“Spessartine.”

Standing center stage at the Scripps National Spelling Bee, Kelly Haven repeated the word pensively. She shifted in her traditional Navajo skirt and moccasins and pressed her eyes closed, trying to visualize the word.

After years of dominating spelling bees throughout the Navajo Nation, after late nights poring over lists of words and definitions, she knew it. Or she thought she did.

“S-P-E-C-A-R-T-I-N-E.”

She waited to hear the “correct” from the judges that would send her on to the next round, but instead winced as a “DING” rang out across the stage. Her time at Scripps was over, at least this year.

But those steps onto stage in June 2017, and similarly in 2018, marked a shift. A shift not just for her, but for the community she represented.

For Kelly, the first full Navajo speller to make it as far as she has, stepping onto the national stage for the first time was more than just a chance to compete.

She donned turquoise jewelry and traditional Navajo clothes, sending a message to the thousands of people watching the Bee in Washington, D.C., and beyond: “I am here, and I am Navajo.”

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“I wanted them to ask me what my culture was and I wanted them to know I was Native American,” she said.

That message echoed through her small Navajo community of Fort Defiance, where spelling bees have evolved from an underfunded, on-and-off after-school activity into a movement shifting education on the reservation.

“It signifies that students of any race, especially the Navajo Nation, can be players, sitting at the table as players with other students from around the country,” said Lynnette Michaelski, superintendent of Kelly's Window Rock Unified School District.

'I've just grown up that way'

Fort Defiance, Arizona, population 4,022, is a town you would only find if you were searching for it.

Pressed against the Arizona-New Mexico border, its most defining characteristic is a giant rock formation called Window Rock — the namesake of the town adjacent to Fort Defiance.

Fort Definace struggles with a 41.7 percent poverty rate, and high rates of substance abuse and high school dropouts.

The Havens live in a small nook of the community where the neon yellow lines of the nearby freeway fade into loose gravel, dirt and weed-riddled sidewalks. Across from their home, bright blue and green spray paint decorates the tan walls and the shattered windows of long-abandoned homes.

“I think that everyone has a way they see the place that they're growing up,” said Kelly, now 13. “This is a tiny town and I've gotten used to this place. There's dirt everywhere, there's graffiti. I've just grown up that way.”

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The Window Rock Unified School District has historically been a product of the place. Schools have lacked funding. There has been constant turnover of teachers. Art and music classes come once in a blue moon. Resources like honors classes and tutoring have been even rarer.

“With our school district, it feels like they are more or less trying to create programs to bring these other kids up to par,” said Dina Haven, Kelly’s mother and an English teacher in the district. “They kind of forget about the kids that are already achieving academically high. There's not an honors program or anything like it.”

It was something Kelly and her family largely accepted as the norm. They only realized the stark difference between reservation and city schools when they first stepped foot in Washington, D.C., and heard other Scripps students discuss their wide range of classes.

“Schools here are very different from schools out there,” Kelly said. “Their schools, they have more money. So they can invest in art classes, music classes — stuff like that. We don't have that here. We just have regular classes.”

Kelly stumbled upon spellingbees almost by accident as a shy first-grader with a speech impediment. She didn’t like sports and the schools didn’t offer many extra-curriculars.

Dina and her husband, Martin Haven, saw their older son, Matthew, find success in previous bees and thought it may bring their quiet daughter out of her shell.

“We honestly didn't think she was going to get very far,” Dina said. “We were like, ‘OK, this is going to be something fun that she's going to do.’ … Then she got further and further along.”

Kelly won her first bee with ease, stunning her parents and judges with a sense of calm confidence they had never seen before. They knew they had something.

“I feel really calm because that's kind of my home,” Kelly said. “Just being on stage with all the other competitors. I just feel so welcome. I feel happy there because that's where I love going.”

'Instead of sports, I found spelling'

Soon, Kelly’s younger sister Hailey, now 11, began diving into the competitions, and spelling bees became the Haven family sport. For them, it was synonymous with basketball or soccer.

“I'm not interested in sports, I'm not really good at sports,” Hailey said. “Instead of sports, I found spelling.”

Where some kids go to practice after school, Kelly, Hailey and Dina sit at the dinner table for hours, tossing words back and forth like a ball.

“Osteoporosis.” “Pilferage.”

“Humuhumunukunukuapua'a,” the Hawaiian name for a reef triggerfish, Kelly’s favorite word.

They use YouTube videos, photographs labeled with the names of spelling bee words, Quizlets and white boards to memorize thousands of words, definitions and roots.

Their gear is color-coded note cards. Verbs are green, adjectives are pink, nouns are orange, adverbs are blue. The girls live and die by binders stuffed with lists.Instead of dragging around a football or a gym bag, Kelly carries a big red dictionary in her backpack — a habit that causes Dina to roll her eyes.

“I just like the dictionary,” Kelly said, matter of factly. “It has everything. It has all the words.”

Hailey has become her sister's greatest competitor, duking it out in competition after competition. No one knowsthe words like they do because no one studies quite like they do.

At home, they are a team. At the bees, they are fierce opponents.

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Spellers begin the bees in each of their individual schools spelling on stage and occasionally taking a practice written test. The winners move up to the regional competition and compete against 50 other top spellers in their grade level, taking both a written test and competing on stage. The top spellers in each of the grade levels, 50 total, then move of to compete in the Navajo Nation bee.

The winner of the Navajo Nation bee then competes in the national Scripps bee.

Hundreds of students compete in Scripps every year. Students first take a written spelling test, then spell a word on stage. Over the course of days, students go through rounds of spelling and eliminations until the top speller takes the trophy.

In every bee until the national bee, students are given long lists of words they could be asked. But in the written test and the later rounds of the Scripps, they can be asked anything in the dictionary.

In 2017, Kelly, Hailey and Matthew each won their school bees at Tsehootsooi Middle School and Tsehootsooi Intermediate Learning Center. All three won their grades in the regional bee and competed against each other in the Navajo Nation bee.

Kelly moved on to Scripps.

In the 2018 school bees, the sisters went head-to-head 25 rounds after everyone else had been eliminated. They spelled seamlessly until Hailey slipped on one word.

“The teachers were like, 'We don't know what else to do, we've exhausted the list,' ” Dina said.

They both won their grade categories — Kelly in seventh and Hailey in fifth — and competed against each other in the Navajo Nation Bee, again going back and forth, this time for eight rounds alone on stage.

Hailey slipped on the word “panzer,” a German armored vehicle. Kelly tackled the words “salami” and “anchovy,” then it was over. Kelly headed to Scripps for a second time.

'We have to be even better'

Much like the education system, when the Havens began spelling, bees on the reservation were not like those in the city. For years, high teacher turnover and lack of financial support riddled the competitions with disorganization.

To succeed in the bees, students needed luck and a parent like Dina, an English teacher, or a mentor like Duane Yazzi, who taught the Havens and helped them gear up for competitions.

“There's teacher turnover, people leaving the reservation,” Yazzi said. “Some schools are left with no one who wants to (compete), but those people who do decide to pick up the baton may not have an actual resource (to do so).”

And so Dina and Yazzi, both teachers in the district, decided to make a change when the issues came to a head in Kelly’s fourth-grade competition.

“If I’m going to complain much about the system,” Dina said, “it has to be bigger than my kids.”

The two began providing resources to parents and schools, making sure they were registered in the national competition and volunteering in various roles throughout Fort Defiance bees.

As they revamped, Kelly gained momentum and began advancing to compete against the nation's top spellers in the 2017 Scripps bees. There, it is a whole different ball game.

Her competitors, some as young as 6, live and breathe the bees. Some study year-round, some form Quizlet study groups and some pay for $1,700 spelling classes.

Most come from more wealthy backgrounds and rarely does a competitor grow up in a place like the reservation.

“We have to be just as good as everybody else,” Dina said. “We have to be even better. We have to try harder.”

When Kelly walked off the national stage in the first round of oral spelling, she saw failure. But her peers on the reservation saw something else: a path to success.

“There's a chance at scholarship opportunities,” Yazzi said. “Opportunities to go beyond high school and go to college somewhere, to even be accepted at Ivy League schools. We know these things are possible.”

'It's not just Kelly now'

Interest in spelling bees shot up in Fort Defiance. With a new superintendent, there is more consistent funding for the bees and a renewed vigor in the classroom. That shift was almost immediate, said Michaelski, the district superintendent of four years.

“I'm seeing increases in test scores,” Michaelski said. “I'm seeing an increase in our graduation rate. I'm seeing a decrease in our dropout rate. Slowly but surely, we're making progress.”

