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

Conclusions

The educational system in the United States, charged with the production of worthy and responsible citizens, has ever worked to eradicate American Indians and their cultures (Adams, 1995). This process has three forms: the containment of American Indians as students, the definitions of American Indians as subjects of academic discourses, and the construction of American Indians as rhetors within the academy.

The issues throughout are clear, the implications could not be more important, and the solutions remain evasive. Through the treatment of students, the academic study of American Indian nations and cultures, and the requirements of academic discourse, the conqueror's culture intends to render American Indian nations the agents of their own colonialization. Whether the actual site of this process is the boarding schools of the nineteenth century or contemporary schools and universities, whether the mechanisms of grading and the culturally specific design of such "universal" examinations as the Scholastic Aptitude Test have largely replaced beatings and blatant humiliation, little else has actually changed. School children and college students-American Indians as well as non-Indians-are still too often being taught that integration into the nation is the necessary condition for acceptance, and that this integration requires the debasement and outright rejection of individual identities as members of separate-and sovereign-nations.

Before American Indians may fully participate in the national democratic process they too frequently must cast off their cultural values, don the cultural values of the dominant society, and risk marking themselves as counterfeit in the eyes of their tribal culture and in the eyes of the members of the dominant society. This, of course, disallows their full participation either in the dominant society or among their own people. Too often, then, American Indians must choose between marginalization within the dominant culture or within their resident cultures.

While this picture is bleak, it is not inevitably so, and there is some cause for hope, if little for rejoicing. Increasingly, American Indian scholars are taking their places throughout the educational system, and alone, together, and with non-Indian colleagues, are working to foment changes in curricula, teaching styles, and research.

Changes in curricula include expanding our understanding to include "Indian" history into "American" history, "Indian" literature into "literature," and so on. Equally important, changes mean incorporating Indian perspectives on their own experiences, contemporary as well as historical, regardless of whether those perspectives mesh with or challenge prevailing perspectives.

Changes in teaching styles imply teaching teachers both the importance of and the techniques associated with culturally appropriate education. It also means continuing and increasing programs designed to get more Indian teachers into the classroom, and giving them greater control once they are there. Given that the majority of educators are presently non-Indian, it is imperative that they be given tools for appropriate education.