31. Collected Wisdom, 21(6), 9-10. 5/1/1998
32. Two Higher Education Programs which Promote Navajo and Hawaiian, 21(7), p. 29. 6/15/1998
33. Immersion Education, 21(8), 23-14. 8/1/1998
34. Importance of Reading, Part 1, 22(1), 11-12. 9/15/1998
35. Importance of Reading, Part 2, 22(2), 15-16. 11/1/1998
36. Comprehensive Federal Indian Education Policy Statement, 22(3), 9-10. 12/15/1998
37. Low Literacy, High Expectations, 22(8), 17 & 20. 8/1/1999
38. Who's Responsible, 23(1), 19 & 22. 9/15/1999
39. Neil Postman's The End of Education, 23(2), 24-25. 11/1/1999.
40. Transforming the Culture of Schools, 23(3), 14-15. 12/15/1999.

Collected Wisdom: American Indian Education is a different kind of book on American Indian Education. Rather than a study of a school or community or a synthesis of existing research on American Indian education, it is the result of a research project based on extensive interviews conducted by University of Minnesota professors Linda Miller Cleary, a non-Indian teacher educator, and Thomas D. Peacock, an Ojibwe former tribal school superintendent. They interviewed over 60 Indian and non-Indian teachers of Native American students working on or near nine reservations located across the U.S. and in two cities with high American Indian populations plus more than 50 other teachers in Australia and Costa Rica.

Collective Wisdom has eight chapters: The Teacher as Learner; Cultural Difference; What Has Gone Wrong; Creating a Two-Way Bridge; Issues of Native Language; Ways of Learning; Literacy, Thought and Empowerment; What Works; and an Epilogue. Overall the book has a secondary/high school emphasis, but many of the ideas are applicable to elementary classrooms.

Being Indian in a non-Indian world

Throughout the book, but especially in the first chapter, Cleary and Peacock share insights on how teachers adapt the way they teach to meet the challenges of teaching American Indian students. They found from their interviews that teaching styles coming from American mainstream society often fail to meet the needs of American Indian students. One non-Indian teacher stated, "We're basically bussing them into a white school, teaching them all of our history and our language and our culture, and then tossing them back out and expecting them to get a job and conform and be exactly like us" (p. 70).

The second chapter focuses on suboppression--the continuing tragedy of internalized oppression, which affects adversely the students who struggle with identity issues, self confidence, and self destruction. Students, who in their traditional teachings should they be lucky enough to have cultural teachings still intact, struggle to find balance and harmony. The past tragedy of students forced to leave their traditional lifeways to go to Bureau of Indian Affairs schools in order to become assimilated remains part of current memory and affects both parents' willingness to support schools and the attitude they display towards education in front of their children. Another manifestation of oppression discussed by the authors is its effect on students. Delayed adolescence, attendance issues, anger, hopelessness, fear of success, passive aggressive behaviors, low self esteem, self- destruction--all work against the efforts that dedicated teachers make to create the conditions for these students to empower themselves.

Chapter four describes ways to make the experience of living in two worlds less destructive and how to build bridges between Indian and non-Indian worlds. The authors write about the importance of native teachers being role models and discussing with their students how they achieved success in schools. All teachers need to participate in the community where they work to get to know the parents. By knowing the environments from which their students come each morning, teachers are able to make a conscious effort to teach to the needs of their students.

Some native students may not be interested in their own traditional culture, having grown up away from the more traditional teachings of their tribes. These students need to be understood and inspired to develop their own sense of purpose and worth.

Issues of Native language

The schools of thought on language loss and language maintenance are brought to light in chapter five, and the common belief "if a language dies, the culture also dies because the language contains and perpetuates the depth, subtleties, and nuances of culture" is discussed (p. 125). Language issues also include privacy and exclusion rights in order for a cultural group to preserve their religious freedom. The Hopi are an example of this where the language is not separate from the religion but is the very structure of its preservation. Bernita Humeyestewa says, "Its got to be valued at home. And that's why we have so many conflicting opinions about where it should be taught. I knew I was getting into a delicate situation this year by teaching it but I was really surprised that no one complained" (p.143).

American Indian learning styles

The authors' chapter on ways of learning shares research on the influence of culture on learning. They write,

The influence of home and community culture on learning styles was recognized by Swisher and Deyhle . . . in discussing the cultural difference hypothesis; they attribute poor academic performance to the differences between the environment and teaching methods of schools and the environment and teaching methods of student's homes and communities. Difficulties occur...because the ways children learn at home conflict with the ways schools teach. (p.156)

What teachers reported about literacy

This chapter if full of information about relevant reading material, the problem of student labeling in remedial programs, dialect interference, the influence of oral tradition, the need for explicit lessons in writing, and cultural differences in thought. For example,

People from oral traditions contextualize their articulation of thought; they depend on shared knowledge of the people who will be listening to them and do not necessarily articulate what others already know. People from literate traditions tend to decontextualize thought, to add the context that a distant audience will need to make sense of speech or writing. (p. 188)

Collected Wisdom has sprinkled throughout gems of teachings, stories to tell of these other ways to approach teaching. A Case Study entitled "The Great Circle of All Things" is an Ojibwe story of how a young boy skips school because his family needs his help with the fishing. It brings the reader to sense the real learning, the classroom of nature that the "truant" boy was experiencing and the unsaid need for that boy's teacher to understand.

