Volume 3 Number 2
January 1964

Philleo Nash

In my talk at your Third Annual Conference here at Tempe last March, I emphasized the fact that education is our biggest single function in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and that it accounts for just about three dollars out of every five we spend on all our programs. Today I want to talk in somewhat greater depth and detail about the various components that make up the total education mission of the Bureau so that we can see the entire sweep of the operation and how the elements fit together.

First let me provide a very brief framework of statistics. In the school year that ended last June the Bureau operated 263 schools of various types and 20 dormitories for the housing and feeding of Indian youngsters attending the local public schools. The total enrollment in the Federal Indian schools was nearly 42,000 with about 26,000 in boarding schools and the balance in day schools, trailer schools or Federal-Indian hospitals. Over 80 percent of the children in our Bureau-operated schools were full-blood Indians and only about three percent had less than one-half Indian ancestry. This is a most important fact about our education mission which we have to keep constantly in mind.

In addition, there were nearly 70,000 Indian youngsters of school age attending local public schools, intermixed in the classrooms with non-Indian children. About two-thirds of these were enrolled in schools that received some financial assistance from the Bureau under the Johnson-O’Malley Act. Under this act we had contracts with 14 states and with school districts in four other states to help the local schools in meeting financial needs occasioned by the enrollment of Indian children living on tax-exempt lands. Altogether in 1962 these grants totaled about $6.4 million.

The job that faces us in our Bureau schools is, of course, similar in many ways to that which confronts public school administrators and public school teachers throughout the country. Like them, we have the responsibility of providing students with basic grounding in the three R’s and other academic subjects and equipping them as fully as possible for effective adult lives, but our problem is greatly complicated by the fact that a very high percentage of our students come from homes where English is not the everyday household language and where the whole cultural background is quite different from that of a typical non-Indian pupil enrolled in a public school. In a sense, our schools function as a bridge between the two cultures and have a responsibility for giving the Indian youngster an understanding of the ways of the world outside the reservation boundaries so that he will be at no disadvantage in dealing with it as an adult whether he decides to Eve on or off the reservation.

This would be difficult enough if we were dealing with two wholly static cultures. But the fact is that both cultures which concern us are changing quite rapidly. The way of life that we find on most reservations today is markedly different from the pre-reservation tribal cultures of a century or more ago and these steadily evolving reservation cultures should have, I believe, far more scientific study and analysis than has been given to them by my fellow anthropologists. On the other side, in the culture of the country at large, so many changes have taken place in the last 30 or 40 years that they have left most of us bewildered. And we can certainly anticipate equally sweeping and drastic changes over the next 30 or 40 years, probably over the next decade.

In our Indian Bureau school programs we are keeping alert to the trends of the times and trying to anticipate them as fully as we can. One way we are doing this is through a shifting of emphasis in our curriculum away from the vocational and toward the academic. Forty or fifty years ago nearly all Indian Bureau schools placed very heavy stress on what was then called vocational instruction. Actually it was a most rudimentary kind of training and the time of the students was largely taken up in raising foodstuffs on the school farm and in doing chores which we regard as a part of proper plant management. This undoubtedly eased the burden a bit on the American taxpayer but its educational benefits to the student-laborers must have been marginal at best.

Starting in the 1940s, the Bureau moved away from this system toward a truer kind of vocational education aimed at providing the students with skills that would be more serviceable—and financially rewarding—to them as adults. In the past ten years or so, however, we have come to a growing realization that in our rapidly developing technological society increasingly complex and sophisticated skills are unquestionably going to be required. This means that the time is coming soon—if it has not already arrived—when 12 years of schooling will not be enough in the way of preparation for truly satisfactory employment. It does not mean, of course, that every youngster will have to graduate from a college or university and enter a professional career. But it does mean that the first 12 years of schooling should be devoted as fully as possible to academic subjects and that vocational education should come only after the completion of this basic preparation. This is the direction in which we are moving in our Federal-Indian schools. Today we provide vocational courses prior to high school graduation only in the 11^th and 12^th grades; and we encourage students, wherever feasible, to continue their studies beyond the high school level.

To meet the needs of such students, we have a far broader range of opportunities and alternatives to offer than was available as recently as ten years ago. We have today, as we did then, the post-high school vocational courses in mechanical and commercial subjects as some of our larger boarding schools such as Haskell and Chilocco. For those who show special aptitudes and inclinations along artistic lines, we have our brand new Institute of American Indian Arts at Santa Fe, New Mexico, which opened its doors for the first time last September. And today we have a program of adult vocational training which can pick up the Indian youngster at high school graduation and provide him with as much as two years of specialized instruction, at Government expense, in some of the finest vocational schools in the country.

