Volume 21 Number 1
October 1981

Jon Allan Reyhner

HISTORICALLY, federal policy towards Indian education has been directed at "civilizing" and assimilating Native Americans into the mainstream of American culture. This policy, for the most part, has failed. Documentation, if needed, ranges from the Meriam Report of 1928 to the Final Report of the American Indian Policy Review Commission of 1977. More money, better facilities, culturally sensitive teachers and tribal self-determination have been proposed as remedies for this failure. Though more money, better facilities and appropriately trained teachers are needed, the special problem with Indian education lies in the fact that it is fundamentally different from education as it is usually defined.

This article outlines how similar education as practiced in most schools is to education in Indian schools and explains how this lack of difference has led to the failure of Indian education. A remedy beginning to take shape is described which fits the goal of tribal self-determination and utilizes the talents of university-trained Indian teachers, part of the relatively few successes Indian education has produced to date. A brief example of this trend, Rocky Boy Elementary School on the Chippewa-Cree Reservation in Montana, is given, and a direction that the self-determined curriculum may take is predicted.

Normally the purpose of education is to communicate the knowledge people have accumulated through the ages from one generation to the next. It is a process for socializing the young into their parents’ culture which begins at home and continues in school. However, since the initial founding of the mission and government schools, Indian education has been an attempt to convey the knowledge of the dominant culture, usually by members of that culture, to Indian youth. The standard method of preparing teachers in colleges of education has proved inadequate for preparing teachers of Indian children. Based on a national study of Indian education, Estelle Fuchs and Robert J. Havighurst proposed in 1973 that "teachers of Indian children should be systematically trained to take account of the sociocultural processes operating in the communities and classrooms where they work" (see Note 1). But states, on the whole, have been unwilling to require students planning to work on Indian reservations to take extra courses for certification, and local districts lack funds to adequately inservice new teachers who hardly stay long enough to make it worthwhile even if funds were available.

As practiced, Indian education usually takes place at a school on or near a reservation that is little different from any other school in the country. Such schools are generally staffed by off-reservation teachers with no special training for Indian education and are equipped with textbooks written for middleclass children. The teachers usually live apart from the community the school serves. The organization and curriculum of the school are frequently alien and antagonistic to the Indian culture. As a result the communication going on in the schools tends to be one-way with the child receiving only a small portion of the total message of the teacher. The child is being told to convert to the life style and beliefs of the dominant culture.

In the course of the transit from tribal belonging to modem alienation, Indians lose the direction of their lives. The loss of Indian culture has resulted in a breakdown in family life and a resort to readily apparent escape mechanisms, especially the abuse of alcohol which is easily available from the non-Indian society. Rapid cultural change produces cultural disintegration and often produces the opposite of the desired effect, xenophobia against whites, a reinforcement of the already existing Indian ethnocentrism. The schools that try to get children to leap the gap from tribal to white society can be counterproductive.

A way to avoid the negative effects of cross-cultural education becomes more apparent once the real source of the difficulties is clearly identified. Kluckhohn has suggested for the Navajo that the underlying cause of their problems in adjusting to American society is that:

While it is possible to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of specific Indian values academically at the university, it is virtually impossible either for a people to do their own self-analysis or to accept an outside evaluation. The answer to the dilemma is for a group of educated people with a foot in each world, specifically the relatively recent group of Native Americans who have successfully completed university teacher education programs, to work out a viable cultural compromise. Indian teachers can act as translators, interpreting and filtering the dominant culture so that it is both comprehensible and hopefully acceptable to both the elders and youth of a specific tribe. Those who can best perceive what parts of the dominant culture a tribe can use are tribal members schooled in both cultures.

An example of the adaptation of the formal schooling pattern of the dominant culture to tribal culture is taking place on the Rocky Boy Reservation in Montana. The local people formed their own state elementary school district in 1970 with boundaries coterminous with the reservation. Since that time a federally funded teacher training program operated through Northern Montana College has graduated tribal members so that currently half the teaching staff is Indian. These Native American teachers neither teach the same thing nor use the same approach as non-Indian teachers, but they are producing a curriculum and a teaching style that meets their own needs and thus they are more effective as the community can identify and relate to them (see Note 4).

