Places of Memory

Whiteman's Schools and Native American Communities

Alan Peshkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780805824698
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135456610
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

While visiting New Mexico, the author was struck with the opportunity the state presents to explore the school-community relationship in rural, religious, and multiethnic sociocultural settings. In New Mexico, the school-community relationship can be learned within four major culture groups -- Indian, Spanish-American, Mexican, and Anglo. Together, studies of these culture groups form a portrait of schooling in New Mexico, further documenting the range of ways that host communities in our educationally decentralized society use the prerogatives of local control to "create" schools that fit local cultural inclinations.

The first of four planned volumes, this book studies the Pueblo Indians and Indian High School. The school is a nonpublic, state-accredited, off-reservation boarding school for more than 400 Indian students. A large majority of the students are from Pueblo tribes, while others are from Navajo and Apache tribes. As a state-accredited school, it subscribes to curricular, safety, and other requirements of New Mexico. As a nonpublic school devoted to Indian students, it has the prerogative to be as distinctive as the ethnic group it serves.

USE SHORT BLURB COPY FOR CATALOGS: This ethnography of the Pueblo Indians and Indian High School epxlores some of the ways that host communities in our decentralized society use the perogatives of local consul to create schools that fit local cultural inclinations.

1
The Focus of Memory: School and Community

It is hard to live our lives in places where we have no memories. It limits the depth of our relationships—not just to people, but to places, to seasons.

—Kathleen Stocking, 1990

Places of Memory

Unremarkably, memory reverberates in our lives. We fear its loss, mark its diminishing as a frightening sign that the end of meaningful life is near, and marvel at those who remember well and truly what has happened to themselves and others. We chide ourselves for forgetting events that spouses, children, and friends expect us to bear in mind and respond to in proper ways. Our memory is the great tracker of what has gone by and what is present; our memory inspires what is to come. Of course, memory also marks places with flavor, affect, and tone. Places, to be sure, don’t have memory; they enshrine memory, or they do not. We connect memory to locales, so that certain places haunt or frighten us, while others inspire warm or uncomfortable feelings, recall security or unease.

Some years ago, I visited an elementary school in Illinois, formerly a high school when the village it served was larger and could support an entire K-12 school system. The occasion of my visit was also one for parents to come and inspect their children’s work. To pass time between appointments, I browsed through the long ground-floor corridor whose walls contained rows of pictures—the graduating seniors of decades past. A man soon joined me, a dad and a former graduate. He, too, examined the photographs. His picture was up there in the lines of now-fading visual emblems of glorified adolescence. I gazed upward just with curiosity, looking at student family names as markers of national origin, at hair and clothing styles, at signs of maturity—somehow, past graduates always look older than those I know today, and, of course, older than I believe I did at the same age. I tried to figure out if the student identified as class president looked presidential—a foolish game, but, then, I was merely passing time.

Not so the onlooking dad at my side. When he reached his own class picture, he looked up long and intently. In fact, he looked with reverence, as if standing before a shrine composed of images of sacred youth. For him, his class graduation photograph symbolized what, projecting, I could think he remembered as his golden youth, a time of innocence and promise, a time of days filled with simplicity in his life, his community, and, indeed, his world. The memory he conjured up, I presumed, included a distant time in his life, but also a distant place, not the aging, dingy setting of his young child’s education. Time and place conspired to transfix him. He looked transfixed, and I felt like an intruder with my superficial, time-passing ways. Lacking memory, I could but play at making something out of what his memory could invest with such reality and such merit as to bring him to worshipful posture.

More recently, I heard a woman being interviewed on National Public Radio. One part of her family lived in Miami, one part in Cuba, her family’s native home. The interviewer probed for her comparative attachment to the United States and to Cuba, inviting her to explore her preferred sense of identity, and to disclose where she saw the promise of her future. The woman finally said, “I don’t think I can ever be American. I’m Cuban. I can’t leave.” Cuba—her stronger place of memory—embraced not only where an important part of her past was situated, but also what was currently essential in her life: where her mother lived, where she worked, where her friends and neighbors were, and where who she was—in the language she spoke, the food she ate, the music she hummed, and all her ways of knowing—were natural. What she knew and who she knew herself to be were Cuban, and this required no explanation, no justification, no unease about its appropriateness. She was not pleased with all that it meant to be Cuban, let alone satisfied with the material conditions of her life, her mother’s health, and the prospects of her country given its loss of the decades of Soviet economic and military aid. She need not be fond of all her memory encompassed to take what it afforded as the substance for identity, dignity, and meaning.

