Prejudice is an equal opportunity problem
Joyce Silverthorne. Photo by Alice Tejkalová.
Prague 2007: Common Ground
Joyce Silverthorne has been the head of the Tribal Education Department of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes for 10 years. She spoke about the history and current status of Indian Education For All, American Indian achievement gaps, the public school system and discrimination.
Who was involved in getting recognition of American Indian education to be part of the language in the Montana constitution in 1972? Were you a part of that?
No. There were no Indians at the Constitutional Convention. This was decided by non-Indian people who realized that Indian studies had not been a part of their history [in school]. Legislators have needed to know this for a long time because when they get elected they have from the first week of November until January when they take office to suddenly learn everything about tribes, reservations, land, minerals, water. There is the treaty sovereignty and as legislators they have to understand how those interact with what they’re doing. There were legislators who realized that it was important to have this knowledge.
Why did it take until 2005 for Indian Education For All to begin taking effect?
In 2005, several things had come together. There were a lot of people working toward trying to get Indian Studies into public schools for a long time. After the 1972 convention, after the constitution was passed, there was an Indian Studies Law. That Indian Studies Law was going to put into place classes for all; actually they started with teachers. All teachers on or near a reservation were required to take six credits of Native American studies. Native American studies programs were new programs. They weren’t really designed to be able to address 13,000 teachers, and they enlisted a lot of people who had knowledge of history. But they were not really teachers. Some of them were activists, some of them had anger issues they hadn’t resolved and the classes were not 100% positive.
The learning curve is steep when you’re under the gun like that and there was a backlash from teachers. And they were able to prevent the legislature…they were able to change the law from MUST take to MAY take [Native American studies credits], that’s the only change. I remember going to a class and it was friends of mine that were teaching it and the class began with making statements that all teachers are unfair, and they really made the class angry right off the bat. Later when we were talking about what’s working and what’s not working, the idea was that they thought that the teachers were there without choice and the first thing they needed to do was get their attention.
Why was 2005 so important?
2005 was a big turning point. To be able to have the law say: “Yes, the court’s in support and watching.” To have the legislature to actually fund. And it split into two pieces: 1) Indian Education for All, which is education for all students in the state, every child. 2) And the money as well for the achievement gap. [Achievement gap refers to the statistical gap between the performance of Indian students and non-Indian students in Montana’s public schools.] The achievement gap is somewhere around 30% of all peers. And that exists on testing, for early childhood assessments on reading and readiness for school all the way through the Graduate Record Exam. There is a gap that exists [for American Indians] for some additional reasons and until we acknowledge that there is this gap, and that we need to address it, its really hard to get research done that really identifies the causes.
Is that kind of research being done?
It’s beginning.
What do you suspect are the causes of the achievement gap?
Expectations. That if we believe our children are going to have difficulty learning we tend to teach differently than if we believe they are children of ability. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s one concern. Another is the kind of educational sources that are spent on schools where large populations of Indian students are. In the state of Montana right now we have 33 schools that have not met adequate yearly progress which is one of the indicators for No Child Left Behind. And in every one of those 33 schools there’s a large population of Indian students. For the first time it’s not only something that would be good to do. The education system in our state has a vested interest.
I believe that our children begin school with a smaller vocabulary in English, and that is kind of a by-product of language heritage lost and parents and grandparents who did not have academic English skills. Their children are English speakers, but they are not coming into the education system with 20,000 words. They may come in with 3,000-5,000 words. That’s partly a cultural difference, that people who are using words more succinctly will have a need for fewer words. When you look at cultural tradition, if you say something, it is. English doesn’t work that way. We have creative imaginations and contingencies, and we say “I’m sorry” at the drop of a hat when we may or may not really mean it.
In the Native languages I’ve had the opportunity to begin looking at, and I consider myself certainly as a student of Native languages and the importance of re-capturing and helping them to continue to thrive, I have not yet found a language that has a word like “I’m sorry.” It is probably the greatest difference in our cultures that I can actually look at and say “Look at this.” There are other ways [to show culpability] than a word that just dismisses it like “I’m sorry.” Think about it when you hear it. I think that as we are beginning some of these other adventures with Indian Ed For All, we’re also getting some opportunities to look deeper within our own records, within our own histories and trying to identify what we want taught, and these are some of the pieces we’re finding.
Did you go to public school?
I was an air force brat. I was not only in public school; I was in public school all over.
What was your experience with the public school system?
In the third grade, my class studied Indians. And there was a presentation where we had some of the information we had planned that we were going to share with parents, PTA. And I was the Indian princess. I was on the little stool set off to the side and I had buckskin pants on and the idea was that this was a good thing. I was extremely shy. I had a horrible time with standing up to talk to my class. So, I don’t think they were very kind. The picture is of me is me sitting there in tears. I don’t think they realized that they had done anything, because they didn’t know either.
Have you met with any racial discrimination in elementary school or high school?
I don’t think there’s an Indian child alive that hasn’t. And that includes the ones that are fair skinned. I have two children that are blondish with light-colored eyes, and my daughter wanted all of her life to dye her hair black so that she would fit in, because she danced at the pow wows and she would get criticism from the other Indians. Prejudice is an equal opportunity problem. Everybody has biases. Those biases that we bring to every situation make a difference in how we react in that situation. For ethnic difference, one of the things that really caught my attention when we were watching [TV news about] Europe where people of the same colored skins were fighting each other.