For those who choose the path of higher education in colleges or universities, the prospects have been greatly brightened by the increasing number and volume of scholarships that are available to Indian students. This present school year such scholarships are being provided by 20 colleges and universities (including, I am happy to say, Arizona State University); by two schools of nursing; by 18 churches, foundations or other non-governmental organizations; by seven States; and by 36 Indian tribes. The total amount available from such sources is just a bit under a million dollars and the Bureau of Indian Affairs is supplementing this with about $740,000 in grants, loans, and working scholarships. The tribes alone are contributing over three quarters of a million dollars.

In 1962 about 5,000 Indian young people from reservations were continuing their education beyond the high school level and nearly 2,900 of these were enrolled in colleges, universities or junior colleges. This latter figure is considerably less than one percent of the 380,000 men, women and children who come within the scope of our Indian Bureau programs and I regard it as far too low. We have made good progress in providing higher education for Indians over the past decade or so. But we still have a long way to go.

There are three phases of our many-faceted program in the BIA schools to which we have been giving special emphasis over the past few years.

One is the development of English language capability. Because so many of our students come from homes where English is not regularly spoken, we have to concern ourselves not merely with instruction in reading and writing but also with developing the ability to speak English fluently and understand it through the ear. Right now we are giving a great deal of attention to this problem and experimenting with a number of comparatively new techniques, such as the use of tape recorders, in an effort to speed up and streamline the whole process.

Another phase we are stressing is student counseling or guidance. Practically all the larger and better public schools, of course, have guidance programs nowadays. But the task we face is considerably more demanding and complex partly because of those cultural differences I have been emphasizing and partly because we have 22,000 students in boarding schools where they are our responsibility 24 hours a day and seven days a week throughout the school year. Over the past few years we have substantially enlarged our guidance staff, especially the dormitory attendants in the boarding schools, and we have upgraded the positions so as to recruit better qualified personnel. Even with these improvements, however, we are meeting only a part of the really urgent needs for student counseling that face us throughout our school system. Actually, I feel we could make excellent use of several hundred additional well-trained counselors and I am hopeful that some of these needs can eventually be met by the assignment of volunteers from the proposed national service organization, sometimes loosely referred to as "the Domestic Peace Corps."

The third phase that I want to mention is the summer programs we have been developing in close cooperation with the tribal organizations to make more productive use of the vacation months. These involve brush-up work on academic subjects, organized sports and recreation activities, field trips to points of regional or even national interest, and summer employment either on or off the reservation. Through these programs we are broadening the horizons of our students and familiarizing them in countless ways with the kinds of responsibilities they will face as adults and the kind of world outside the reservation boundaries in which they will be living. The programs started in the summer of 1960 on a comparatively modest scale with about 2,000 students participating throughout the school system. Because the results of that initial experiment were both gratifying and encouraging, Congress provided funds for a substantial enlargement of the activity in the summer of 1961 and the number of students taking part more than tripled to a total of roughly 7,000. In the summer of 1962 it was almost doubled again to a total of nearly 13,000 and this coming summer we expect that 20,000 students will benefit. This will be nearly half the total enrollment in our BIA schools and will take in a very high percentage of those in the junior high school and senior high school grades.

In addition to this whole gamut of educational activities for Indian young people in the school-age brackets, we are also actively concerning ourselves with education and training for Indians beyond the age of 21. The adult vocational training program, which I mentioned earlier, is available not merely for those just graduating from high school but for young men and women up to the age of 35 and, in some cases, even older. Two principal kinds of training are involved—enrollment in private or state-operated vocational schools and on-the-job training in industrial plants. Over the past five or six years since the program started, we have provided training in vocational schools for about 6,000 Indians and on-the-job training for an additional 2,000. Including the family dependents of these trainees, over 17,000 persons have directly benefited from the program. Currently we are maintaining a fairly constant level of about 1,400 Indians in the vocational schools and we now have about 200 receiving training on the job.

Finally, there are the adult education classes which we are conducting with our own personnel for people on the reservations. When this program began, about eight years ago, it was aimed primarily at adult Indians on the reservations who had received little or no formal schooling in their youth. Over the years, however, it has been steadily broadened and now takes in all people who feel the need for instruction and guidance regardless of the extent of their childhood education. The content of the curriculum varies greatly from one reservation to the next and is adjusted to meet the learning needs and interests of the participants. Some of the main topics being covered are the development of reservation resources, making a living, home and family life, social understanding, health and safety, civic participation and the education of Indian children. Last year we conducted such classes in 127 communities on Indian reservations or among the natives of Alaska. In the fiscal year that ends next June we estimate that about 10,000 people altogether will take part in the program.

This, then, in highlighted form, is the present-day total education mission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. As you can see, it is far-reaching, multifaceted and ambitious. Yet it is by no means the full and final answer to the educational needs of Indians. A major part of our mission for the future will be to keep our operations flexible and dynamic and closely attuned to the swiftly evolving pattern of the larger American society. It is a big challenge but we look forward to it eagerly, even zestfully.