I cling to the notion of places of memory,¹ persuaded that in the differential quality and meaning of what Pueblo people have stored in individual and collective memory lies the best explanation of why they respond as they do to two tangled processes: one, going to the whiteman’s² school and seeking some place in the world where that school belongs; the other, growing up Indian within a tribal community encompassed by the non-Indian world. It is premature to elaborate the consequences of these two processes, but not what is at stake for Pueblo people. Although attendance is compulsory, Pueblo adults freely send their children to school. The school, a Pandora’s box of uncertainties and prospects, welcomes the children, and in the name of education and opportunity unwittingly unleashes a flood of activities that changes their lives forever. Under prevailing circumstances, can any school that Indian children now attend, even one controlled by Pueblo Indians who are attuned to Pueblo ideals, manage the impact of this stream of activities in a way that creates less confounding results?

Remaining and Becoming

The formative years of approximately 5 to 16 are a critical time for shaping children’s identity and preparing them for adult life. Parents, accordingly, may seek just the right nonpublic or public school, hoping to find one that incorporates moral values, academic standards, peer companions, if not a way of life, that fits their personal sense of worthy cultural norms. Home schooling may be the extreme case of parents’ locating the exactly right academic milieu formed in their own interests. For such parents, no external institution will do. Other parents, no less conscientious, find the right educational fit with their sense of cultural norms in the local public schools. For them, no alternative is necessary.

The many types of nonpublic and public schools may differ in truly substantial ways. For example, the academic experience in denominational schools may be framed by an embracing religious orientation (see Peshkin 1986). The academic experience in nondenominational schools includes distinctions derived from philosophy, as in Waldorf and Montessori schools, and from soaring aspiration, as in the elite prep schools of the Northeast and elsewhere. Although such schools satisfy the tastes and needs of some families, they are objectionable to others.

No school or philosophy of schooling satisfies everyone. For most parents, the ideal school sustains the valued cultural norms of home and community, and readies their child to function productively and profitably in society at large. Parents fear for their own and their children’s well-being if their children become misfits in their community or social class, on the one hand, or the larger society, on the other. Parents may vilify, abandon, or try to change schools they perceive as leading their children astray or failing to satisfy expected standards. By one means or another, parents expect schools to do good, or at the very least to develop their child’s means to perform usefully as workers and citizens; they expect, as well, the school not to do harm to the family’s cultural norms. It is one thing if the school does not actively promote these norms; not all parents want schools to play this role. But it is another if the school subverts these norms in any way, be it by insensitivity, inadvertence, or intent.

Many American subgroups, some of them racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious minority groups, seek to sustain their sense of a distinctive way of life, while facing the prospects of schooling in the dominant society. Troubled by the perceived outcomes of such schooling, minority parents may seek educational alternatives in Afrocentric, Chicano-centric, or parochial schools. These parents are doing what many parents always have done: seeking the best possible match between their own cultural norms and their child’s school.

In the late 1960s, writer Stan Steiner traversed the country to gather perspectives on what American Indians “think about American society, about their own cultures, about the future” (1968:292). While preparing to write The New Indians, he came across a poem by David Martin Nez, “New Way, Old Way”:

We shall learn all these devices the White Man has.
We shall handle his tools for ourselves.
We shall master his machinery, his inventions,
his skills, his medicine, his planning;
But we’ll retain our beauty
And still be Indian. [Steiner 1968:131]

Steiner cites the reaction to this poem by an anonymous official of the Bureau of Indian Affairs:³ “Romantic but unrealistic … These Indians have got to leave their dreams back there on the reservations and get into the real world” (1968:131). Almost 30 years later, Dr. Perry G. Horse (Kiowa), echoes the conclusions of David Martin Nez: “We are mindful that we do not live in the past. We know we must balance the best of our ways with those of others in our contemporary lives” (Horse 1994:8).

Nez and Horse are concerned with Indian mastery in two worlds, neither to be forgone, intent that even after learning “all these devices the White Man has” they will “still be Indian.” For them and their native compatriots, the economically, politically, and technologically dominant world of the whiteman is the world from which they draw the imperatives of who they must consider becoming. If this world is never very distant from Indian life, it is nonetheless the Indian’s second world, the place to which they go when they leave home.

Constructed from the norms and work needs of American society, Indian High School is a centerpiece in the world of becoming. It embodies the whiteman’s form and content of cognition, affect, and skills. Indian High students get peer reinforcement for elements of this world pertaining to dress, food, music, sports, and material goods. The routines and preferences of Indian High School students are like those of students anywhere in the country. Although they have adopted and adapted to Anglo-American ways, and thereby become participants in that world, they continue to retain Pueblo ways, particularly regarding Pueblo ideals of who to be and what to value. Indeed, they remain Indian, even as they become recognizably mainstream Americans. As I will make clear in the following chapters, like Nez and Horse, most Pueblo parents believe that while their children must become skillful actors in the dominant society, they should remain faithful members of their tribal community.