Collected Wisdom is a valuable source book for parents, teachers, and counselors. Summing up the view of Wayne Newell, one of the teachers interviewed, Cleary and Peacock also sum up the message of their book:

The key to producing successful American Indian students in our modern educational system...is to first ground these students in their American Indian belief and value systems. (p. 101)

In 1992 the Navajo Division of Education began a Teacher Education Program with funding from the Ford Foundation for its first three years to train teachers to meet the goal of the 1984 Navajo Nation Education Policies that stated,

The Navajo language is an essential element of the life, culture and identity of the Navajo people. The Navajo Nation recognizes the importance of preserving and perpetuating that language for the survival of the Nation. Instruction in the Navajo language shall be made available for all grade levels in all schools serving the Navajo Nation. Navajo language instruction shall include to the greatest extent practicable: thinking, speaking, comprehension, reading and writing skills and study of the formal grammar of the language

Diné College, formerly Navajo Community College, formed a partnership with Fort Lewis College, Northern Arizona University, Prescott College, University of New Mexico, and the University of Northern Colorado. This partnership had graduated an estimated 200 new Navajo teachers by 1996 with a retention rate of 85%. In addition to getting elementary certification, students in the program earned a bilingual teaching endorsement.

As part of the Navajo Teacher Education Program now offered at Diné College's Tsaile Campus students take an academic specialization in Navajo language, history, and culture that includes courses in Navajo Literacy for Speakers, Navajo Literature and Grammar for Speakers, Navajo Descriptive and Narrative Writing, Foundations of Navajo Culture, Navajo History to the Present, and one restricted elective related to Navajo Studies. Students are also required as part of their professional teacher preparation program to take courses in Diné Educational Philosophy, First and Second Language Acquisition, Teaching Navajo to Non-native speakers, Teaching Literacy in Bilingual Education/ESL Classrooms I & II, and Teaching Navajo to Native Speakers.

University of Hawai'i's Hawaiian Language Program

The 1990 census reported that less than five percent of Native Hawaiians the Hawaiian language, and most of these speakers were elderly. When Hawaiian was first taught at the university level in 1921 all Hawaiian adults spoke Hawaiian. The revival of interest in Hawaiian began in the 1970s. In 1996, declared by the Governor of Hawai'i as the Year of the Hawaiian Language in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the banning of Hawaiian in schools, Hawaiian was taught on the nine campuses of the University of Hawai'i. University enrollments in Fall 1994 totaled about 2,300 students. The content of all upper division courses in the Hawaiian Studies Department at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo is taught in Hawaiian.

Learning from Maori efforts in News Zealand, Hawaiian university faculty have been very involved in the establishment of Hawaiian language immersion preschools, elementary schools, and, most recently, high schools. The first preschools were opened in 1984 and by 1996 enrolled 1,208 students in Hawaiian language immersion programs in eleven schools, while another 3,500 students were in non-immersion Hawaiian language programs. The Hale Kuamo'o Hawaiian Language center is located at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo. Curriculum materials are developed at the Center for Hawaiian medium schools, including math and science texts and a Hawaiian language newspaper.

One area of emphasis in the University of Hawai'i's Hawaiian language efforts is in the area of using technology. In Hawaiian 201 and 202, a writing intensive intermediate level course at the Manoa campus, there are once-a-week computer lab sessions using e-mail and production of website materials. Hawaiian 300 and 400 level courses are taught to students on the major Hawaiian islands using interactive television. The Hawaiian Language Center's website address is http://www.olelo.hawaii.edu/

The National Foreign Language Center at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa sponsored a symposium and workshop this summer on advancing language immersion education focusing on Pacific perspectives and international applications. Workshop instructors included Helena Curtain of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Makalapua Ka'awa of the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, and Timoti Karetu, Maori Language Commissioner in New Zealand.

The purpose of the symposium held from July 6 to 10 was to "facilitate the sharing of resources, ideas, and information about all aspects of language immersion education." Over 80 participants from Australia, Canada, China, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States shared ideas about language policy, teaching methods, curriculum development, and assessment. Speakers described foreign language immersion programs teaching English, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Chinese and mother tongue immersion programs teaching indigenous languages, including Hawaiian, Maori, and Arapaho.

The two-week workshop with 20 participants that followed the symposium had four modules: pedagogy, culture, technology, and materials development. Participants were indigenous, heritage, and foreign language teachers either currently teaching in immersion programs or interested in starting one. They selected and developed "projects to prepare them to meet the challenges of language immersion education and share resources and information with colleagues."

Immersion has proven an effective successor to previous language teaching approaches of traditional grammar translation methods, the audiolingual methods of the 1960s, and communicative methods of the 1970s. The central characteristic of immersion is the teaching of language, content, and culture in combination without the use of the child's first language. Students are taught a second language they initially don't understand through the use of a variety of context clues provided by the teacher. Three hundred thousand students are in immersion classrooms today in the United States. Test scores show that immersion students learn the same academic content as students in English-Only classrooms along with a second language. Immersion students as they proceed together through the grades also develop a strong sense of camaraderie and often form a "values community" that reflects the positive aspects of the language and culture that they are learning.

Immersion language teachers provide ideally at least half-day (partial) immersion for students in the language they are targeted to learn and often students receive full-day (total) immersion. The less students are likely to be exposed to a new language outside of school the more they need to experience a second language in school. The pervasiveness in the broader community of the two languages is also a factor. The lesser the use of a language outside of school the more it needs to be supported in school. In fact, high prestige languages that are omnipresent in the community and especially in the media, such as English, will be learned even if they receive no support in the school.

Math and science are typical content subjects taught through immersion in the primary grades as they are best taught through the use of manipulatives and hands-on activities. In higher grades there is often less time spent in second language immersion and the subject taught is often social studies because of the difficulty of obtaining appropriate textbooks for higher level subjects.

