From the moment he opened his eyes, Sam Oozevaseuk Schimmel was precocious. He starting talking at 6 months, walked at 9 months and hated sleeping.
“He was a pain in the ass,” laughs Jeremy Schimmel, Sam’s father. “He exhausted you. When he was a little kid, I would read books to him. I’ve never read more books in my life. Frog and Toadwould last, like, a minute. So then you’re on to Dr. Doolittle and The Little Prince, and by the time, you’re done, you’ve read nine books and it’s, like, ‘Oh my god.’ And he’s still awake. You just couldn’t satiate his need for listening and for knowledge.”
Jeremy and Rene Schimmel had moved back to Alaska, in part so Sam could be born at the Alaska Native Hospital where Rene had health coverage. As a child, Sam spent most of his time outside with his parents and with Rene’s family.
“He never was inside. He hunted and fished,” says Jeremy. “He was catching fish when he was 2 — off the dock.” Sam watched and listened to his family in Gambell with the same intensity he gave to books. He memorized old songs and stories his great-grandmother sang and told. She would hold his little body close and press her cheek to his, as if to convey: “You are one of us.”
Rene breathed a small sigh of relief and refocused on her own goals. She decided to get a master’s degree in education. The family started splitting their time between Alaska and Seattle, where she was in school. When she graduated in 2004, she got a job at one of the best public elementary schools in the city. “I was so happy,” she remembers.
But school was difficult. Sam didn’t like sitting still and didn’t understand why he needed to follow so many rules about when to talk and what to say. He started getting in trouble in class.
Rene and Jeremy would meet with school administrators. Some teachers and counselors suggested Sam had a learning disability or a behavioral disorder. His parents entertained that possibility but explained that Sam was growing up in a different environment than his peers. The family still spent summers in Gambell. No one else at the school was from a subsistence hunting culture. Might it make sense that Sam would learn differently from most other students?
“They didn’t listen,” says Jeremy, standing at his kitchen table in Seattle and picking through a box of old progress reports from the time. “They told us: 'You need to go back to Alaska. Go back to the village.’ It was terrible.”
“I remember one teacher told me I wouldn’t go to college,” Sam adds from the couch. He’s 18 now, lanky in a baseball cap with a fish pattern on the front. “Who says that to a child? Like, if another kid says, 'Your shoes suck,’ you can just tell them, 'Well, your shoes suck, too.’ But you can’t deflect like that when an adult is mean to you.”
The Conflicting Educations Of Sam Schimmel
Photos: Kiliii Yuyan for NPR
Illustration: Nathalie Dieterle for NPR
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