Tribal education supports skills of Indian students
In Browning and on the Flathead, tribal schools are getting results
Symbol of Salish Kootenai College. Photo by Alice Tejkalová.
Prague 2007: Common Ground
According to research done in 2003, only 52 percent of Native American girls and less than 50 percent of boys finish high school in the United States. There are various reasons for such a high dropout rate. Language immersion elementary schools and tribal colleges may help more American Indian students to succeed. Both types of schools are designed according to the needs of Indian students, with understanding for their cultural backgrounds and differences.
Children who attend Nizipuhwahsin Center in Browning run by the Blackfeet poet, Harvard graduate and Vietnam veteran Darrell Kipp have better chances to succeed in high schools and then at university than their peers from public schools. Their education is based on a language immersion program. That means in grades K-8, all of their studies are conducted in the Blackfeet language.
They leave the school with strong knowledge of their native language, and with very good English, even though they aren’t allowed to speak it in the Center during the school year. “Parents don’t speak Blackfoot language and grandparents also are unlikely to do so. So children come here and they know English,” said Kipp. “They stay in here from eight o’clock till four. As soon as they come out from that door, I’m sure they will speak English. Children who come here learn simply more languages at once.”
Teachers at Nizipuhwahsin Center are happy that children who stay in the school from kindergarten till eighth grade are later advanced students at English-speaking high schools. According to Kipp, “Even though they had no English lessons here, they are among the top English, French or Spanish students as well as math students.”
“That’s true, Darrell Kipp’s school has very good results,” said Joyce Silverthorne, education director of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation.
An option for older students is Salish Kootenai College, the Pablo-based institution that prides itself on helping Native American students put their education together.
“From the beginning they can feel something like – this is a place for you, we understand when you have some stops and gaps and holes and whatever in your education, it’s OK,” said Alice Chumrau, vice-president for academic affairs at Salish Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation. “The other thing is that American Indian students are not so happy to leave their home. I speak in general but in a lot of cases it’s true what I’m saying,” explained Roger McClure, director of career services at SKC. “Before the tribal colleges, they could go to mainstream universities, but they were too big, too white, too many and so we had just very few Native American students staying there and graduating and being successful,” added McClure.
SKC was founded in 1977 and now offers its students seven BA programs, several associate degree programs and a few certificate programs. This fall it is offering a new four-year-long BA program in elementary teaching.
This field of study is awaited with high expectations because teachers who graduated at SKC will know a lot about the history of Native Americans. They will know the culture of the Salish and Kootenai tribes, and they will better understand their Indian students. Indian Education For All is a new project and teachers from tribal colleges could help to apply it more quickly to Montana’s education system. Nowadays, some tests don’t take into account the different cultural background of Indian children.
“When there would be a question: ‘Who discovered America? Christopher Columbus, Adolf Hitler or ‘none of the above,’ the Indian child would mark ‘none of the above’ and it would be called wrong,” said Joe McDonald, president of Salish Kootenai College.
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