Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools

Leilani Sabzalian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429764172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Indigenous Children's Survivance in Public Schools examines the cultural, social, and political terrain of Indigenous education by providing accounts of Indigenous students and educators creatively navigating the colonial dynamics within public schools. Through a series of survivance stories, the book surveys a range of educational issues, including implementation of Native-themed curriculum, teachers' attempts to support Native students in their classrooms, and efforts to claim physical and cultural space in a school district, among others. As a collective, these stories highlight the ways that colonization continues to shape Native students' experiences in schools. By documenting the nuanced intelligence, courage, artfulness, and survivance of Native students, families, and educators, the book counters deficit framings of Indigenous students. The goal is also to develop educators' anticolonial literacy so that teachers can counter colonialism and better support Indigenous students in public schools.

PART I

Colonialism in the Classroom

The stories in this part all focus on moments of teaching and learning in classrooms. Read together, these three stories draw attention to dimensions of teacher professional knowledge that would help educators teach Indigenous students and Indigenous studies in responsible ways, while also calling into question the idea that such a knowledge base is discrete and that mastering it is attainable.

The first story, “Pilgrims and Invented Indians,” begins when Zeik, a 2nd grade Native student, resists the classic settler Thanksgiving narrative of hardworking pilgrims and welcoming Indians. By documenting how Zeik courageously speaks up in class to address what he considers a stereotypical portrayal of Indians, this survivance story highlights the unnecessary pressures stereotypical representations place on young children. Moreover, this story demonstrates that Native students—even young children like Zeik who is only 7—often already have knowledge and experience to critique dominant representations of Indianness and challenge the discursive authority of texts. This survivance story also points to the subtler colonial discourses that could be difficult for young children to detect, such as the ways Eurocentrism tacitly permeates the curriculum. From this survivance story, teachers can infer essential concrete and conceptual knowledge about Native representations, history, and social studies orientations they must understand to better serve students like Zeik.

The next story, “Halloween Costumes and Native Identity,” documents a high school Native youth group’s organizing around issues of cultural appropriation, including a critical literacy activity in which students write a collaborative letter to Spirit Halloween store condemning their sale of Indian costumes. This story then follows one student as she attempts to bring her new knowledge on this topic to her classroom, only to be shut down by her teacher, Sharon, who doesn’t understand “what the big deal is.” While drawing attention to essential knowledge for teachers, this chapter also highlights how even Indigenous educators versed in Indigenous studies may also miss moments in the process of teaching and learning. By describing an educational moment that I missed when I didn’t recognize a Native student’s negative experiences with my own curriculum, this survivance story illuminates the pervasiveness of colonial discourses and how they can even distort understanding between Indigenous peoples, particularly around issues of identity and authenticity. Because students have keen insights into their own experiences, this survivance story suggests teachers should provide avenues for students to give them feedback. Further, this story proposes caring and ongoing relationships with students as a form of accountability for the inevitable moments we miss as teachers.

The final story in this part, “Native Sheroes and Complex Personhood,” builds on the themes of identity and authenticity. This survivance story describes a Native student’s experience with a social studies unit in which she has the opportunity to research a contemporary Native leader. While highlighting the promising pathways this curriculum offered her to learn about a Native shero and bring her own cultural identity into the classroom, this story also draws attention to the complexity of Indigenous identity. By describing how this young, culturally confident, light-skinned student grapples with how to appear “Native” for the final project, the story makes apparent the ways the normalization of whiteness places an unfair burden on Indigenous students.

This survivance story illustrates why educators must not only pursue concrete and conceptual forms of knowledge, but also relational and political commitments to disrupting dominant discourses that constrain Indigenous students’ well-being and educational opportunities in schools.

1

Pilgrims and Invented Indians

It was November, a time when most elementary curricula in this district included Thanksgiving-themed curricula and units on Pilgrims and Indians, when I spoke with Zeik, a Native student involved in the district’s Title VI/Indian Education program. Zeik relayed an experience he had in his second grade classroom. His teacher, Ms. Billings, had organized a unit on the Mayflower and his class was learning about Pilgrims. Zeik shared that Ms. Billings read a book to the class about Pilgrims and he didn’t like the pictures of Native Americans that were included. He recounted the images, which included a Native man with a painted face, and another of a Native man with feathers in his hair. Zeik told me that he raised his hand in class and said to his teacher, “Not all Native people wear feathers. That is only for Chiefs who earned it. And painting your face is for special times.”

Whether Zeik knew that the nonspecific “Indians” he saw in the book were likely Wampanoag people is unclear. Knowledge of tribal diversity is often an effective base from which to critique generic representations of Indians. If Zeik had such knowledge, it did not come from his teacher as she had not heard of the Wampanoag people until our interview. Regardless, Zeik spoke from his own base of experience which was enough to disrupt hegemonic constructions of Indianness offered as official knowledge by his teacher.

“I’m Not an Indian”: Invented Indians and Dehumanization

Zeik’s commentary in class, though brief, reflected what Ojibwe scholar Scott Lyons (2000) terms rhetorical sovereignty, “the inherent right and ability of peoples¹ to determine their own communicative needs and desires in the pursuit of self- determination …” (p. 462). As Lyons continues, “rhetorical sovereignty requires above all the presence of an Indian voice, speaking or writing in an ongoing context of colonization and setting at least some of the terms of debate” (p. 462). Zeik was setting at least some of the terms of debate in his classroom. Zeik mediated the curricular space, carving out classroom space for himself and his humanity. His words also challenged the discursive authority of his teacher’s text. His observation “not all Native people wear feathers” not only contested the curricular representations offered to him, but also revealed the partial and constructed nature of the text. Rather than letting the selective processes of curricular erasure, silence, and misrepresentations go undetected, Zeik’s interjection destabilized the dominant discourse by implying other possibilities than what he and his classmates were presented.

At the age of 7, Zeik probably wasn’t aware his words were doing all this work. When I asked Zeik why he chose to speak up, Zeik commented that he “just didn’t like the pictures.” For Zeik, the images of the Indians in the book must have been a stark contrast to his daily experiences with actual Native people who looked, according to him, “just sort of normal.” It’s not that Zeik never saw Native people dressed in feathers or with their faces painted. He had been to many pow wows and other Native community gatherings. Zeik’s comment that feathers are “earned” and “painting your face is for special times” suggested to me that he understood particular aspects of the pictures as more than inherently stereotypical markers, and instead part of a cultural and community context in which those items have particular meanings.

I also learned that Zeik had a particular distaste for the word Indian, a referent repeated throughout the book. It’s not that Zeik never heard the word Indian either. Indian was frequently used in the Longhouse and Native community and the Title VI program Zeik was involved in was often called the “Indian Education Program.” Yet for Zeik, the word Indian also had a negative connotation. Perhaps it was because his family primarily used their tribal affiliation or the word Native, or because the Indian Education Program, despite the official title, frequently used “Native” in its programming (e.g., Native Youth Group, Native Youth Center). Either way, Zeik didn’t like that the book the class read that day used the term:

I don’t like being called an Indian. I’m not an Indian. I’m a Native American. It’s like being called a girl gets annoying [because of his long ponytail], but being called an Indian gets really annoying. Being called an Indian kind of messes with who I am. They use Indian and make them look not smart and I’m Native American and I’m smart. So when they call me Indian they’re kinda trying to say I’m not smart.

At the age of 7, Zeik had already experienced and could detect a hostile climate, one in which people try to make Indians look “not smart.” Zeik wasn’t a victim—Zeik saw himself as Native American and smart—but he didn’t identify with the Indian that “kind of messes with” who he is. Zeik’s rejection of the term Indian was an act of self-care, mirroring a similar act by James Baldwin (1998) relayed in a reflection on his own upbringing in a hostile climate:

In order for me to live, I decided very early that some mistake had been made somewhere … I had to realize when I was very young that I was none of those things I was told I was. I was not, for example, happy. I never touched a watermelon for all kinds of reasons. I had been invented by white people, and I knew enough about life by this time to understand that whatever you invent, whatever you project, is you! (p. 682)

Like Baldwin, Zeik rejected the imposition of this invention. He didn’t identify with the ways he felt some people were trying to make him look or feel. Zeik’s comment reminded me of someone else who had a particular distaste for the word indian. ² Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor (2014) states,

My argument about Indians all along has been that we just have to change the name, the actual language of reference. Leave the inventions of the Indian to the people who created it, and then we can easily humiliate them for their silly behavior. They invented an Indian, an image that makes them feel good, or not. The invented name, in my view, has nothing to do with Natives … I created the word postindian, a theoretical language and a new idea so that people could say, “No, I’m not Indian, but if you insist, you could say I’m postindian because I’m not the Indian that’s been invented for popular culture. I came after the invention, and the invention is not me. I’m a young person. I’m not obligated to all that stuff. I didn’t participate in it. I’m not an invented Indian, but if you like, you could say I’m postindian. I’m a different kind of person imagining myself after the popular cultural indulgence in the invented Indian.” (p. 111)

Like Vizenor, Zeik was aware that the Indian in the book was a simulation. Such awareness reflected the “double consciousness,” or sense of seeing himself “through the eyes of others” (Du Bois, 1961, p. 17), Native students often have as a result of navigating society’s misperceptions. Zeik’s teacher, lacking such an awareness, unwittingly reproduced invented Indians as curriculum and negatively impacted Zeik’s educational experience.