Indigenous mother tongue immersion and foreign or second language immersion differ in terms of the commitment to culturally transforming the student. Mother tongue immersion seeks to transmit the children's indigenous culture while foreign language immersion seeks to create an understanding and appreciation of the culture of the new language.

The Maori and Hawaiian mother tongue language immersion programs are well developed. The Maori began with preschools, their kohanga reo, in 1982. The main tenets of the kohanga reo are that Maori is the sole language to be spoken and heard, no smoking is allowed in the environs, they are to be kept scrupulously clean in the interest of the health, and decisions are the prerogative of the parents who have children in the kohanga along with the care-givers.

Under pressure from parents who wanted their children's Maori education continued in the public schools, the New Zealand government established Maori immersion schools. Three Maori immersion classes have graduated from high school, and there are now five total-immersion high schools. Timoti Karetu, now the Maori language commissioner, was impressed by a visit to Navajo Community College, now Diné College, in 1976 and subsequently helped move his university to offer Maori immersion teacher training.

Learning, from the Maori example, the Hawaiian language immersion program began with family-based preschools in 1983 and in the public schools in 1987 after Hawai'i's English-Only law for schools was changed. A parent described to me his involvement in his child's Punano Leo, "This is a way of life...you have to take it home." He described to me how the Hawaiian immersion brings back the moral values of the culture and how the culture mends families. The English translation of the Punana Leo mission statement reads:

The Punana Leo movement grew out of a dream that there be reestablished throughout Hawai'i the mana of a living Hawaiian language from the depths of our origins. The Punana Leo family initiates, provides for, and nurtures various Hawaiian language environments. Our families are the living essence of these environments, and we find our strength in our spirituality, love of our language, love of our people, and love of knowledge.

Indigenous mother tongue immersion programs are voluntary and require parent involvement. In Hawai'i parents are required to help in the preschools eight hours per month and to take classes in Hawaiian so they can support the instruction given in the schools. A non-profit corporation supports the preschools, provides post-secondary scholarships for the study of Hawaiian, and develops Hawaiian language curriculum and materials for use in the schools.

Many immersion teachers have learned the language they are teaching as a second language, and their speaking ability can be criticized. One indigenous language teacher noted "I don't speak like my grandmother, but I speak the language of my grandmother." Another teacher commented that we need to "Get beyond the notion you can only be smart in English."

An excellent review of the research on the importance of reading to academic success is Stephen Krashen's little book The Power of Reading: Insights from the Research (1993). While I do not want to rewrite his book here and re-cite the over 200 references found in it, I do want to give his conclusions based on his extensive study:

My conclusions are simple. When children read for pleasure, when they get "hooked on books," they acquire, involuntarily and without conscious effort, nearly all of the so-called "language skills" many people are so concerned about: They will become adequate readers, acquire a large vocabulary, develop the ability to understand and use complex grammatical instructions, develop a good writing style, and become good (but not necessarily perfect) spellers. Although free voluntary reading alone will not ensure attainment of the highest levels of literacy, it will at least ensure an acceptable level. Without it, I suspect that children simply do not have a chance. (p. 84)

Krashen advocates Free Voluntary Reading (FVR), which requires a variety of reading material available to children at home, in libraries, and especially in classrooms for them to select from based on their interests. Programs that advocate time set aside for FVR every day in every classroom such as Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) (McCracken, 1971) and Drop Everything And Read (DEAR) are valuable additions to any school curriculum. Krashen even supports the use of comic books with reluctant readers since comics often contain sophisticated vocabulary and the pictures provide clues for the reader to help they learn what that vocabulary means. Teachers can interest their students in FVR by reading high interest books to their students fifteen minutes or so every day, even in the upper grades. I have seen fourth and fifth students who were noisily jumping around in the late afternoon gather around and quiet down when their teacher began reading to them a high interest novel. Students who might be interested in different types of stories can not show any interest just because they have no idea of the type of stories that exist. Through reading to their students, teachers can introduce new material of slightly more complexity than the students can easily read to pique their interest and expand their horizons.

Unfortunately, almost all Indian reservation communities lack bookstores and many lack adequate libraries in both their schools and communities. Community, school, and classroom libraries are being gutted by budget cuts because no one wants to pay taxes. It has been argued by some that new media and computers make reading less important, but textbooks remain central to the classrooms today, and one must read webpages, e-mail, and the like on even the newest computers. However, the desire by educators t o be technologically up-to-date has led to more money being budgeted for computers and less on books.

Transitioning students from conversational to academic language proficiency.

Teachers, linguists, and even parents tell me that Indian children are too often not speaking their ancestral (tribal) language at all or well and are also not speaking English well. Some linguists use the controversial term "semilingualism" to describe this situation. Bilingual researchers such as Jim Cummins (1996) make the distinction between conversational and academic language proficiency. Indian children develop conversational language proficiency at home and in their primary classrooms but often fail to develop the academic language proficiency needed to handle grade-level academic material, especially lectures and textbooks from fourth grade on. Primary textbooks have a simple vocabulary and syntax and lots of pictures to provide children clues about meaning, but as the number of pictures declines and the vocabulary and syntax become more complicated, American Indian and other minority children often have problems making the transition. This is the same transition between primary picture books with pictures on every page to a juvenile novel that often have no pictures at all. Students who read a lot get the practice they need to make the leap from conversational to academic language proficiency. While they are not likely to read a lot of textbook material, because it is often not of high interest and it is not self-selected, if they are "hooked" on fiction and non-fiction trade books they will read a lot.

