Resume Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4: Native American Teachers

• Native Americans and Their Struggle to Survive Schools 

Native Americans have a long tradition of educating their own children whereby many ‘teachers’ participate in the training (Marashio, 1982). Elders serve as guides for the younger members of the tribe. Children watch, listen, and follow long before they act. Ironically, for many Native peoples it is not even a question of choosing between acquiring the skills, knowledge, and lifestyle of mainstream middle-class society or retaining one’s cultural identity and traditions. Native peoples struggle to understand how they can gain self-sufficiency, free of dependence on the ‘outside’ world of federal agencies, which are often flawed with bureaucratic and political agendas, a dependence paradoxically created as a legacy from federally provided government schooling guaranteed by treaty.  

• Native Americans: The Image of Teaching and Respect for the Profession  

Part of the difficulty in establishing a positive image of teaching or imagining oneself in the profession of educating others is that much of what is taught can seem irrelevant to the needs of traditional and/or working-class families (Stiegelbauer, 1992). For Native people, negative images of schooling have been passed down for generations. Even though students themselves may not have gone through boarding schools, young people have heard the stories and internalized the messages.

• Native Americans Address the Low Participation of Indian Students in Teaching

Native American informants were more cautious in identifying the reasons for low participation of their people in the field of teaching. For many Native youth, the prospects of continuing on to college in order to acquire a teaching credential were thwarted not only by their family’s traditional views but more significantly by poor academic preparation and, hence, low graduation rates from high school and college (Wilds and Wilson, 1998).