Ron Corn:
I didn't know a whole bunch, but I was proud of what I knew. And she just pulled me in close with her. There was a few of us in her inner circle, and so that was really the start. I mean, she took me at a really good time, because life was hard up here and there was a lot of decisions to be made on a daily basis as to how you were going to conduct yourself. Having her as a guiding light in my life was absolutely critical. I could go on telling the story about how these coincidences stack up. But there was also a man that I met after many more years of learning. The building's named after Wáqsecewan Lilian, she's the one who took me up in junior high and then all the way through. And then I met a man named Joe Beaver. We call him Mipanita. He was the first one that I could already talk Menominee and understand a lot. But they never corrected me. So I made lots of mistakes, but I didn't know it. They could understand me, so they would just let it go. He was the first one that said, "There's a better way to say that". That's exactly what he said, "There's a better way to say that." And I said, "Well, tell me". So he fixed it up and then he told me. And I said, "Anytime I could say something better, you let me know". And so then that day, he did that a lot. But then it got me to also do this next layer of study on the language, if you will, and that's when things really started to open up.