar experience when a teacher and a teacher’s aide were laughing and said, “It’s working because one of the kindergartners said, ‘Stop politicking.’” They were surprised he understood what we were talking about.

Curtis Yarlott: That’s good.

Mason Pashia: That’s awesome. I love that. Thank you for sharing, Curtis. Do you have any closing thoughts or takeaways for our listeners before we wrap up?

Jason Cummins: While Curtis is thinking, full disclosure, I’ve worked with Curtis for a while with our language consortium. I’m really honored to work with him. He does a lot of substantive, meaningful work, and I think he focuses on real work and tries to fly under the radar. That’s another testament to the leadership there. I don’t know if he does that on purpose or not.

Curtis Yarlott: I appreciate those words. I work with Jason in a number of arenas and have always been impressed by him. My tendency is to fly under the radar. It was instilled in me as a child by my parents, and it’s my natural personality. I don’t aspire to be a public figure. I would rather focus on things that make a difference, that work, and hopefully move things along. And I’m going to sound like a broken record, but things that make things better for the communities we serve.

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Guest Bio

Curtis Yarlott

Curtis Yarlott (Apsáalooke) is the Executive Director of St. Labre Indian School, and has been a Crow Language Consortium Board Member since 2019. As a fluent speaker of the Crow language, Yarlott has contributed countless hours of recordings for the Crow Dictionary and classroom materials, and has been an educator for nearly four decades. Under Yarlott’s leadership, St. Labre Education Foundation schools Pretty Eagle (in St. Xavier) and St. Charles (in Pryor) Catholic Academies have expanded dual language classrooms (Crow and English) across the curriculum, for Pre-K to 1st Grade. Additionally, St. Labre sponsors a Crow language immersion pre-Kindergarten in the Lodge Grass District.

Jason Cummins

Jason D. Cummins (Awachíikaate) is an Indigenous scholar with over 20 years of experience in education, having served in various roles including teacher, instructional coach, and administrator. He is a contributing author of The School Wellness Wheel, coauthor of Humanized Education, and a professor of educational leadership at Montana State University. Jason has worked with schools on a range of initiatives, from implementing traditional school improvement efforts to culturally sustaining, trauma-informed, and restorative approaches.

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