Abstract
As the U.S. Supreme Court prepared to rehear for the second time the case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1953, the 83rd Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 and Public Law 280—policies that would terminate federal treaty and trust responsibilities to Native Americans. Even as post-Brown desegregation went into effect, thousands of Native American children continued to attend segregated, English-only federal boarding schools. This lecture considers the Brown legacy and broader issues of education equality in the context of research, policy, and practice in Indigenous education. Focusing on a core argument in Brown—that equality of opportunity is a prerequisite “so that any child may succeed”—I examine hard-fought pathways toward education justice forged by Indigenous educators, parents, leaders, and allies; the larger settler colonial project in which those efforts are embedded; and the ways in which Indigenous initiatives are braided with those of other racialized groups. Key to this analysis is recognition that equal access and uniformity of education approach are not synchronous with equity. I conclude with the ongoing challenges in fulfilling the promise of Brown—in particular, the simultaneous homogenizing and stratifying effects of current education policies—and what can be learned from diverse models of contemporary Indigenous education practice.
Keywords
Dedicated to the memory of Richard Ruiz—visionary bilingual education scholar and activist, generous colleague and friend, and cofounder of the AERA Brown Lecture series.
Prologue
I begin with place—this place that we, gathered here, occupy—the homelands of Algonquian-, Siouan-, and Iroquoian-speaking peoples who have stewarded these lands and waterways for millennia, and who are still here. 1 In their book, Power and Place, Yankton Dakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. and Yuchi/Muskogee scholar Daniel Wildcat (2001) point out that place is not just where one happens to find oneself. Place is imbued with history, humanity, and power—the complex relationships and interactions that make us who we are.
There is a place southeast of here, near the mouth of Chesapeake Bay, that is called, in the language of the Powhatan people whose Aboriginal lands stretch over 6,000 square miles of this coastal plain, Kecoughton (kih-co-tan) (Rountree, 1989). In English, this place is known as Hampton, Virginia. As you hear about this place, listen for a history of complex relationships between three distinct peoples: Native Americans, African Americans, and White settler-colonizers. Hampton sits not far from the first settler emplacement on Powhatan lands, Jamestown, where, centuries later, a plantation would give way to the site of the first Southern reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. There, in 1868, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, son of White missionaries, founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, 2 an industrial training and teacher preparatory school for African Americans (Figure 1). Education at Hampton combined a gendered vocational curriculum with “relentless lessons” in racial hierarchy suffused with puritanical evangelism (Fear-Segal, 2007, p. 119). The Hampton concept, says James Anderson (1988), was “part and parcel of the plan to train a corps of teachers with a particular social philosophy relevant to the political and economic reconstruction of the South” (p. 77; see also Watkins, 2001).
Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, Hampton, VA—“Church and Academic Hall, 1899.”
Ten years after Hampton’s founding, Armstrong received a petition from Captain Richard Henry Pratt, a White man born of meager means, who, like Armstrong, had been placed in charge of Black soldiers during the Civil War and who later fought against Native peoples in the southern Plains. Pratt then commanded the Ft. Marion Prison in St. Augustine, Florida, where 74 Kiowa, Comanche, and Cheyenne men had been taken prisoner following the so-called Red River Indian War of 1875, a campaign to forcibly dislocate Kiowa, Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Comanche peoples to what the federal government named Indian Territory, and is today Oklahoma (Pratt, 1964/2003). Pratt transferred 17 incarcerated Native American young men to Hampton. Within a few years, Pratt’s determined recruitment of children from the Dakotas made Hampton the first boarding school in the eastern United States to enroll large numbers of Native students (Spack, 2002). Pratt would go on to head the prototypic Indian boarding school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and is forever known to history for the ethnocidal pronouncement that the goal of education was to “kill the Indian, save the man” (Churchill, 2004; Pratt, 1964/2003).
Central to Hampton’s Indian program and the boarding school system was a policy that Mvskoke scholar K. Tsianina Lomawaima and I have called “erase and replace”: “Erase Native languages, replace with English. Erase Native religions, replace with Christianity. And so on” (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006, p. xxii). To woo funders, Armstrong and Pratt refined a scheme to illustrate erase and replace with “before” and “after” photographs of Native students (Figures 2 and 3). Although enigmatic and deeply troubling, the photographs give us a glimpse into the Native young people who lived the life of the boarding schools.
Hampton Institute, Hampton, VA—“Before Entering School–Seven Indian Children of Uneducated Parents, 1897.”
Hampton Institute, Hampton, VA—“Children of Indian Students Educated at Hampton–Four Children and Two Adults Posed Seated, 1899.”
In a case study of Hampton, Ruth Spack (2002) examined the role of English-only schooling in pursuit of that transformation. This wasn’t simply second-language teaching, she stresses. The idea was that English “transmitted a superior culture”; English teaching served as a hammer of domination and control (pp. 3, 5). To accelerate their acquisition of English, Native students were roomed with their African American peers. In his monthly reports, Booker T. Washington—perhaps Hampton’s best known graduate, whom Native pupils called “house father”—noted that African American students “became valued mentors” to Native students (Spack, 2002, p. 6; Figure 4).
