Volume 3 Number 2
January 1964

Paul Kutsche

The problem of dropouts from school, and especially of dropouts of American Indians, is a particularly knotty one. Statistics are easy to gather if one is satisfied with totals and not a breakdown by cause, but correlations which will help to investigate cause and effect have mostly not been forthcoming. (The Bureau of Indian Affairs pamphlet Today’s Dropouts . . . Tomorrow’s Problems, 1959, is an example of good crude statistics together with frustration in finding meaningful relations.)

This paper is a modest attempt to investigate one small aspect of the problem-the influence of physical and economic environment. It cannot claim more sophisticated statistical treatment than other studies, but it asks, and I believe answers, a question not elsewhere investigated: Is the high dropout rate of American Indians a function of Indian culture or of cultural (especially economic) deprivation? Like other students of the dropout problem, I shall indulge in my own speculations about causes, but data and speculation will be kept separate (see Note 1).

The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians live on a small reservation in the Great Smoky Mountains of Western North Carolina, and were considerably isolated from contact by Anglo-American society until the late 1930s and the 1940s. At that time the Great Smoky Mountain National Park was established along one border, and paved highways were constructed through the center, of the reservation. At the present time the tourists passing through are numbered in the millions annually. The Cherokee High School is located close to the intersection of two major highways, and serves the entire Band by school busses. Within twenty miles are two market towns Bryson City and Sylva—both county seats containing high schools which, like the Cherokee school, serve their outlying areas. Neither school has Negro students, although both have a few Cherokee. Both the Cherokee and the White districts are somewhat isolated even today, behind the thin strip of U.S. highways. There is not a great deal of difference between Indians and whites in wealth, amount of education, style of dress, housing, or transportation, although such differences as do exist favor the whites.

Dropout figures for the Cherokee High School are compared in this paper with parallel figures from the Sylva-Webster High School and the Swain County (Bryson City) High School, all of the data compiled according to standards of the North Carolina State Department of Public Instruction. Insofar as such a goal is possible to attain, physical and material-culture environments are constant, and any difference between the Indian and White dropout rates should be a function of differences in non-material culture.

Tables 1, 11, and 11 present the raw figures for the three schools. These data are minimal, and do not include a number of things we should like to know. First, age of students is probably important, particularly if, as is suggested in a number of studies, the Indian student is older in each grade than the white (e.g., Officer 1956, pp. 75-89; U.S. Department of the Interior 1959, pp. 12-13; Coombs et al. 1959, pp. 6-7, 107-18). Second, only students dropping out during an academic year are counted; "non-returnees"—those who complete a year but fail to return for the next are not counted, but are equally dropouts from the academic process. Third, these figures have nothing to say about how many dropouts return later, either to the school from which they dropped or to another. Fourth, there are no data about reason for leaving school. As a result of these inadequacies of the crude data we are comparing here, the totals themselves mean very little. The comparisons between the schools are meaningful, however, since all figures are compiled according to the same standards.

If Cherokee students behave so unlike their white contemporaries in environments which are so similar, how do the Cherokee compare to other American Indians? Available data, presented in Table V, permit a rough comparison of percentage of dropouts in each grade as a proportion of total dropouts, but no comparison of dropouts in proportion to total enrollment. No statistical test of significance has been attempted on this comparison; by inspection the percentages seem similar grade by grade.

It is one thing to note startling differences between groups in their school behavior and another thing to discuss the reasons. My speculations are based partly on the data reported in the foregoing section, but mostly on field work among Cherokee and Mountain Whites from 1956 to 1961. Some of my arguments were anticipated by Ben Feifel in a Bureau of Indian Affairs article (Reifel 1957). He feels that the differences between Indians and white in adjustment to the white economic world can be boiled down to four categories: 1) future (white) vs. present (Indian) orientation; 2) consciousness of time as something to be scheduled and rigidly subdivided (white), vs. time still oriented around natural phenomena (Indian); 3) saving as a private virtue and public necessity (white) vs. use of goods as they are produced (Indian); 4) work as a moral good (white) vs. work when survival and comfort demand it (Indian). In a similar vein John Gulick, my colleague in Cherokee field work, points out differences between white and Cherokee assumptions about the world. He urges that whites who want to deal with Indians must understand their own implicit culture, as well as that of the Indians (Gulick, 1958).

The labels which seem to me to aid in understanding the different school records of Cherokee and white students are similar to Reifers, but not identical: 1) the white concept of competition; 2) white upward mobility; 3) white willingness to defer satisfaction of wants; and 4) recognition on the part of Indians of the consequences of their cultural separateness from the bulk of the nation. Most of these differences stem in large measure from differences in family life, that most intimate area of culture which is least visible and consequently most resistant to acculturation.