In 2017, AzMERIT test scores jumped almost districtwide.

As test score climbed, so did participation in the bees. Dina said before Kelly, Fort Defiance schools hadn’t had a speller in the Navajo Nation Bee for about a decade.

In 2018, Dina said the Fort Defiance area had eight different kids go far.

“It's not just Kelly now,” Yazzi said. “We've had a few spellers who have done well to really push each other. Kelly has been the one who … works hard to make sure she stays ahead of everyone else. But it's been a little bit of a tougher ride for her this past year because other kids are really competing with her.”

Yazzi grew up in the district and has taught there on and off for 15 years. He said the difference he is seeing In the reservation is not just in this newfound mindset that success is, in fact, attainable, but also in the wealth of new educational resources the bees provide.

Those resources, like extra tutoring in preparation for the bees, are ones students may not have had otherwise.

“Unemployment is so high here on the reservation,” Yazzi said. “We see families who are struggling to put food on the table, let alone thinking about purchasing reading materials.”

'Something that saved the Nation'

For some, like Kelly’s father, spelling is not just about shifting the trajectory of reservation students. It is about embracing a culture defined by words.

Navajo, known to its speakers as Diné, or “people,” is spoken fluently by little more than 169,000 people — only about half of all Navajos, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

For centuries, the language was not written. Instead, stories and legends were passed down orally. Today, that oral tradition is still a key part of the Navajo culture.

“I'd like to think that it runs in her culture,” he said, noting his daughters' bees and his wife's work as a teacher.

For decades, fluency of the language crept toward extinction. It was a side effect of 100-plus years of cultural assimilation forced on Native American children. Young Navajos were ripped from their homes and sent to boarding schools where they were rewarded for speaking English and punished for speaking their own language.

Yet, in the same stroke, the Navajo people gained fame because of their language. In World War II, 29 Navajo men joined the U.S. Marines and used Navajo to develop a code the Japanese military could never crack. They were known as the Navajo Code Talkers.

“The Navajo Code Talkers, that's part of what we're known for,” Dina said. “That’s what the Navajos are famous for. Language is something that saved the nation.”

In recent years, there has been a push to reclaim what was lost. The language is now being taught in classrooms and in specialty schools, but many say Navajo may never be quite what it once was.

Dina and Martin have worked to learn the Navajo language and said they want their daughters to as well.

“I grew up off the reservation much of my life, then I came back,” Martin said. “One of my regrets is that I wish I would have learned earlier. Now that I'm a lot older in age, it's hard to pick up.”

Martin, himself a veteran, said that by diving into the 15 languages the spelling bees have the students study, the girls continue to honor their lineage of linguistics.

He said it’s something that will carry the girls through any career they encounter. They dream of going into the medical field.

“Navajo, of course, we never want to lose that part of our lives,” he said. “But I also don't think there's a limit on how far words can take them.”

'We are a small community, but we are still here'

But today,the family is focused on the shorter term, and their goal to dominate the national bee.

In 2017, her first encounter with Scripps as a sixth-grader, Kelly was out on the first round of spelling on stage. She tied for 260th place.

In 2018 she returned, wearing turquoise necklaces and rings and a patterned shirt.

This time, however, she didn’t hear that “ding.”

She made it through the first round, a written test. She made it through the second round spelling “pasteurella,” a species of bacteria, correctly. She made it through the third round as a semifinalist, spelling “calzone.”

But she missed the coveted spot in the final round because her combined scores didn’t match the 16 spellers who continued on. Still, she is the first full Navajo to have made it that far.

She and her sister, who watched Kelly from the audience, returned home with a renewed vigor.

The next day, they took out their color-coded flashcards, their binders and their lists emblazoned with the “Scripps” logoand began studying for next year.

“Usually the kids from the bee, the finalists, they study year-round,” Kelly said. “They study for years and they get really far. I was like, 'I want to do that, I'm going to try to do that.' Now I'm trying to study 20 words every day.”

2019 is the last year Kelly can compete in Scripps, where she hopes to make it into the final round of the bee and past the 11 million competitors that enter the spelling bees every year.

Hailey hopes to follow in those footsteps as Kelly passes on the baton.

“It's a lot of pressure, but it feels good to represent them,” Kelly said. “I want the Washingtons to know that we are here. We are a small community, but we are still here.”