Education is communication, and what really needs to be communicated to Indians are not the facts of white culture but the idea that Indians can learn from whites without committing psychological or ethnic suicide. "What is learned in high school, or for that matter anywhere at all, " according to Edgar Z. Friedenberg, "depends far less on what is taught than on what one actually experiences in the place" (see Note 5). If the Indian child experiences the school as something foreign, which he certainly has in the past, then he is defensive and apprehensive from the start. If at least some of the teachers are Indian and he sees them socially outside of school dealing as equals with his parents, then the school is less alien. If the curriculum of the school includes some Indian literature and history, the school is even less foreign.

The mistake made with Indian education in this country has been to move away from the democratic and libertarian principles on which the United States was founded and to attempt to enforce assimilation of Native Americans. The larger society has to keep faith with its ideals and believe that in locally controlled public and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools Indian children will receive an appropriate education. If we do not trust our principles, there is a danger of creating a festering problem such as has occurred with the Basque under Spanish rule and the Irish under British rule. "In any culture, given a climate of respect and freedom in which he is valued as a person," asserts the psychologist Carl Rogers, "the mature individual would tend to chose and prefer . . . [the] same value directions" (see Note 8). Kluckhohn has suggested that the real solution to the conflict between cultures,

Erikson’s focus on mutual understanding among mature people from different cultures is especially important in an age when the technologies of swift world-wide communication, transportation and trade are breaking down geographical barriers which formerly permitted cultures with different languages and customs to exist a few miles apart. Cultures have always adapted and changed; now they must adapt some more in the direction of human universals. For centuries, tribal cultures in Western Europe have adapted themselves to a larger European culture that represents an amalgam of Judeo-Christian, Hellenic, and other influences, and over the years there has been a secularization of this Western culture. All people must continue to adapt and change their culture in order to grow and survive.

Cultural adaptation and change can take place if it is not forced and if there is a free interplay of ideas between cultures. Intercultural communication occurs if both sides are willing to learn from the other, to talk to persons from the other culture as equals and to use translators when necessary. Forced assimilation has been tried and has not worked. The only kind of cross-cultural education that will work is education that recognizes the values of the native cultures and trusts those values to come forth in locally controlled schools. Indian education must be a process of enculturation using a large percentage of Native American teachers and a curriculum based on a synthesis of the congruent strengths of the dominant and tribal cultures rather than a process of erasure of the Indian culture and the transference of American culture, warts and all.

1. Estelle Fuchs and Robert J. Havighurst. To Live on This Earth: American Indian Education. New York: Doubleday, 1973. p. 305.

2. Clyde Kluckhohn. Culture and Behavior. New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1962. p. 340. While the currently accepted spelling is Navajo, Kluckhohn used the phonetic spelling Navaho.

3. 1bid., p. 342.

4. Other examples of the distinctive styles of ethnic teachers are described in Courtney B. Cazden, Robert Carrasco, Abdil Abel Maldonado-Guzman, and Fredrick Erickson. "The Contribution of Ethnographic Research to Bicultural Bilingual Education," In: Georgetown University Roundtable on Languages and Linguistics 1980. Ed. by James E. Alatis. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1980. pp. 64-80.

5. Edgar Z. Friedenberg. Coming of Age in America. New York: Random House, 1965. p. 40.

6. Clyde Kluckhohn. Mirror for Man. New York: Whittlesay House, 1949. p. 141.

7. Charles H. Kraft. "Worldview in Intercultural Communication," In: Intercultural and International Communication. Ed. by Fred L. Casmir. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1978. p. 420.

8. Carl R. Rogers. "Toward a Modern Approach to Values: The Valuing Process in the Mature Person," In: Person to Person. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Real People Press, 1967. p. 17.

9. Kluckhohn. Culture and Behavior. p. 342.

10. Erik Erikson. Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1963. p. 269.