Competition, so thoroughly a part of white North American life, is taught first of all in the family. Children are encouraged to compete with other children, including their own siblings, in many subtle ways even before they reach school. But the Cherokee, like most American Indians, are noncompetitive. They resist competition in schools even when the stimulus to compete is as mild as a teacher’s suggestion that "The first child to get the answer please raise his hand." MacGregor reports a similar resistance among Sioux children (1946, p. 135), and Thompson for the Hopi (1950, p. 119). Probably most Indians in North America feel uncomfortable when asked to push themselves forward as individuals.

The white (and perhaps also Negro) tradition of upward mobility is likewise rooted in the family. "Making good" is among the highest values of the dominant American. culture, and education is the best-accepted highway to success, or at least the first stage along that highway. Upward mobility plus the equally American ideal of progress—especially when carried to the modem extreme of planned obsolescence—implies that those who make good in each generation will do it differently from their forebears. For the non-competitive Cherokee, making good is a foreign value; furthermore, career opportunities are so limited on the Eastern Cherokee reservation that "up" is necessarily "out." To be sure, a trickle of migration constantly leaves the reservation toward the mainstream of American urban life, but these Cherokee almost invariably "pass for white" (to borrow a phrase from Negro culture), and in effect are lost as Indians. Not many Cherokee are willing to pay such a high price for this foreign thing called success.

The future orientation of white culture constantly involves deferment of satisfaction—Plato’s greater (often more remote) vs. lesser (often more immediate) good, and Calvin’s working for an honored place in heaven. Attending school demands the postponement of pleasure. The white or Negro student can usually tolerate the choice of studying as opposed to playing, of going to school as opposed to going fishing, because he knows that his grades depend upon attention to duty (another European-American concept). He can often tolerate the whole idea of school as opposed to getting a job, marrying, etc., because he knows that he is more likely to become wealthy and prestigious if he persists in school. To make constant and consistent choices in favor of future as opposed to immediate gratification of want implies more than a conviction that education is worthwhile. It implies a whole cultural set toward living for tomorrow, a set which goes far beyond the school itself.

Recognition of the existence of difference operates in a fashion as subtle as the family-based attitudes toward education. By "recognition of the existence of difference" I mean the knowledge on the part of a white highlander that he is a white man in a white culture, and the parallel knowledge of the Cherokee that he is outside the dominant stream of culture. The Negro author James Baldwin describes the results of this recognition vividly in the following discussion of a crude and isolated Swiss mountain hamlet where he spent several weeks:

For this village, even were it incomparably more remote and incredibly more primitive, is the West, the West onto which I have been so strangely grafted. These people cannot be, from the point of view of power, strangers anywhere in the world; they have made the modem world, in effect, even if they do not know it. The most illiterate among them is related, in a way that I am not, to Dante, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Aeschylus, Da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Racine; the cathedral at Chartres says something to them which it cannot say to me, as indeed would New York State’s Empire State Building, should anyone here ever see it (Baldwin 1955, p. 165).

Curiously enough, the recognition of difference is independent of other aspects of the world view of Cherokee or whites. In general, the Cherokee perceptual universe (as measured by the Rorschach Test) is not very far from that of urban Chicago, and both are much different from the universe of the white highlander (Kutsche, "Southern Appalachian Personality," in press). Just so, James Baldwin’s perceptual universe and that of a white man in New York must be closer in most respects than either is to the Swiss mountaineer. Since the Cherokee are "more like" Chicago than white highlanders are, we should be able to predict that the Cherokee school dropout rate, and the Cherokee attitude toward most cultural institutions, would be close to what we could expect for a large city. Further, we should be able to predict that a Cherokee from the Appalachians would have less difficulty in adjusting to an urban American environment than his white counterpart would. In fact, this adjustment is very difficult for them both, and for the urban communities they move to. But the white highlander knows—without necessarily being conscious of his knowledge—that however great the differences between his free, individualistic, rural background and the crowded impersonal city to which he migrates, he is moving from one section of his own culture to another, and that if he can make the adjustment to the city he will be accepted by it. His Caucasian physiognomy makes this adjustment easier, of course, but the difference between his problems and those of the migrating Cheroke are cultural as well as racial.

The Cherokee high school student, sensing these problems in his immediate future as he hears reports from older friends who have come back from the industrial cities, is likely to look critically at his curriculum. Since this school system is geared toward full participation in white culture, why should he not drop out? (see Note 3).

