This week I keynoted for Apache, Hopi, and Navajo grant school board members. Last minute invitation and I said yes. I always say yes to this kind of work.

Before the call I sat down and did what Masan taught me. Fifteen minutes. Stone breath. The practice her father passed to her, and she passed to me before I could even read. I wasn't nervous. I was ready.

I opened with stories about her, my first teacher.

Big Mountain. No electricity. Kerosene lamp. Four hundred sheep outside every morning. My great-grandmother Masan never once called what she did a "success seminar" — but that's exactly what it was. Every single day. Up before the sun. Prayer facing east. Sweep the floor. Walk the flock. She knew every animal by the sound of its bell. At night there was humor, stories, clan, relation. Nobody sat alone. Nobody felt lost. That was the classroom. That was the whole curriculum.

I told them about the teacher in Tuba City who saw a kid getting bullied for being too Navajo, a halfbreed (Lithuanian), too smart, too much — and instead of looking away, she went to Masan. That one conversation changed the direction of my life. She sent me to Montezuma School. And here is what I want every school board member to hear about that place.

Montezuma was not a traditional school. It was a working ranch with an accelerated, mastery-based learning model. You moved at your own pace. You didn't wait for the class. You didn't get left behind. You worked the land, cared for animals, took responsibility for real things — and somewhere inside all of that, your brain woke up. I ran a 4:20 mile there as a freshmen, learned to cliff dive, kayak, study. I excelled academically in ways I never had before. The model worked so well that I went back to regular public school and finished before my senior year. I was mainly working by then. The education had already done what it needed to do.

I told those board members directly: there are high-performance learning models out there that look nothing like a standard classroom and work far better for our kids. Mastery-based. Project-based. Land-connected. Accelerated for students who are ready. Look for them. Fund them. Build them.

I told them about Fort Lewis. Falling out after Masan's passing. Coming home. Not knowing what came next. That challenge redirected me to NAU where, 3 years later, I became Standard Bearer, and MBA, and eventually the first and only Native American inducted into the NAU College of Business Hall of Fame. The Grand Canyon Trust. Co-founding companies. Leading two Navajo Nation programs. None of it in a straight line. All of it real.

I shared a story of a school that impressed me. An Aztec language and culture school in East LA. Before my talk every single student — teenagers in East LA — sat in complete silence for fifteen minutes of meditation. No phones. No fidgeting. Just present. It worked. I said to those board members: if it works there, it works here.

Then I shared my current journey. Twenty-five years ago I started a PhD program at my college. Life had other plans and I stepped away. Last year that same college invited me back — not as a student, but as commencement speaker for their PhD program. I showed up and spent time with the professors and the graduating students. Something shifted. They encouraged me to apply. I didn't know if my old coursework would transfer. Didn't know if they'd even accept me. I applied anyway.

I got in.

And this program is nothing like sitting in a classroom. It's weekly writing sessions, Zoom collaborations, conferences, presentations, a constant exchange of ideas with some of the most experienced minds I've encountered. I look around at my fellow students — most are older, grey-haired, already teaching, already publishing, already leading. Good. That's exactly what makes a great teacher. A life fully lived before you try to explain it to anyone else. I'm on my third book. The Ancestral Watch Series. A wellness framework built from tools my ancestors practiced for thirty thousand years, translated for the modern world.

All through my life, every single time a door opened, there was a teacher or professor on the other side of it. Every time they said the same thing: I believe in your potential. I never took that lightly. A professor opened the door to my MBA. Another introduced me to my first major job at the Grand Canyon Trust. I co-founded a successful company with a professor. The most intimidating professor I ever encountered — the one I was most in awe of — nominated me to lead our graduating class. Every door, a person. Every person, a belief.

This is what I left with those board members:

Our families were always the most sophisticated success seminars ever designed. The traditional Navajo, Hopi and Apache home had everything — early rising, physical discipline, humor as medicine, silence as prayer, songs that encoded identity, stories that carried wisdom across generations, clan systems that made sure no one ever had to figure it out alone. Tony Robbins charges five thousand dollars a ticket to teach what our grandmothers taught before breakfast. We didn't lose these teachings because they stopped working. We lost them because systems were built specifically to take them from us. Your school is where we take them back.

And the school doesn't have to look like the one you grew up in. Some of our best students need something different — a Montezuma, a meditation room, a working ranch, a Zoom cohort of grey-haired writers who meet every week and push each other further than anyone expected. The standard classroom was never designed with our children in mind anyway. Find the models that work. Fund them.

After I finished, people came up one at a time.

"I haven't heard these teachings in a long time."

That's the whole reason I do this. The wisdom isn't new. It just needs someone to keep saying it out loud until it finds the people who need it most.

Every student on your land is carrying extraordinary potential right now. What happens in that boardroom determines whether it gets activated or goes quiet forever.

The journey doesn't end here. It just changes phases.

The ancestors are watching. Let's not waste what they built.

Ahéhee' Kokwei!

Tony Skrelūnas PhD Candidate · Author, The Ancestral Watch Series · Keynote Speaker

TribeAwaken.com | AncestralWatch.com