My wife and I are good friends with a kindergarten teacher in Ponemah, the traditional village that sits on the spit of land between Upper and Lower Red Lake. On Thursday, March 31, the teacher returned to Ponemah for the funeral of one of the students killed in the Red Lake shootings. Three of the six students killed were from Ponemah, and one had volunteered in our friend's classroom.

At the funeral, our friend saw some of her kindergarteners for the first time since the tragedy. She e-mailed this: "Some of my class have been thinking that I was dead—they figured if I was alive, they'd be in school— They wouldn't let go when I held them . . . So the next time someone asks me, 'And how does this affect you?' I'm going to have to scream!!!"

Through the tragedy, and then the public scrutiny afterwards, the Red Lake Ojibwe people, both born and honorary (our friend has been given an Indian name) have taught the world something precious: That life is sacred and, even in the face of mass death, is to be honored and respected. That even troubled kids who kill others are to be honored and respected. That relationships, between old and young, between Red Lake Band members and respectful outsiders, are to be honored and respected. That honest, full-life spiritualism— whether or not of a mainstream religion—is to be honored and respected.

No teacher or administrator and no family of Red Lake, Little Rock, Redby, and Ponemah will ever be the same after this. If we have learned, truly learned, from this sad happening, we will not be the same either.

We will see human relationships differently. We will view what happens between teachers and children in classrooms as meaningful. We will value what is truly human in the education process. We will let pressures for academic performance affect less how we relate to the children in our class. We will respect parents more for the precious gift they hold in their hands, and share with us each day. We will see true teaching as being from a heart to a heart, with all else, including the "measurement" of learning, being secondary.

We will change not out of "sympathy for the poor people of Red Lake." We will do it for the dignity in the face of extreme adversity that the people of Red Lake have modeled for the world. We will do it from a rekindled awareness of what it really means to be human in a sometimes inhuman world. Though not because they wanted to, the people of Red Lake have placed this lesson before us. May we choose to learn it.

Dan Gartrell is a professor of early childhood education at Bemidji State University in northern Minnesota and a former Head Start teacher at Red Lake. He is the author of What the Kids Said Today: Using Classroom Conversations to Become a Better Teacher. If you wish to help the people of Red Lake, you can send donations to: Red Lake Nation Memorial Fund, Red Lake Band of Chippewa, P.O. Box 574, Red Lake, MN 56671.