Picture books are designed to engage novice readers and get them to enjoy reading, but transitioning Indian children into juvenile novels (so-called chapter books because they are long enough to be divided up into chapters) is especially important for getting Indians students to do enough reading to get the practice they need to become fluent readers and develop academic language proficiency. Almost any chapter book that interests a child will do, but series books where a child who likes the first book will have many others in the series to read are especially important. Zane Grey or Louis Lamore westerns, Tarzan books, Nancy Drew mysteries, Sweet Valley High books, Goosebumps books, and the like are all useful. However all of these essentially deal with non-Indians, and it is very important for their identity that Indian children also read about people like themselves.

When I concur with the idea that reading is everything and focus on picture books and novels, I am not downgrading the subject matter areas of social studies, mathematics and science. What I am saying is that success in the content/subject-matter areas of the curriculum become increasingly dependent on students' reading abilities as they advance through the schools' grades. American classrooms are very reliant on textbooks, and even when their not, they are very reliant on supplementary reading material. In addition, the classroom, criterion reference, and standardized testing that schools use to measure student success are very much dependent as students in advance in grade level on their ability to read them. Students cannot score well on a math or science test even though they know something about math and science if they cannot read the questions on the test to understand what is being asked of them.

Novels can be used to enhance the core academic curriculum in a number of ways. T.L. McCarty (McCarty & Schaffer, 1992) writes about using Scott O'Dell's (1970) novel Sing Down the Moon as part of a social studies unit. The book is a fictionalized account of the Navajo's Long Walk, and eighth grade students supplemented their U.S. history textbook's information with material on Navajo history. I taught junior high science 25 years ago at Chinle Junior High. I would have liked to been able to use a novel back then such as the recent Jurrasic Park both because of its high interest and because it has a lot to say about both scientific ethics and how scientists gather information and develop theories. In addition, I would point out to students how much more information (and story) are in novels than in the movies made from those same books.

American Indian academic achievement: Sources of the problem

Another reason, besides lack of academic language ability, for poor academic performance centers around motivation as I described in my review of Alan Peshkin's 1997 book Places of Memory: Whiteman's Schools and Native American Communities in this column in the September 15, 1997 issue of NABE News. Mick Fedullo (1992) in his book Light of the Feather: Pathways Through Contemporary Indian America illustrates an extreme case of this cultural conflict with a quote from an Apache elder who stated that students' parents had,

been to school in their day, and what that usually meant was a bad BIA boarding school. And all they remember about school is that there were all these Anglos trying to make them forget they were Apaches; trying to make them turn against their parents, telling them that Indian ways were evil.

Well, a lot of those kids came to believe that their teachers were the evil ones, and so anything that had to do with "education" was also evil--like books. Those kids came back to the reservation, got married, and had their own kids. And now they don't want anything to do with the white man's education. The only reason they send their kids to school is because it's the law. But they tell their kids not to take school seriously. So, to them, printed stuff is white-man stuff. (p . 117)

Note: This is an edited version of a portion of a paper the author delivered on February 24, 1998 at the Third Exemplary Institute organized by Dean Chavers and held in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The second part will be published in the next issue of NABE News.

References

Fedullo, Mick. (1992). Light of the feather: Pathways through contemporary Indian America. New York: William Morrow.

Krashen, Stephen. (1993). The power of reading: Insights from the research. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

McCracken, Robert A. (1971). Initiating sustained silent reading. Journal of Reading, 14, 522-23.

McCarty, T.L., & Schaffer, R. (1992). Language and literacy development. In J. Reyhner (Ed.), Teaching American Indians students (pp. 115-131). Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

O'Dell, Scott. (1970). Sing down the moon. Boston: Houghton Miflin.

Peshkin, Alan. (1997). Places of memory: Whiteman's schools and Native American Communities. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Tennant, Edward. (1994). "Eye of Awareness": Life values across cultures. Unalakleet, AK: Bering Strait School District.

Using books to help students deal with cultural conflict

Cultural conflict and reading may seem miles apart, but the selection of the right kind of books can help students work through these conflicts in a process that has been called bibliotherapy as well as to give them practice reading. For example, the books of Paul Pitts are excellent material for teaching American Indian students ways of dealing with cultural conflict:

Paul Pitts explores issues that many Native American children face that are not often addressed in children's novels. Racing the Sun, Shadowman's Way, and Crossroads each portray a young Navajo boy as the main character. The issues these boys face allow the books to be entertaining for both avid and reluctant adolescent readers. The central underlying themes in each of Pitts' books are how young children seek friendship and deal with cultural differences in defining their identity. (Steward, 1996, p. 43)

Some people decide whether others have any value on the basis of their skin, their clothes, how they talk. You can only hope, if you want those people to accept you, that they will take the time to get to know you as a person. (p. 104)

A recent book on Indian children's literature that could be used to help build a library for what I have called a heritage reading program (see Reyhner, 1992) is Jon C. Stott's (1995) Native Americans in Children's Literature, reviewed by Brian A. Bell in this column in the February 1, 1997 issue of NABE News. Stott lists more than 100 books by and about Americans Indians along with short synopses and critiques to help teachers find stories to use in their classrooms. It is critically important that books such as Stott describes and recommends are readily available year around for Indian students to read and to own. In addition, parents and community leaders should work with teachers and librarians in helping choose books. Parent and community involvement in the selection of books that would be heavily promoted for students to read would serve two purposes. First, it would help screen out books that could increase the cultural conflict between community and school that Peshkin found, and second it would get adults reading books and thus being role models for the children.

