KESHENA - Teachers can’t and don’t know everything, so it’s not unusual for them to have to research something before taking it into the classroom.

But Ben Grignon of Menominee Indian High School takes that to kind of a ridiculous extreme. He probably doesn’t know half of what he’s trying to teach his students. True, he spends an awful lot of off-hours trying to catch up, but, come on, Ben, what are you trying to pull here?

What would you do with a teacher like that? Send him back to school? Fire him?

Well, the state of Wisconsin knew what to do. It stepped in and named Grignon the 2019 High School Teacher of the Year. He got a surprise visit last week from State Superintendent Tony Evers in Keshena.

Evers handed him a $3,000 check from the Herb Kohl Educational Foundation and welcomed him to an elite crew: Grignon now is certifiably one of the best teachers in the state. It’s an honor that’ll stick with him; he’ll be expected to show up every year as one of the alumni when new teachers are similarly honored. The Wisconsin Education Association Council said Grignon may be the first native American teacher to receive the honor.

See, you have to forgive Grignon for not knowing his subject all that well. He is quite probably the only high school teacher on the entire planet teaching the subject he teaches.

Grignon is the traditional arts and craft teacher for a tribe that takes a great deal of pride in its traditional culture but which, like many tribes, is fighting an uphill battle to keep that culture alive.

For example, as part of the curriculum, Grignon teaches the Menominee language, which is on the brink of going extinct. Almost no one alive is what we would call a native speaker, someone who learned it as their first language at home, the way language was meant to be learned.

When the last of those native speakers are gone, the entire Menominee language could go the way of the West African Black Rhinoceros, just one more memory, one more thing that humanity let slip between its fingers into that vast ocean of dead-things-that-once-were-beautiful-that-we-wish-we-would-have-saved. Gone for all time.

“There are probably only about five people still alive today who spoke it as their first language,” Grignon said.

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At age 40, Grignon is certainly not one of them. But he is one of those who studied the language academically, by trying as best as he could to immerse himself in it, by spending as much time as possible learning from those few remaining native speakers. And now he is among those fighting like hell to keep the language alive, desperately trying to perform CPR on this dying thing, trying to get it into the school curriculum wherever it will fit, organizing language immersion camps, serving on the Menominee Language and Culture Commission, which is trying to get a language immersion program installed all the way down to the level of the Menominee Tribal Daycare.

But here’s the thing: Grignon is an arts and crafts teacher. Even as he insists his art students use the Menominee word for beads, for leather, for scissors, for needle, he is simultaneously trying to perform CPR on a host of other culturally iconic activities that are struggling for survival.

Menominee beadwork, leatherwork, textile crafts, pottery-making, basketry — all of them are stampeding toward oblivion, and Grignon is trying to put a halt to it.

Grignon has a master’s degree in fine art, which grounded him in all of the drawing, painting, sculpting skills that we tend to think of when we think of art. He also has an associate’s degree in fine art from the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which gave him some chops in some of the more traditional native American media.

But an art school in New Mexico won’t teach you Menominee ways. For that, you want to grow up in a Menominee household where both parents are steeped in Native American arts, like Grignon did. You want to talk to the elders who still remember how to do stuff and get them to show you, like Grignon does. You want to study as much of that Menominee art as you possibly can, wherever you can find it, and try to figure out how it was done, as Grignon does.

You want to consult with science teachers to learn how to identify mushrooms that you can eat and plants that can make dyes. You want to talk to math teachers to learn geometric formulas so your beadwork comes out even. You want to talk to archeologists and chemists about how the clay from ancient pottery can be reconstituted into new clay for new pottery projects.

A student in Benjamin Grignon's traditional Menominee art class at Menominee Indian High School in Keshena works on a bead project. (Photo: Sarah Kloepping/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)

And all the while you’re doing all that, you want to find ways to keep the ancient traditions relevant for young people buried up to their necks in non-native cultural influences. Allow that beading student to bead a portrait of the rap artist Notorious B.I.G. Allow that ceramics student to make a clay sculpture of a beaver that can be used to hold a cell phone and amplify its tiny sound system. Those aren’t traditional, but the students are learning the traditional skills and are carving out a new direction for the old ways.

Grignon does all that, and meanwhile, he excels at that other, unavoidable part of the job in today’s culture: the teacher-as-social-worker.

Grignon has learned to use devices like classroom meditation and alternative programming to address what the state Department of Public Instruction calls the “Adverse Childhood Experiences” prevalent in high-poverty districts. Menominee art comes with a palette of colors and motifs within the tradition, but Grignon makes sure students seek ways to use the traditional arts to express themselves, share their struggles and work their way through them through art.

As Grignon puts it: “My students are taught about menacehaew (respect) for themselves, each other and for the knowledge passed on to us from the elders.”

School principal Jim Reif called Grignon “an irreplaceable embodiment of what it means to be a revered Menominee leader and teacher.”

And now, he and everyone call also call Grignon one of the best in the state.

Benjamin Grignon, traditional Menominee art teacher at Menominee Indian High School in Keshena, works with students on bead projects. Grignon was recently named a Wisconsin 2019 High School Teacher of the Year. (Photo: Sarah Kloepping/USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin)