|
Viewpoint For Native Americans, teaching is
resistance By COLMAN
McCARTHY
When John Blackhawk, interim president of Little Priest Tribal
College, asked the class of 98 to ascend the stage of the community
center to say a few words, all five graduates came forward. Beginning with Amy
Bearskin, each spoke for a few minutes, expressing thanks to their parents and
promising their professors -- four full-time and 11 adjunct -- that this
days success would lead to more.
Not that it was much noticed beyond the sere hills of the
Winnebago reservation in northeastern Nebraska and northwest Iowa, with the
Missouri River in between, but the commencement ceremony had two links with
history: one making it; the other remembering.
This was the first graduating class at Little Priest, a two-year
associate degree college offering 43 core courses and 24 electives to some 100
students. Two-thirds are adults, three-fourths women. The Little Priest campus,
which has one building atop a hill that is a pasture and creekbed or two away
from the tribes buffalo herd, is named after the Winnebago chief whose
dying words in 1866 to his community were: There is nothing more I can do
for you. Be strong and educate my children.
The remembrance of history goes back to the 1832 treaty between
the Winnebagos and the administration of Andrew Jackson, one of the most
anti-Indian presidents in U.S. history. It required that the tribe cede 7
million acres of arable land in the central Missouri Valley to the well-armed
white outsiders. In exchange, the government promised piddling rewards to the
straitened Winnebagos: 12 yokes of oxen, 1,500 pounds of tobacco and a school
to impart whatever knowledge the president of the United States would
prescribe.
For 166 years the Winnebagos, with 1,200 members currently on the
reservation and 3,800 on the roll, has had its own views on what useful
knowledge should be dispensed. Forced assimilation, the devaluation of
traditional culture, attacks on tribal sovereignty, boarding schools and other
forms of paternalism by federal officials assured that the tribes
potential for independence went untapped.
Educationally, that changed in August 1996. The Winnebagos opened
Little Priest College, with John Blackhawk telling me at the first-day
ceremonies that the school is an institution of survival. Start-up
funding of $500,000 came from the tribes casino income.
Little Priest Tribal College is the latest display of
self-reliance and educational excellence in Indian country. The school is one
of 31 Native American colleges in 11 states. Such schools as Turtle Mountain
Community College, N.D., Salish Kootenai College, Mont., Oglala Lakota College,
S.D., and the rest are enrolling some 20,000 students from more than 200
tribes.
In 1968, I covered the opening of the first tribal college at
Tsaile, Ariz., on the Navajo Reservation. The early promise of that day has
been fulfilled: Some 10,000 students have graduated, and current enrollment is
about 1,500. Much of the 1968 funding for the Navajo Community College came
from the Office of Economic Opportunity. Sargent Shriver, who directed the
office, predicted at the time that Indian educators would be both knowledgeable
and motivated to teach tribal languages, culture and history, and that little
of this would be available in non-Indian schools.
The prediction has proved to be true. A 125-page report,
Native American Colleges: Progress and Prospects, issued in 1997 by
the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching summarized the findings
of a survey of 1,600 Indian students. It showed that 69 percent were very
satisfied with the teaching at their college ... 68 percent strongly agreed
that their professors enjoyed teaching, and 70 percent strongly agreed that the
professors encouraged students to participate actively in classroom
discussions.
More than a third of the surveyed students had previously attended
a non-Indian college or university: Of those, 88 percent agreed that
tribal college faculty are friendlier, and 93 percent agreed that more
individual attention is shown to students at a tribal college. Finally, 72
percent agreed that the quality of instruction was higher at their tribal
college.
Taken together, Native American colleges are a statement of
resistance -- against the political, economic and cultural power of the larger
society that in the 19th century systematically sought to kill off Indians and,
failing that, in the 20th century tried forcefully to assimilate them. Not only
have Indians not gone away, they have shown, by their colleges, that a
resurgence has begun. The curriculum at Little Priest is typical. In addition
to the customary liberal arts courses in math, science, computers and English,
credits are given for the study of Winnebago history and the tribes
Ho-Chunk language, federal Indian law, American Indian women and Winnebago
mythology.
Every calorie of this educational energy will be needed. In recent
years, political attacks against tribes have increased. In the past two
Republican Congresses, efforts have been made to weaken the Indian Child
Welfare Act and the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act. Amendments were offered to
the Clean Water Act to strip tribes of their authority to regulate water
policies on their reservations. Proposals were made to impose federal taxes on
tribal gaming revenues. Indian Legal Services took hits, as did funding for
Indian Health Services facilities. Tribal sovereign immunity has been attacked.
Billions of dollars in the Interior Departments trust fund for tribes
have been mismanaged.
For Susan Williams, a Native American attorney in Albuquerque,
N.M., whose father is a Dakota and mother a Chippewa and who taught Indian law
at Harvard Law School for five years, the anti-Indian feelings showing up in
Congress reflect the negativity seen nationally: Many people in this
country, she told me, including so-called open-minded liberals, do
not take seriously the treaties that this government entered into with Indian
nations. They feel that Indians are a species relegated to museums and are not
an active, live people with the right of self-government. ... People fail to
recognize there are three forms of government: federal, state and tribal.
Were in the Constitution.
This legal tie to American power twins with the efforts of tribal
colleges to preserve Native American identity, despite its devaluation by
white-driven commercialization, romanticism, ignorance and violence. In the
current issue of Fellowship magazine (published by the Fellowship of
Reconciliation, Box 271, Nyack, NY 10960), James Juhnke and Valerie Schraq
write: The American myth of redemptive violence, which requires action,
adventure, bloodshed and bluster, is a lie. It is especially so in the Native
American case. The great Indian leaders who mobilized violent resistance were
justifiably outraged and undeniably courageous. But they did not save their
people.
The true heroes of Native American history were those who
resisted nonviolently. Native American culture was rescued and sustained by
Indians who strove to avoid war and who picked up the pieces after repeated
rounds of death and destruction. Indian ways of living survived because of the
patient, persistent and creative traditionalism of ordinary men and women. ...
Throughout history, Native Americans have adhered to a peace tradition in the
face of violent conquest and upheaval. This tradition, though obscured in
mainstream texts, provides a vital insight into a people for whom
reconciliation is a way of life. It is an insight desperately needed if
American society is to overcome the myth of redemptive violence and reconcile
itself with its past.
In 1972, the American Indian Higher Education Consortium was
formed. In 1989, the tribes organized another power, the Indian College Fund,
which raises money for student scholarships. One of this years
scholarship winners is a Little Priest graduate, Rona Stealer, who has been
accepted by the University of Nebraska. She plans to become a physicians
assistant and return to her Winnebago community to serve.
Thats another subject taught at Little Priest: the ideal of
service. The faculty and administrators live it, and the students absorb
it.
Colman McCarthy was for many years a syndicated columnist
for The Washington Post. He is an active pacifist and teaches peace
studies around the nation.
National Catholic Reporter, July 31,
1998
|
|