TELL ME MORE from NPR news, provided a month long series during the Native American Heritage Month of
conversations with Anton Treuer, author and professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University in Bemidji, Minnesota. Over the course of the month the following issues were discussed - who can call himself/herself Native American and why, the political and economic issues in Indian country, and pop culture. In concluding the Native American Heritage Month, the final series with Professor Treuer discussed education.
An excerpt from the interview:
TREUER: What it really boils down to is that, in spite of it all, although the, you know, the residential boarding school system has been reformed, although not eliminated - believe it or not, there are still four Indian boarding schools run by the United States federal government today. They've been reformed, so they're not beating people for the speaking of their tribal languages anymore, but they've kind of survived as a vestigial remnant of this experience.
But in spite of all it, going to school native in this country really still means getting an assimilation. You go to school. You get a sugarcoated version of Christopher Columbus and the first Thanksgiving. And you get very few other opportunities, even if you're native, to learn about yourself. And it's not the intention of people who design curriculum standards or those who teach it to out or marginalize others, but it is the effect.
And I can share one counterexample, because we can point to a lot of things that don't work, like 50 percent of the Native population are failing state-mandated tests in English and math in this country - half. But I'll share a story about something that is working, because to me that really tells a lot.
On the Lac Courte Oreilles Reservation, which is located in Wisconsin, there's a public school system nearby in the town of Hayward. And their statistics for the Native population mirror the national average. Around half of the kids were failing state-mandated tests in English and math.
There's a group of people who created a tribal language immersion school. So they said: We will meet all state-mandated curriculum guidelines. We'll just use the tribal language to deliver the material to the kids. To make a long story short, because there are a lot of things that they did over there to make that happen. To make a long story short, for 13 years in a row, the tribal language immersion school has had a 100 percent pass rate in state-mandated tests in English, administered in English.
