Bringing Tewa Home, One Generation at a Time | Porter Swentzell

Porter Swentzell shares how a decade of community-led education is helping Santa Clara Pueblo carry its Native language into the future.

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For Porter Swentzell, the future of Tewa is something he hopes to hear: children, parents, and neighbors speaking their language freely and joyfully throughout Santa Clara Pueblo.

On this episode of Doing Good, Swentzell describes the decade of work behind that vision at Kha’p’o Community School. In 2016, the community took control of its federally operated school with a mission: education in both Tewa and English.

The stakes reach beyond vocabulary. Language carries a people’s worldview, relationships, and understanding of what it means to be human. For Swentzell, passing it forward honors generations who sustained their culture through extraordinary challenges.

Building the program has meant rethinking how school works. When classroom arrangements failed to challenge students at different language levels, the team started over. Drawing on the community’s agricultural traditions, they organized proficiency levels around the growth of a corn plant. A block schedule brings children of different ages and grades together by ability.

Learning and assessment reflect an oral tradition. Teachers gauge understanding through conversation and everyday requests, listening for the difference between comprehension, a simple response, and more complex expression. Swentzell credits Tewa director Darrin Rock and his team with developing this approach.

The effort now reaches beyond elementary classrooms to parents, adults, staff, and high school students. A ten-year plan coordinates leadership, funding, and responsibilities around creating proficient speakers.

For families where parents no longer speak Tewa, expecting children to learn it at home is insufficient. The school’s ambition is to help return the language there.

Swentzell’s education began with family, farming, animals, and the changing seasons. Those experiences inform his conviction that education belongs to a community.

He hopes for hundreds more speakers and an immersion setting for young children. Success means Tewa living wherever people gather, carrying an inheritance into another generation.