As with Vizenor, names and language for Zeik were also as a site of resistance. When asked what he prefers as a self-referent, Zeik said his tribal affiliation or Native American. Zeik told me another story, however, that indicated he had already understood the issue at hand was more complex than semantics, more than a matter of merely swapping terms:

My teacher one time asked [the class] “What do you do when you have a problem?” and I raised my hand and said I try to fly high above my problems like an eagle and [the girl] next to me said “That’s such an Indian thing to say.” … So I guess if she said that’s such a Native American thing to say, I’d feel a little better, but not really.

Zeik understood that his peer’s statement communicated more than the particular word she chose to use. Whether she had said Indian or Native American, Zeik recognized that he still wouldn’t have liked what she was trying to tell him. Zeik’s awareness and experiences complicate one of the first questions I am often asked in professional development and teacher education courses that I offer: “What is the appropriate term to use: Native American or American Indian?”

Educators should seek out respectful terms, which likely include the names of specific tribal nations or bands within their region, while also recognizing intergenerational or cultural diversity within usage. Educators should also appreciate the political and social significance terms such as Indigenous, Native American, or American Indian can wield as they attempt to address a base of collective experiences with respect to land, people, and colonization; however, they should also recognize the inadequacy, even the risk, inherent in any term that collapses the rich geographic, political, linguistic, cultural, and spiritual diversity of Indigenous peoples. Zeik may not have recognized all of this at the age of 7, but he could detect the complexity of a context in which a semantic swap would not have redressed the harmful dynamics he had experienced. Such awareness by a 7-year-old complicates the initial question many teachers often ask.

Good Teachers with Bad Curriculum

In a later interview with Ms. Billings, she recounted the story as Zeik had told it, explicitly praising Zeik for his insight and courage to speak up in class, a supportive attitude that not all teachers express when their curricular choices are questioned. She stated that she had planned on saying something similar to the class about the images in the book, that this was a historic piece and not all Native people look like that today, but that Zeik had “beat her to the punch.” She also shared that her teacher preparation program had trained her to use a “multiple perspectives” approach and “critically” examine the perspective underlying a resource (including what she termed a “white man’s perspective”). As she spoke, I struggled to make sense of the gap between her professed theory and actual practice, wondering how she could recognize the need to critically interrogate curriculum, while simultaneously using a book based on generic Indians. On the surface, Ms. Billings was articulating a theory of critical pedagogy (Freire, 1970), and a critical multicultural analytic practice of reading within, across, and beyond the texts (Botelho, Young, & Nappi, 2014). She also named whiteness as influencing curriculum with a frankness that many white elementary teachers I worked with could (or would) not; yet naming whiteness didn’t lead to detecting the textbook’s construction of generic Indians as a construction of whiteness, what Berkhofer (1979) terms “the white man’s Indian.”

Ms. Billings admitted the curriculum she used often had flaws, but believed having critical conversations about the texts is important, perhaps even more important for students than spending time trying to find the most accurate books. On some level I shared her sentiment that all students, particularly Native students, should develop a critical relationship with curricula since entire domains of knowledge—science, English, social studies, etc.—have been rooted in Eurocentric philosophies and values. But then, Ms. Billing seamlessly reverted to the position many teachers I have worked with in the district take, and expressed the difficulty she has finding good curriculum. This position is always difficult to understand, upsetting even, given the wealth of resources I knew to be available to teachers.

To be fair, teachers have immense pressures on their time. Ms. Billings routinely, however, demonstrates that she goes above and beyond for her students in many other ways. For example, in a Title I school with increasing mandates to standardize curriculum, Ms. Billings still manages to teach project-based science units on catapults, create space for music weekly, and take students to see plays. Zeik loves his teacher, and rightfully so; she is caring, energetic, engaging, and committed. The recurring response that finding better resources is too difficult seems to reflect then, not just a gap in knowledge, but tacit resistance or unwillingness to looking, even an unexpressed desire to remain a “perfect stranger” (Dion, 2008) to Indigenous realities. This position appears to justify and uphold “business as usual” (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008, p. 981) approaches to Indigenous education that have persisted for decades. Further, these comments illustrate that being a “good teacher” in this district doesn’t necessarily require an ability to detect bias and Eurocentrism in the curriculum.³

As a sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I: Colonialism in the Classroom
• PART II: Colonialism in the Culture of Schools
• Conclusion: Interventions for Urban Indigenous Education
• Index