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Across the country, advocates are working to ensure K-12 students have the opportunity to take ethnic studies courses.

This educator—originally from North Dakota—shares two reflections that inform how and what she teaches about Standing Rock and the Dakota Access Pipeline.

When I was in fifth grade and new to suburbia, my teacher introduced the concepts of racism, civil rights and fairness. And she began the task of helping 10-years olds—all of us white—learn how to talk about race in constructive ways. I’d moved from a gritty urban neighborhood where whites, blacks and Puerto Ricans lived together rather warily. My parents maintained a chilly silence on the issue of race, although they forbade racial epithets; on the street I heard plenty. In this place, the black kids came mostly from the projects, the Puerto Ricans lived in apartments and the better-off among the white families might have an entire house. I knew that race divided.

A recent Cheerios commercial reminds us of the historical roots of race in the United States. Those roots still cause social and political upset.