Volume 11 Number 3
May 1972

Eric Dlugokinski

DURING the last academic year, the author had the privilege of acting as a consultant to the staff and students of Riverside Indian Boarding School in Anadarko, Oklahoma. The school is a secondary school for Indian children from all parts of the United States. In approaching this consultation there was a great deal of hesitancy on my part due at least partially to the notion that Indian children by nature are resistant to therapeutic services and reluctant in general to deal with personal issues and feelings.

From my very first week of dealing with students at this school to the present time this hesitancy has dissipated, and instead a very high regard has developed for the capacities of these students to engage in meaningful therapeutic contact and in general to deal effectively and openly with personal issues and feelings. This has developed in spite of the fact that the therapist or consultant is not Indian and had been previously unfamiliar with various Indian customs and practices.

Throughout all of my experience I have been impressed by the need and desire of Indian students to discuss matters of personal concern and to deal with sensitive issues demonstrating a degree of openness uncommon in any student group. Students at any boarding school have an intense need to deal with issues and feelings about being a student in a strange place and away from previous meaningful social contacts. Feelings of isolation and loneliness can be especially traumatic for a student in his first year at a boarding school but they seem to be also common at higher levels even with the most experienced of students.

Administration and faculty of all Indian boarding schools must encourage the development of programs which facilitate meaningful social intervention and the expression and awareness of human feelings. It is only through the development of these programs that we can expect to educate the total student and to help the student become more meaningfully involved with campus activities. For too long Indian schools and our public schools in general have resisted programs dealing with these issues. We are neglecting a part of our educational responsibilities if we do not teach our students how to express and deal with their feelings and how to develop more meaningful and cooperative interaction with each other.

Because the need for this type of communication has become so apparent several steps have been taken and will be taken in the near future to alleviate some of these conditions at the Riverside School.

On an experimental basis the Human Development program has been initiated in several classrooms of the school to facilitate more open discussion and expression of concerns in nonacademic areas. By instituting this program as an integral part of the school curriculum it is anticipated that human growth and awareness can be dealt with as an essential part of educational programming. The program as it is now established is an essential tool for all students to help them articulate their feelings and develop meaningful patterns of social interaction. This kind of education is essential if we are to expect our students to be skilled and effective as people and not simply as children in a student-role playing situation.

For those students whose needs are more demanding and who require more extensive and intimate expression of personal feelings and problems, a more specialized therapeutic involvement is essential. The present focus has been on the establishment of group experiences backed by individual consultation whenever necessary. The group experiences appear both most economical and most appropriate in that students can rely on each other for daily contacts in times of stress when the group is not officially meeting, and secondly this type of experience encourages further communication between the students themselves at times when the professional is not available. To further elicit this student responsibility and group support, the groups convene on alternate sessions without the therapist. Such alternate meetings represent a mediating bridge which permits peer group members to use their effective resources independently without leaning heavily on parental figures. In addition the neurotic struggles in adolescence are often concealed from parental scrutiny, but may be revealed to an audience of trusted peers. By learning to act autonomously and constructively in alternate sessions group members are engaged in their own ego building by facilitating communication between themselves and peers in more natural and realistic peer settings.

In the plans to provide more comprehensive services to students in the counseling area, a plan will be established to develop a cadre of student counselors who can receive credit for learning the basics of counseling and listening skills. Perhaps the students themselves, once they have been trained, will be able to manage their own "rap center" on campus and aid in the training of future students themselves. This is an especially exciting project in that this kind of counseling can open avenues of communication not readily available to today’s student and it offers promise of further dissipating the"we-they dichotomy" which is so apparent in many of our educational institutions today. Too often "we" counsel the students on discipline matters which "they" have violated. Even when we have the interests of the students at heart the counseling situation is often interpreted (and perhaps rightly so) as an attempt by the administration at student control.

This misunderstanding can present the most serious problem in the development of both communicational and therapeutic programs for students. The danger stems from the confusion and nonseparation of counseling and discipline programs. To sabotage this type of counseling and development program, we need only to convey in some way the message to our students that these programs are intended for bad students or as a power effort to keep Indian children more manageable or under control.

Counselors cannot be expected to be disciplinarians if they are to be at all trusted in their counseling relationships. Discipline and counseling functions are both important, but if they are fused both may become ineffective. Similarly students identified as counselors in pilot endeavors must deal with the needs of their clients—the students themselves, and not the administration perception of student needs. If such counselors become a police force for the school administration and its policies, the students, the counselors and the school itself will be the losers.

The Indian student has perhaps even greater needs for personal awareness and social communication than most students in our school system today. These are some of the steps that have been taken to make that communication more accessible and a more natural part of our educational services in Indian schools. The Indian child is not silent and passive by nature but often by the design we create for them in our educational and social programs. As long as we allow our programs to be influenced by this stereotype, we may, however, be creating a self-fulfilling prophecy which is not adaptive to meeting the real needs for Indian children.

1. Besell, H. and Palomares, U. Methods in Human Development, 1970, Human Development Training Institute, San Diego, Cahfomia.

2. Bronfenbrenner, U. "Soviet Methods of Character Education: Some Implications for Research," Am. Psychol., 1962, pp. 550-564.

3. Hoffman, M. L. "Childrearing Practices and Moral Development: Generalization from Emperical Research," Child Devel., 1957, 28, pp. 401-411.

4. Kadis A. "Coordinated Meetings in Group Psychotherapy," American Journal of Psychotherapy, 1956, 10, pp. 275-291.