In communities without bookstores, school administrators should make available children's books for purchase. Teachers through monthly magazine book clubs and librarians through yearly book fairs are often doing this now to a degree, however, book clubs lack a good selection of books on American Indians and other topics of local interests, plus today's children want things right now, rather than waiting weeks for the teacher's mail order to come in. It is my experience that most students have money for soft drinks and other junk food and are willing to buy high interest books if they are readily available. In one reservation school where I was principal I used to take a book cart around to every classroom once a week selling paperback bo oks at cost and using the money to buy more books. I sold a lot of books. If there is a student store in your school, I would investigate ways it might sell some books. A third possibility is to get your school library to stock some paperback books for sale year around.

Conclusion

The health of American Indians have suffered greatly because they did not have the immunity to European diseases and the cultural prohibitions about the use of alcohol that immigrants brought with them from Europe. Likewise, the education of American Indian students has suffered greatly because American Indians did not have cultural teachings about the importance of reading in particular and school in general that European immigrants often brought with them. Educated Euro-Americans teach the importance and values of reading to their children before they ever get to school by regularly reading them bedtime stories and having books, magazines, and newspapers scattered around their houses. In contrast, one can find Indian households without books, and bookstores in Indian communities are virtually nonexistent, and libraries, other than school libraries, are not much more frequent.

While Headstart Programs have proven very effective, there is no school-based program that can compensate for what has been called the "LAP" method of teaching reading. Putting your child in your lap every evening and reading them a bedtime story not only teaches them pre-reading, reading readiness, and reading skills, it also associates reading in the mind of the child with all the warmth, love, and care that parents ideally give their children. Programs such as Reading Is FUNdamental (RIF) that help get books into homes, and programs that encourage older siblings in school to read to their younger siblings still at home are excellent ways to introduce pre-school children to reading.

The best picture books help teach children what it means to be a human being in the same way that traditional Indian stories do. Whether these stories are read or heard, they help enculturate children to become productive members of their communities. Children who are denied these oral and written stories are in danger of missing a moral compass that will keep them on course. Educators need to work with parents and communities to provide students with narrative guideposts, both oral and written, that will provide direction for our youth.

If educators are to turn things around for their Indian students, they must not just teach the phonics and other skills associated with reading, they must help develop a culture of reading in the communities they teach in by working to get reading materials into the home, building classroom paperback libraries, and maintaining well-run and well-stocked school libraries, and they need to see that students have opportunities to own their own books. However, having a lot of books is not the only criteria; reading materials should be carefully selected as to not be destructive of the student's culture! Educators need to be careful that the reading material they are stocking and promoting does not aggravate the cultural conflicts that Peshkin describes in the Indian boarding school he studied. By working with their students' parents and communities and studying the information in books on Indian education and Indian children's literature, teachers can help build a culture of reading for their students.

References

Bell, Brian A. (1997). A review of Native Americans in children's literature. NABE News, 20(4), 25.

Peshkin, Alan. (1997). Places of memory: Whiteman's schools and Native American Communities. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Pitts, Paul. (1988). Racing the sun by Paul Pitts. New York: Avon Camelot.

Pitts, Paul. (1992). The Shadowman's way. New York: Avon Camelot.

Pitts, Paul. (1994). Crossroads. New York: Avon Camelot.

Reyhner, J. (Ed.) (1992). Teaching American Indians students. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

Steward, Jill. (1996). Review of Paul Pitts' Racing the sun, The Shadowman's way, and Crossroads. Journal of Navajo Education, 13(3), 43-44.

Stott, Jon C. (1995). Native Americans in Children's Literature. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

The September 15, 1998 issue of NABE News included a copy of President Clinton's Executive Order on American Indian and Alaska Native Education signed on August 6^th. It is interesting to compare this document with the March 1997 Comprehensive Federal Indian Education Policy Statement: A Proposal from Indian Country to the White House that was endorsed by the National Indian Education Association, the National Congress of American Indians, the National School Boards Association, numerous tribes, and other Indian groups.

The Indian Education Policy Statement emphasizes tribal sovereignty, funding needs, self-determination, tribal involvement, and support for Indian languages. The Clinton Order emphasizes President George Bush's America 2000 (1991) goals and calls for regional forums and an Interagency Task Force on American Indian and Alaska Native Education. Another goal of the Clinton Order is "to address the fragmentation of government services available to American Indian and Alaska Native students and the complexity of intergovernmental relationships affecting the education of those students."

The goals of the Clinton document echo most of the 1991 goals the Indian Nations at Risk Task Force report, which was an Indian-oriented version of the 1983 A Nation at Risk report that was commissioned by former Secretary of Education Terrel Bell. In fact, Bell co-chaired the Indian Nations at Risk Task Force along with William Demmert, Jr.

Well-researched rebuttals have been made to the claims made in A Nation at Risk, with the most prominent being Gerald Bracey's (1991, 1992, 1993) articles in the Phi Delta Kappan and Berliner and Biddle's 1995 book The Manufactured Crisis. While not denying problems in American education, these rebuttals emphasize that America's schools are performing overall as well as they ever have, and the crisis is not general but more specific to the academic performance of most ethnic minority students, including American Indian students. Most importantly they document how more emphasis on reading, math, science, and technology will not, by itself, make much difference in our schools.

I would like to focus in this column on the different emphasis on Indian languages found in the two documents. This emphasis is based on my own interest in the teaching of Indian languages and because A Nation at Risk, which in many ways the thinking behind Clinton's Order parallels, has been used to attack bilingual education. It is worth noting that Berliner and Biddle specifically counter the claims of Bell's successor William Bennett that bilingual education is a failure.

In Clinton's Executive Order, the only specific mention of native languages is in section 2-f on putting together a "comprehensive Federal research agenda to.. evaluate the role of native language and culture in the development of educational strategies." On the other hand, the Comprehensive Federal Indian Education Policy Statement starts off in Section A-2 with the statement that federal agencies need to "develop an institutional knowledge that native languages, cultures, and traditions are extremely diverse and unique, and occupy an unparalleled status in the history and laws of the United States as the original languages, cultures, and traditions of North America." Section C of the Statement is devoted to the "Support of Native Languages and Cultures" with calls for funding, technical assistance, tribal control, academic credit, and teacher certification.

Clinton's Executive Order asks the new Interagency Task Force to again retrace well trodden trails rather than to break new ground implementing the findings and policies of the Native American Languages Act (P.L. 101-477) of 1990 that states "there is convincing evidence that student achievement and performance, community and school pride, and educational opportunity is clearly and directly tied to respect for, and support of, the first language of the child or student" and that "it is the policy of the United States to...preserve, protect, and promote the rights and freedom of Native Americans to use, practice, and develop Native American languages." In addition, the Indian Nations at Risk Task Force (1991) developed ten goals that both parallel Clinton's six new goals but also include the goal of maintaining of Native languages and cultures.

This is not to say I am entirely in agreement with the Comprehensive Federal Indian Education Policy Statement. That Statement emphasizes tribal sovereignty but not the responsibility that needs to go hand in hand with sovereignty. Tribes and tribal organizations want more direct funding from federal and state governments, but little is said about better using current funding.

Tribally controlled schools today too often model themselves after off-reservation schools, for example in emphasizing and valuing athletic over academic programs. I don't see the Policy Statement tackling the issue brought up by Alan Peshkin in my last two columns, the issue of poor academic performance by Indian students in relatively well funded Indian-controlled schools. There is still the notion that tribal control (and more funding) will, in and of itself, solve Indian problems. The experiences o f the last quarter century with self-determination have shown progress, but many problems remain unresolved despite local control. In fact, local control has produced a new set of problems, often based on factionalism within communities and tribes, that have replaced the older problems that were based on the lack of self-government.

The goals in Clinton's Executive Order of better reading, math, and science instruction, fewer dropouts, and safer schools are admirable, but they are being put forward pretty much in a cultural and linguistic vacuum that pulls attention away from how Indian communities and schools both need to change if Indian children are to value schooling. While the Clinton document speaks of fulfilling its educational commitment "in a manner consistent with tribal traditions and cultures," that thought is in danger of getting lost in the America 2000 rhetoric that dominates the Order.

Tribal Colleges and organizations such as the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), headquartered in Boulder, Colorado, are showing how Indian languages and cultures can be integrated with technological education in order that Indian students can achieve the type of academic success that will allow them to compete for jobs in the modern workplace. One hopes that the Interagency Task Force will draw heavily on the work of the Tribal Colleges and AISES so that new trails are charted in its work rather than old trails merely revisited.

References

America 2000: An Education Strategy. (1991). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

Berliner, David C., & Biddle, Bruce J. (1995). The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on America's Public Schools. Reading, MA. Addison-Wesley.

Bracey, Gerald W. (1991). Why can't they be like we were? Phi Delta Kappan, 73(2), 104-117.

Bracey, Gerald W. (1992). The second Bracey report on the condition of public education. Phi Delta Kappan, 74(2), 104-117.

Bracey, Gerald W. (1993). The third Bracey report on the condition of public education. Phi Delta Kappan, 75(2), 104-117.

Comprehensive Federal Indian Education Policy Statement: A Proposal From Indian Country to the White House. (1997, March). Washington, DC: National Congress of American Indians.

Indian Nations at Risk: An Educational Strategy for Action. (1991, October). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.

A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. (1983, April). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Peshkin, Alan. (1997). Places of memory: Whiteman's Schools and Native American Communities. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

I recently came across Neil Postman's 1995 book The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (Vintage Books) in a local used bookstore. Having read other books by Postman, I bought it and was interested to find that he considered multiculturalism one of the false gods being followed by some teachers today.

I assigned the book as required reading in my undergraduate Foundations of Multicultural Education class that I am teaching this Fall as a companion text to Sonia Nieto's Affirming Diversity (see the September 15, 1994 issue of NABE News for a review of that book) because I thought it would get my students thinking about how the field of multicultural education fits into education in general.

In contrast, Postman supports cultural pluralism, which he defines as bringing into the school the stories of America's minorities to first provide "a fuller and more accurate picture of American culture and, especially, its history," to second show that despite horrendous treatment of minorities, American has and is making efforts to improve, and to third "show that there were substance and richness in each tribal tale" that all of us are better for knowing (p. 17).

Besides the false god of multiculturalism that some educators are following, Postman describes other false gods Americans are worshipping, including consumership, economic utility, and technology. In other words, we are what we buy, schooling is simply to prepare students for jobs, and the increased use of computers and other technology is the key to reforming schools.

Postman's book is divided into two sections. The first section describes the false gods and proposes some alternative ways of looking at the purpose of education. For Postman, "schools are not now and never have been about getting information to children" (p. 42). Instead, "the idea of public education depends absolutely on the existence of shared narratives and the exclusion of narratives that lead to alienation and divisiveness" (p. 17).

The first proposed narrative uses the metaphor Spaceship Earth to link us with all the other inhabitants of our planet and emphasize that "we can no longer take for granted the well-being of the planet" and need to work together world-wide to take care of our environment (p. 64). Furthermore, we cannot show responsibility towards the physical world we live in without a knowledge of the sciences. Showing responsibility for one's world, and in particular one's neighborhood, would in Postman's view give students a feeling of usefulness that many now lack.

The second narrative of the Fallen Angel is a counter to the self-esteem movement in America schools and what Postman views as hubris, pride, dogmatism, and arrogance among Americans. In this journey of understanding students must learn to "esteem something other than self" (p. 76).

In describing the Fallen Angel narrative, Postman is particularly critical of textbooks because he considers most of them to be badly written "packaged truths" that give students a false sense of certainty about their subject matter.

Postman's third narrative is the American Experiment in which he sees the history of our country as an ongoing attempt to develop a better way of living and where documents such as the Declaration of Independence are arguments about the purposes of nations and the roles of citizens.

For Postman, America's narratives of democracy, the melting pot, and the Protestant ethic share themes, for example, of "family honor, restraint, social responsibility, humility, and empathy for the outcast" (p. 15). He thinks it is wrong that "there is certainly more emphasis, these days, on loving one's self than on loving one's country" (p. 131), and he hopes that the arguments over what is the best form of government will never end.

Postman includes "a list of 'values' students should accept, such as justice, honesty, self-discipline, due process, equality, and majority rule with a respect for minority rights, each of which is not so much a 'value' as it is a focal point of a great and continuous American argument about the meaning of such abstract terms" (p. 131). When the arguments stop is when wars begin. One of the big questions facing America today is whether it is "possible to have a coherent, stable culture made up of people of different languages, religions, traditions, and races?" (pp. 135-36).

The fourth narrative is the Law of Diversity. Here Postman again criticizes multiculturalism as he defines it where "if everything is seen through the lens of ethnicity, then isolation, parochialism, and hostility, not to mention absurdity, are the inevitable result" (p. 76). For Postman, "diversity does not mean the disintegration of standards, is not an argument against standards, does not lead to a chaotic, irresponsible relativism. It is an argument for the growth and malleability of standards" (p. 80).

For Postman, "to promote the understanding of diversity is, in fact, the opposite of promoting ethnic pride. Whereas ethnic pride wants one to turn inward, toward the talents and accomplishments of one's own group, diversity wants one to turn outward, toward the talents and accomplishments of all groups" (p. 144). Furthermore, we should read minority authors because their work is good not because it was written by minorities. For example good children's literature is both well told or written and helps students understand the human condition, as do both Greek fables and American Indian coyote stories.

Finally Postman writes, "If we are serious about making diversity a central narrative in the schooling of the young, it is necessary for our students to learn to speak at least one language other than English fluently" and to do this we need to start with young children (p. 149). I would add that rather than just teaching a second language as a subject, we need to teach young children through that language as well in order for them to truly master it. In other words, all children need bilingual education!

Lastly, Postman puts forth the narrative of humans as The Word Weavers/The World Makers. He sees the strength of the English language is the fact that because of the repeated invasions of England and its use around the world it has picked up words from many different languages with the result that it "is the most diverse language on earth, and because of that, its vitality and creativity are assured" (p. 78). Furthermore, "We use language to create the world--which is to say, language is not only a vehicle of thought; it is also the driver" (p. 83), and "almost all education is a form of language education. Knowledge of a subject mostly means knowledge of the language of that subject" (p. 123).

Too often we teach children the definition of a word rather than a definition of a word, which leads them to assume words are part of the natural world rather than something invented by humans. "The word cup, for example, does not in fact denote anything that actually exists in the world. It is a concept, a summary of millions of particular things that have a similar look and function" (p. 181).

The central theme of The End of Education is that "without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention" (p. 7). In the broadest view, the end and purpose of education is to get children to join the age-old search for "what it means to be human" (p. 60). There is no set understanding about this that teachers can deliver to students in capsule form.

However, students can learn about how people have lived and brought meaning to their lives in the past by studying anthropology, history, and literature. They can learn about how people worked and are working to make sense the physical world we live in through the study of science. And they can learn about people today by studying subjects such as psychology, sociology, political science, and even Native American Studies. To my mind, the end of education is to get students to join in the age-old human quest to bring meaning to our lives. This is a multicultural quest that all cultures have contributed to, are contributing to, and will contribute to.

Title VII and other bicultural teacher training programs have increased the number of minority teachers in America. However because teaching expectations are culturally-based, these teachers often encounter distrust, disdain, and hostility in their new classrooms. The recently published book, Transforming the Culture of Schools: Yup'ik Eskimo Examples (Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), describes these apparently insurmountable difficulties and the subsequently creative solutions. These Yup'ik Eskimo teachers discovered their key solution to be the Ciulistet, an indigenous support group.

The University of Alaska's Cross-Cultural Education Development (X-CED) Program founded a quarter century ago is a field-based teacher training program for Native Alaskans that has helped increase the number of indigenous teachers in Native Alaskan villages from less than one percent to twenty-five percent since its conception. However, graduates of the program often felt rejected on two fronts: mainstream teachers and school administrators scorned the alternative nature of their teacher-training program, and Native Alaskan communities ostracized the alien appearance associate with being a teacher. As Yu'pik teachers began to enter the school systems "they were both welcomed and treated as objects of suspicion. Administrators feared if they hired Native teachers, they could never dismiss a poor or unsuccessful teacher" (p. 46).

For the village community, new Yup'ik teacher "should not act white, but if she acted as herself (Yup'ik), she was not considered a 'real teacher,' or not as good as the White teachers" (p. 60). Thus, the new Yup'ik teachers "struggled with doubts about their effectiveness as teachers and about their ability to be of service to their communities" (p. 25).

In an effort to balance expectations, the Yup'ik teachers rejected the profuse bubbly praise promoted by outside teachers --Yup'iks believe that, "overly praising will ruin a person" (p. 126). More important, they wanted to provide their students with greater comprehensible input in terms of language and content. Although this approach contradicted the dominant decontexualized methodology pervading Alaskan schools, the teachers understood the necessity for a Yup'ik culture-based curriculum. Yup'ik "children in the village were raised to be self-reliant and have a great deal of responsibility." However, "in school, they learned to look upon the teacher as an authority figure who tells them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it." (p. 95).

A Yup'ik teacher emphasized "establishing a strong personal relationship with students," in contrast to the outsiders' ideas that "good teachers" were teachers who had the "ability to impart content knowledge" (p. 101) and that content was designed to replace the Yup'ik language and traditional cultural knowledge and values. Thus the growing number of Yup'ik teachers were faced with a cultural conflict just as their students were. Fortuitously, one new sympathetic superintendent of schools encouraged the formation of a group of all the certified Yup'ik teachers in his school district in 1987, which became known as the Ciulistet. The Ciulistet has grown into a general support group for Yup'ik teachers and has expanded over time to include village elders.

This support is needed because "Yup'ik culture conflicts powerfully with cherished values associated with mainstream schooling and society" (p. 5). Mainstream schooling, according to the authors, emphasizes "abstract learning decontextualized from personal experience and organized into chunks to fit prescribed time, spaces, and places of learning" while Yup'iks desire "knowledge validated through personal experience–typically related to subsistence off the land" (p. 25).

The new Yup'ik teachers did not take to phonics instruction and the pervasive Nomination, Elicitation, Evaluation (NEE) model of teaching use by the outsider teachers. In the NEE model a teacher repeatedly calls on individual students in their classroom and asks them questions that the teacher already know the answer to, and then the teacher tells the whole class whether a student has answered correctly. This teaching model spotlights individual students in a way which is contrary to traditional Yup'ik child rearing practices.

Various "rigid" programs that have been designed for minority children--such as DISTAR, Madeline Hunter's version of Direct Instruction, and Success for All that tend to turn both students and teachers into robots following a script--were disliked by Yup'ik teachers because the programs forced teachers to rush through lessons and did not allow them flexibility. Yupik teachers wanted to treat their students like a family rather than as objects for drill and practice.

However, the situation faced by Ciulistet teachers is not an either/or choice between traditional Yup'ik life and child rearing practices and mainstream American culture and its classroom practices. While schools are a meeting place between the two cultures, neither are monolithic entities . "Traditional cultures face a series of modern choices" and Yup'ik teachers act as cultural brokers "negotiating a curriculum with the help of both village elders and outside facilitators such as the professors in the X-CED program" (pp. 26-27).

Yup'ik teachers called for "more content that related to the children's environment and culture so they could learn rapidly" (p. 52), but they also recognized the need for literacy and learning about the outside world. The Ciulistet teachers have found that the rich Yup'ik "oral tradition, rich in its explanations of the relationships among people and between people and the environment, offers teachers numerous possibilities for developing oral and written literacy" (p. 193).

Using support from the National Science and Annenburg Foundations, Ciulistet teachers developed culturally appropriate mathematics and science curriculum. This culturally compatible curriculum built mathematical and science concepts on the prior knowledge that students brought to the classroom from their village, including their fluency in the Yup'ik language. However, use of the Yup'ik language is still marginalized in the schools with the result that unless more progress is made, the language will be lost.

While not easy reading, Negotiating the Culture of Schools highlights the problems faced and opportunities offered as more ethnic minorities become teachers in our schools. Historically, the dominant culture's approach to minority schooling that concentrates on replacing the minority culture and its language with the dominant culture and English has failed many minority students. When this assimilationist approach is persisted in, as seems to be the case now in California under Proposition 227, some children and their families reject schooling while other children can become lost between their families and the demands of the school.

To prevent this persistent failure, the authors of Negotiating the Culture of Schools recommend increasing the number of minority teachers, helping them form support groups, involving elders and other community members in those groups, and establishing ties to other groups, including indigenous educators elsewhere, and even to mainstream teachers once the local community has a clear educational agenda mapped out.

The culturally negotiated curriculum advocated by the authors of this book offers more than a compromise and is not simply a matter of "taking the best from both cultures." It is a complex process of decision making that must go on in every community to determine what is best for that community and its children. It is not something that can be mandated from any state or national capital. It is a curriculum that parents must buy into as well, so maybe if Congress requires parents to agree to putting their children into bilingual programs, the results will not all be bad.

I recently viewed again the videotape E Ola Ka '0lelo Hawai'i produced by the 'Aha Punana Leo (1997) in Hawai'i, which dramatically portrays the most successful recent effort for indigenous language revitalization in the United States. This video makes a powerful statement about the value of the Hawaiian language and culture for Native Hawaiians, and it especially emphasizes the successful efforts to change English-only state laws and to involve the whole family in their children's schooling and to make the school and classroom "like a family."

Individual teachers neither can produce a whole new culturally responsive curriculum on their own nor can they individually change repressive laws. It is through group efforts such as the Ciulistet and 'Aha Punana Leo that indigenous teachers can find the moral and curricular support they need to transform the culture of their schools.