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

American Indians as Participants

The academic exploitation of American Indians goes beyond treating them as the subjects of academic discourse, and also affects individual American Indians as participants within that discourse. As Deloria ( 995) says, "The push for education in the last generation has done more to erode the sense of Indian identity than any integration program the government has previously attempted" (p. 14). The academy trains scholars in specific rhetorics, and is invested in protecting those discourses (McCloskey,1983). Thus, those writing from different perspectives, or with different methodologies or styles, will be sanctioned by representatives of the discipline in question (Blair, Brown, and Baxter, 1994). The results for American Indians has often been less the promulgation of Indian perspectives as increasing numbers of Indians are successful academically, and more "a generation of technicians and professionals who happen to be of Indian blood" (Deloria, 1995, p. 14).

Those who know this and still attempt to legitimate their writing as "academic," even if differently "academic" from the standard linear approach, will likely be told notjust that their work does not fit the governing paradigm of academic writing, but that it is "bad" writing. As Carole Blair, J. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter (1994) note, "Academic writing...is regulated by clear norms, usually among them a refined, ahistorical, smoothly finished univocality [that displays] as little as possible the circumstances and activities of production" (p. 383). Further, "issues of institutional or professional power are deemed superfluous to the substance and character of our scholarly efforts" (p. 383). Controlling the style of writing facilitates control of the content of that writing, which in turn functions to maintain the hegemony of those who dominate the academy as well as the dominance of the culture in which the academy is embedded (West, 1993). Controlling the production of "knowledge" can thus be seen as equivalent to and reinforcing of the control of other means of production throughout the society (Allen, 1993; Rigsby, 1993). Academic writing is thus a means of perpetuating colonialization (Duran & Duran, 1995).

The argument that there is but one standard of "good" or even of"appropriate" writing is an argument for hegemony (Elbow,1991), not just in the academy, but in the broader world outside of it (Tomkins,1996). As Peter Elbow (1991) argues, "...in using a discourse we are also tacitly teaching a version of reality and the student's place and mode of operation in it. In particular we are affirming a set of social and authority relations" (p. 146; emphasis in original). Members of the academy are trained to want "results," to prefer academic writing that fits the mold of expectations. Less consideration is given to the possibility that what are generally understood as "results" may be only one possible definition; that the process of creating, discovering, and transmitting knowledge may be appropriately and usefully conceived of in a variety of ways.