It was, for me, an experience I had not seen. And so trying to understand how the boundaries were set, how people knew who was who, and who was friend and who was enemy. That was new to me. I think that has been probably a new lesson, because in all my experience in the past it has been that I look different that people place me. I have spent most of my life trying not to fit in that place. I sail because there are no Indian sailors. I do contrary things to not fit into an identity. I’m an educated Indian. I have served on the Montana Board of Public Education for 10 years. In that situation I was frequently the only Indian in the room. It has always been those kinds of challenges.
Do you think Indian Education For All could help people to understand the diversity of Native Americans and their way of life and their different cultural background?
I think it has more potential in transforming education [in general] than just Indian studies. In fact it’s the first time diversity has ever really been addressed in most of our Montana schools. With that comes a different understanding of who Indians are. It also adds to a different understanding of our legal relationships. We can’t study about Indians without talking about treaties, without talking about legislation and how it worked. And that is probably the closest that most of us ever come to a law in Washington D.C. affecting what we are going to do next month. With Indian people, our connection to that center in our government has always been very close because our legal relationship was with the federal government, not with the state. So that whole introduction for the non-native child is a new kind of education.
So we’re not waiting till the 12th grade and saying “this…last semester, we’re going to put you in a government class, in Government 101.” We have elections and they start with such rudimentary information at such an older age, and yet they have been affected by government all their lives. For the first time with Indian Studies we’ll have a better knowledge of how government affects us from the beginning. I think that’s a plus for education. I think that we are really looking at some of the first true change in education classes that I’ve ever seen. We see small curricular changes, the New Math was a curricular change, the introduction of computers was a curricular change, but this is larger than either of those. It is K-12. It can be incorporated into everything. Social studies is the easiest introduction, but it also is extending to math and science and literature and composition.
How has it been working since it was introduced?
We have the cart before the horse. The teachers did not get professional development and they are expected to implement curriculum in their classroom. They are just told they need to do this. The money went directly to the schools and did not go to professional development. We are seeing a lot of places re-inventing the old Indian Studies Law and drawing in the first Indian they find to be the educator as if the brown skin came with the book knowledge. [The Indian Studies Law of 1973 required all teachers “on or near reservations” to take at least 6 credits worth of Indian studies classes. The law was repealed in 1979.] I think we’re going to struggle for maybe five years. I think it is going to be a little chaotic but I see pockets of absolute change and positive attitudes. I see also resistance. I see people who don’t understand why they ought to do this, don’t particularly want to would really prefer that they could change it and make it go away.
What do you do as the director of tribal education for the Flathead reservation?
The Tribal Education Department is kind of an interesting thing. And we don’t operate the one school that the tribe does operate, the Two Eagle River School. We have communication with the college and we offer scholarships for higher education but we have no authority. And so our real role is with the K-12 system. And we have 25 different schools on the reservation, seven districts. Of the 5,000-6,000 students that are served by that system, probably about 40 percent are American Indian students. So remember that the [reservation-wide] population is only 26 percent but the school-age children are 40-some percent. We are a young population, the median age is young and we have a greater proportion in schools than we have in the general population. We still believe in larger families. So we work with all of those folks and we have a series of incentives. The first is “If you can’t get the child to school, they can’t be educated.” So attendance in school is something that we acknowledge on the board.
And then grade point averages: If they are doing well, if they get a minimum level and then increase it, they get a monetary reward. We see this working. And then the third is for graduation. For those students who graduate we have a monetary assistance as well. We offer scholarships for higher education. We work with performance in schools, we have an advocacy program. We serve as third party in concerns for students. We have an advocate group able to come in and sit down and we keep on top of the policies of each school. With our seven different districts there are seven different sets of rules. We help the parents and children understand what their rights are as well as what the rights of the school are.
So what happens if students experience racial discrimination in the schools, what recourse do they have, who do they go to?
In one of our schools, we had an over-identification of middle school age boys who were identified for suspensions and expulsions. It was predominantly Indian boys, so that had continued for awhile and the office of civil rights works with the Office of Public Education and when those kinds of situations are identified, they have the intervention authority. That’s a hard process to get into, it’s a long process and it requires the feds to stop in and visit one school. That’s not the best way to get that done. What our office attempts to do is to keep schools adhering to their policies. Most every school has some statement of diversity. Protection, rights, personal safety, all of those are a part of that. If we can keep them to what they say they are going to do, it’s like a contract. We try to keep them to their contract as much as possible. Sounds easy, huh?
Do you have any figures for how many students drop out of the educational system?
We are getting better and better numbers on that. What has happened in the past was that the drop-out was considered if the child enters the school system in the fall, did not transfer or complete the school year, they were a drop out. They are counted once and that’s it. When in fact, we know that back in 1988 we started the Montana Tracks Program, and the Tracks Program began to count how many children we had in the schools throughout the state. One of the first discoveries was that at Kindergarten the statewide number of Native American children was 16.7 percent. The graduation numbers were 6.7. So over the course of 12 years of schooling, almost 2/3 of the children were disappearing. Just knowing that has begun to make a difference, but we still have everything from 70% who begin as freshmen do not graduate… The numbers are better than they were but still a long way from what we want them to be. We have children who drop out in the 7th and 8th grade. They shouldn’t be able to do that. But if they get into trouble it is back to suspensions and expulsions especially in middle school …how do they re-enter?
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