Native Teaching Aids

Who We Are

Creation Story

Native Teaching Aids was started as a samll business in St. Ignatius, Montana as an answer to the lack of resources to teach indigenous languages, cultures, and histories. Before the inception of Native Teaching Aids, Rebecca Goff was pursuing a masters in linguistics and her husband Brandon Goff owned MetaForge, a software company. Rebecca and Brandon approached Darrell Kipp, the renowned founder of the Blackfeet Immersion School, seeking to get involved in language revitalization, but also wanting to remain culturally sensitive and not be white saviors. With the collaboration of Darrell, Brandon and Rebecca started Native Teaching Aids in 2013. Native Teaching Aids currently has 8 employees. Native Teaching Aids still operates out of St. Ignatius.

Mission

Native Teaching Aids believes in the vital importance of maintaining and revitalizing indigenous culture, language, and history for indigenous communities everywhere. Many Native American languages are considered endangered by Ethnologue, and for many communities the death of their language is the loss of their way of life and identity. Consequently, there has been a huge movement to breath new life into Native American languages and culures. Further, Indigenous histories have been whitewashed and portrayed inaccurately which has led to many tribes seeking to decolonize.

Our mission is to get involved in these movements through our educational resources. We develop, design, and create educational and entertaining materials with a focus on indigenous language, culture, and history; These materials predominately consist of board and card games, but also include mobile apps, websites, artwork, and multimedia. We believe learning your language should be fun and resources should be easy to use, and our games embody that. We use games because they require the same foundations languages do; community and communication. [THIS NEEDS A REWRITE IMO]