In this article, the author proposes a model educators can apply when teaching one text, Louise Erdrich's "The Bingo Palace"; while she emphasizes the particular concerns this text raises, she aims, simultaneously, to offer a more general approach to teaching American Indian literature responsibly. In an increasingly multicultural academic setting, both in terms of the student body and the material educators teach, this responsibility must be acknowledged and embraced. Before turning to the novel, however, she spends some time problematizing and, ultimately, situating her own position as a white educator teaching indigenous-authored texts. In the first section, then, she argues that to teach American Indian texts responsibly, educators must contextualize them within a cultural framework and include themselves and their own complicity in that framework. She then turns to "The Bingo Palace" to identify some pieces of the Ojibwe narrative that are often overlooked by critics, issues that should take center stage in the classroom. She begins by addressing at length how the novel participates in the oral narrative tradition. She then turns to focus solely on the characterization of Fleur, a figure tied to two important Ojibwe nonhuman beings: bears and Misshepeshu, the underwater manitou. Following the body of the article is an appendix of possible pedagogical tools for the classroom that use the findings of her research. In offering this structure, the author does not pretend to have fashioned an innovative critical model. But she does hope that this article reflects both a willingness to decenter her Euroamerican analytical power and her commitment to a pedagogy of social change. Moreover, while she emphasizes particular issues facing white educators of Native-authored texts, she anticipates that this model--and the theoretical and political convictions it is predicated on--will be useful to all pedagogues. (Contains 14 notes.)