This book is most immediately about Pueblo adolescents and their life as students at Indian High School, but it is most fundamentally about remaining and becoming, processes of consequence that everyone experiences in some way, to some degree. Typically, the issue is not if, for example, we will remain adherents to the behavior and beliefs of our family, our community, and our tradition, but to what extent.

Issues of remaining and becoming are intrinsic in the human condition. They are defined and redefined by circumstances beyond our control—economic booms, revolutions, war, and natural disasters; by circumstances we create or want to happen—becoming a dancer, becoming rich, or becoming a religious convert; and by circumstances of our being—an immigrant, a member of a minority group, a refugee, or a conquered foe. The general issues of remaining and becoming exist for everyone, but differ for each person in their particulars, as is clear from this brief consideration of the range of circumstances that can define them. Furthermore, they are inescapable issues. We do not have the option of living exactly like our parents or grandparents, of learning just what they knew and valued, absorbing it, and transmitting it to our own children—as comfortable and appealing as this option may be. In fact, no one has this luxury. As we learn, we make decisions, and we have decisions thrust upon us, of what to blend and balance, of what to accept, of what to keep intact and modify, from the interacting circumstances we face in our worlds of remaining and becoming. Schools are places of controversy because they are at the juncture of the processes of remaining and becoming, where what is at stake for society, local communities, parents, and students becomes explicit.⁴

I will explore the processes of remaining and becoming as they affect the educational experiences of Pueblo Indian adolescents who live in their tribal reservation communities and attend Indian High School. I do not fully explore this school and its operations; this important topic is not the point of my inquiry. My consideration of remaining and becoming illuminates the matter of schooling anywhere these youngsters would attend school, which is to say that though I focus my study on Indian High School, I mean to affirm that there are basic circumstances about the whiteman’s schools that generally make them problematic for Pueblo adults and children.

Nature of Study

Mimes perform a skit within a circle of light standing on an otherwise blackened stage. When a mime moves and “bumps” into the “walls” of this light, the audience realizes that the mime has fashioned light into a fully enclosing container. He moves this way and that in an effort to escape his imagined confines. With every bewildered move, he knocks against a barrier invisible to the audience, but nonetheless impassable. The mime apparently can see through his enclosure, but he cannot move beyond its constraints.

The circumstance of an unseen but effectively constraining barrier between the mime and the world outside the circle of light comes to mind when I consider the issue of academic success for Indian High School students. For the purposes of my study, I make several assumptions. First, the students—of high school age, living on or closely associated with their reservations, and members of one of the New Mexican Pueblo Indian tribes—have intellectual capacities comparable to any American group. Second, they are taught, for the most part, by talented, caring educators. And, third, they are raised by families that generally value education. Assumption number one is in the stands-to-reason category. Assumptions number two and three rest on the outcomes of my observations of several years, and also on the students’ assessments reported in later chapters.

In light of these assumptions, I ask, as do Indian High School educators: What, then, is the barrier that stands between students and academic achievement so they do less well than their peers in New Mexico; less well than their teachers want them to do and believe they can do; less well than their parents and communities want and need them to do; and less well than the students acknowledge they can and should do?⁵ Doing “less well” is not a term explicitly defined by those within this Pueblo school and community who use it. It covers a range of conventional indications of “success”: test scores, grade point averages, motivation and effort, graduation rates, college applications, persistence in college, and acquiring jobs based on school achievement.

The institutionally completed act—schooling offered by educators to students, schooling received and made use of by students⁶—is a complex, hit-and-miss affair. It requires the connection of educator intentions and deeds with student will and capacity to translate those intentions and deeds into practice. There is always a discrepancy between the fullness of what educators offer and the extent to which students can and will accept and capitalize on what they are offered. Ideally, students value their school’s academic opportunities for their own sake and for their relevance to post-school opportunities. Between educators’ ideals and students’ behavior is the latter’s understanding of their school experience. Indian High School students do not consistently grasp and internalize the prospects of schooling in ways that effectively motivate them to persist in learning.

By taking educators, parents, and students to be relatively inconsequential factors in creating this circumstance, I de-emphasize factors that elsewhere can and do make a difference for student achievement. I focus on the cultural barriers between students⁷ and academic achievement, aware that by doing so I venture into territory that I cannot comprehensively explore because of the deep-rooted taboos within which Pueblo Indians place traditional cultural knowledge.

Barred as I was by my willing agreement with school aut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue
• 1 The Focus of Memory: School and Community
• 2 Education at Indian High School: Good Intentions
• 3 “Preserving What We Love and Cherish”: Pueblo Ideals
• 4 “Caught Up in This White Man’s Society”: Living in Two Worlds
• 5 “Go Have Yourself a Good Education”: The Limits to Getting One
• 6 Reconstructing Memory: Imagining a Future
• Epilogue
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index