If the Cherokee schools are to serve the Cherokee community better than they do at present, then those professions in white society which are concerned with Indians must re-examine once more where they think Indians can fit in American culture. We have been guilty of a good deal of ambivalence within the past few decades, and anthropologists probably have been, more guilty than most. Although few people are flatly in favor of wanting to preserve Indians as museum curiosities (an accusation sometimes heard against the Collier administration), when practical decisions are to be made whether to bring Indians and urban America closer together—e.g., with roads, factories, resettlement—anthropologists as well as others find themselves taking a reactionary and romantic position. The federal government on the contrary, has recently been header headed, with its termination policy and resettlement of Indians in large cities.

The alternative solutions to the school problem seem to me to boil down to three possibilities, which may be stated simply.

First would be to acknowledge the romance of Indians, accept the high dropout rate of Indian students as evidence of their disaffection with American-style education, and accept the concomitant responsibility for the wardship in perpetuity of Indian tribes. Such a solution would have the virtue of frankly confronting the dominant "melting pot" ethos with a defense of the Indian’s right to his own culture. Whether this solution would be economically feasible without restoring Indian tribes to their pre-contact population density is another question.

Second would be to recognize and insist ruthlessly on the assimilation of American Indians. Schools would be consciously geared toward fitting Indians into industrial urban settings. In order to be consistent, this policy ought to embrace far more than merely education. It ought to treat American Indians as underdeveloped societies, and bring them as rapidly as possible into harmony with the rest of the country. A domestic peace corps would help speed this process. Such a solution would have the virtue of frankly embracing the "melting pot" ethos and following it to its practical conclusion of giving economic as well as ideological assistance to the unmelted lumps in American society. The present urban resettlement program is part of such a solution. On the Eastern Cherokee reservation, a program to bring factories to the Cherokee is also consistent with it.

Third would be a less clear-cut solution, full of compromises. This is to establish separate educational programs for Indians, leaving open the possibility of future changes of attitude toward participation in white culture on the part of tribal leaders. The directors of such a program, if they pursued it with energy, would ask themselves such questions as these: What are the implications of non-competitiveness for revision of grammar and high school procedures? How can curricula give enough present satisfaction to "now-oriented" Indians to keep them attending?

Some aspects of the present Cherokee school curriculum already seem to show adoption of this third alternative. A series of furniture-making courses have kept a number of boys in school who would certainly have dropped out otherwise, and have been so competently taught that students have won a number of regional and national prizes for their products. A woodcarving and craft program, equally competently taught, has also produced excellent results both technically and socially. Both of these programs are financed wholly or in part by the Cherokee Historical Association, an organization which channels tourist money into the tribal treasury.

Whether a school system can be devised for Cherokee and other Indians which will serve their cultural needs in a broader sense than mere economic preparation to enter an alien world it is not possible to predict. That the Cherokee feel their system does not now serve them in important ways, the dropout data eloquently testify.

1. Data for this paper were gathered during field work in 1961, financed by a faculty research grant of Colorado College. Previous field work in the Southern Appalachians was supported by the Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania. Mr. James Vance, guidance counselor at the Cherokee Central School, and Mr. Jerry Rice, principal of the Swain County High School, were helpful in discussing the dropout problem. The manuscript profited by criticisms from Van B. Shaw of Colorado College.
2. The results presented in Table IV are even more startling in view of the admission by principals of the white schools involved that they regard their own dropout rate as distressingly high. The principal of the Swain County High School feels that a large number of his students leave as soon as they reach age 16, when they may legally drop from school.
3. The Collier administration in the Bureau of Indian Affairs attempted to re-orient American Indian schooling so as to fit the needs of the various Indian cultures as well as the dominant U.S. culture. However successful this policy may have been generally, it did not have much effect on the Cherokee schools.
4. A profitable study might be the search for Indians of all tribes who have accomplished this feat of successful double participation, and the investigation of possible common threads in their formal or informal education.

Coombs, L. Madison, Ralph E. Kron, E. Gordon Collister, and Kenneth E. Anderson. 1958. The Indian Child Goes to School. Washington: United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Kutsche, Paul. "Southern Appalachian Personality," in Proceedings of the XXY International Congress of Americanists. Mexico City. (in press).

MacGregor, Gordon. 1946. Warriors without Weapons, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Officer, James E. 1956 Indians in School: A Study of the Development of Educational Facilities for Arizona Indians. Tucson: Bureau of Ethnic Research, Department of Anthropology, University of Arizona.

Reifel, Ben 1957 "Cultural Factors in Social Adjustment," Indian Education, April 15. Reprinted by Branch of Education, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior.

Thompson, Laura. 1950. Culture in Crisis. New Yorker: Harper & Bros.

U.S. Department of the Interior 1959. Today’s Dropouts . . . Tomorrow’s Problems. Washington: U.S. Dept. of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs.