From boarding schools to the multicultural classroom: The intercultural politics of education, assimilation, and American Indians

Teacher Education Quarterly, Summer 1999 by Sanchez, John, Stuckey, Mary E

It's hard to be Indian.

-Asa Primeaux, Yankton Dakota Holy Man

Education, as two such different authors as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Henry Adams have noted, is a powerful tool in the service of democracy. Through democratic education, "citizens" may be created where "persons" existed before. Implicit within this practice is the notion that only certain kinds of "persons" are acceptable as "citizens," that there is a mold into which the raw material of humanity may be poured and out of which templates of proper behavior will be produced (Antczak, 1985). While for members ofthe dominant culture this process may be uncomfortable or boring, it tends to reproduce and reinforce the lessons learned elsewhere: in homes, playgrounds, and places of worship. For those who do not participate, or who do not participate fully in that dominant culture, however, the process is far less benign, far less reinforcing, and potentially far more damaging. From policies designed to help "them" become part of the "melting pot" to policies that enforced segregation on those not welcome in the "American" mix, the classrooms of the United States have been crucial sites for the interplay of power and cultural dominance.

No group of American citizens has experienced this process more intensely than have American Indians. From the first days of contact with Europeans, American Indians have been subjected to an impressive array of educational policies and programs designed specifically to eradicate all traces of their resident cultures. While such explicit assaults are no longer a sanctioned part of the national educational agenda, a number of practices remain that produce much the same effect: a devaluing of resident cultures in favor ofthe dominant American culture. This paper examines these practices, and through them the politics of intercultural communication in the academy via a historical and contemporary analysis of American Indians as the subjects, objects, and practitioners in the American educational system. Through the lens offered by this approach, the potential as well as the problems of implementing multi- and intercultural education will be illuminated.

American Indians as Students

American Indians are complete and separate nations and cultures located within the boundaries of the United States. This year, on the behalf of the United States, the Bureau of Indian Affairs will legally recognize over 500 Indian nations with over 300 separate tribal languages. American Indian nations however, whose populations are finally beginning to grow again after the devastation wrought by Euro-American contact, still only make up about 1.8 million people, less than one percent of the total population.

While American Indians may study the American popular culture, and may even adopt some of the characteristics of that culture, they are rarely completely assimilated into it. Cultural differences remain and Indians defend their right to maintain them (Sanchez, 1997; Swisher, 1998). Despite the fact that many of the most profound differences may have disappeared over the last five centuries (Deloria, 1994, p. 62), American Indians continue to represent a distinct set of cultural attitudes andbeliefs. The nature and extent of these differences should have been reasonably clear as far back as 1492, and were certainly obvious when formal education in the European model began on this continent in the 1700s. In observing a meeting between representatives of the Haudenosaunee (Six Nations or Iroquois League) government and that of the Commonwealth of Virginia, for instance, Benjamin Franklin (1794) noted that:

...the commissioners from Virginia acquainted the Indians by a speech, that there was at Williamsburg a college with a fund for educating Indian youth; and that if the chiefs of the Six Nations would send down half a dozen of their sons to that college, the government would take care that they be well provided for, and instructed in all learning of white people. The Indians' spokesperson replied:

"...We are convinced that you mean to us good by your proposal and we thank you heartily. But you, who are wise, must know that different nations have different conceptions of things; and you will not therefore take it amiss, if our ideas of this kind of education happen not to be the same as yours." (p. 28-29)

Nonetheless, the non-Indian culture that came to dominate the United States has continued to insist on acculturating and assimilating its American Indian students. American boarding schools had a serious negative impact on two of the most important aspects of American Indian cultures: language and spirituality. Boarding schools challengedthe very make-up of Indian cultures by forcing the tribal languages and the customs they reflected from American Indian children by forcibly separating those children from their families, and by severely punishing those children who deviated from the cultural norms imposed upon them (Adams, 1995). Second, these schools forced the spiritual beliefs that are centuries old from these children and compelled reliance on the Christian religious paradigm (Adams, 1995).