“American Indian and African American Students at Hampton Institute, Hampton, VA, 1900(?)–Men in Carpentry Workshop.”
During its 55 years in operation, Hampton Institute enrolled nearly 1,400 Native American young people from 65 Indigenous nations (Lindsey, 1995). Of those, only 160 graduated, and many graduates reported losing their jobs when White employers learned they had attended a “Black school.” Hampton’s Native American program closed in 1923 after Congress failed to reappropriate its funding on the grounds that the school encouraged racial “mingling” and “amalgamation” (Lindsey, 1995, pp. 253, 261). But its racial ideology formed the template for the government’s common Course of Study for Indian Schools for decades to come (Fear-Segal, 2007, pp. 122–123).
I open with this account of place—of Hampton—because it situates the 1954 Brown ruling in a complex multiracial, multiethnic history of people, power, and privilege within the nexus of the settler colonial state. It also places language squarely within larger struggles for equity and justice. In commemorating Brown’s significance in those struggles, we have much to learn by positioning them within the multiple dimensions of colonization, accommodation, resistance, and contestation—over land, language, culture, and education—that construct this place we call the United States of America. These are not simple binary accounts of Native-White or Black-White struggles. As the Hampton story shows, the reality is much more complex (see also Anderson, 2007; Grant, 2004). That complexity and its meaning within the Brown legacy constitute the theme of this lecture.
In what follows I reconsider the Brown legacy in light of research, policy, and practice in Indigenous education. As Brenda Child and Brian Klopotek (2014) write, a critical, comparative examination of Indigenous experiences within the larger context of segregated schooling provides “significant opportunities to better understand how race functioned [and functions] in conjunction with educational policy” (p. 6). Key to this analysis is an understanding of the distinct status of Native American peoples whose inherent sovereignty predates but is also recognized in the U.S. Constitution and myriad treaties, legislation, and case law (Wilkins & Stark, 2011). Native peoples in the United States include more than 560 Indigenous nations and Indigenous Hawaiians. Native peoples speak over 170 languages. Racial inequality is clearly central to any experience of Indigenous education—Hampton providing case-in-point. But equally important is the status of Native Americans as originary inhabitants of these lands, who possess a singular government-to-government relationship with the federal government (Brayboy, 2005).
At the heart of this lecture is a core argument in Brown, that equality of education opportunity is a prerequisite so that “any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life” (U.S. Supreme Court, 1954). 3 Both premise and promise, this driving argument gives title to this lecture. In the narrative that follows, I draw upon social science research to trace the pathways of Indigenous individuals and groups in the quest for education equality and justice. This quest, I submit, has always been firmly centered on tribal sovereignty and self-determination (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006).
In many cases, the pathways of Native people have run parallel to those of African Americans, women, immigrants, and others. Sometimes the pathways have intertwined with others in consequential ways; sometimes the pathways have diverged. No single presentation can do justice to these varied pathways and those who made the road by walking it. This presentation is, therefore, partial, and it reflects my position as a non-Indigenous scholar and “allied other” in the work (Kaomea, 2003).
In preparing this lecture, I revisited familiar scholarly ground, but I also sought out—and just plain stumbled upon—what historian Daniel Cobb (2008, p. 2) calls the “hidden transcripts” of Indigenous activism—unexpected accounts that marble through the Brown legacy. What follows is a peopled narrative that gives “deep attentiveness to place” (Richardson, 2015, p. 35). It is a historical narrative, for a critical understanding of history is the necessary precondition for positive social change (cf. Williamson, 2006, p. 45).
I tell the narrative through three key rhetorical movements, each corresponding to episodes of social movement, and bookended by this prologue and an epilogue. I turn now to the first movement: the preconditions in Indian Country when the Warren Court handed down its landmark ruling in Brown.
Movement 1—Preconditions, 1953–1965
In the summer of 1953, 4 months before the Supreme Court would hear for the second time the case of Brown v. Board, the 83rd U.S. Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 and Public Law 280, collectively known as the American Indian termination policy. Couched in the rhetoric of emancipation and full citizenship—“another step in granting equality to all Indians in our nation,” declared President Dwight Eisenhower in signing P.L. 280 into law—the termination policy would revoke federally recognized tribal sovereignty, “freeing” Native peoples of their treaty- and trust-protected rights (Fixico, 1986, p. 112). In reality, these laws gave legal cover to the federal government to seize mainly forested Indigenous lands, which were then sold to politically connected White businessmen or transferred to banks. Within the next 5 years, a cascade of termination bills churned through Congress. Altogether, 106 Native nations and 11,000 Native citizens were politically disenfranchised and dispossessed of more than 2.5 million acres of land (Fixico, 1986).
Coupled with termination was a federal program to relocate individual Native Americans to urban centers. As historian Donald Fixico (Shawnee, Sac and Fox, Muscogee, Creek, and Seminole) writes, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) portrayed relocation as a Rooseveltian “‘New Deal’ for Native Americans” (1986, p. 139), circulating brochures like that in Figure 5, that a better life awaited in urban areas. “Pictures of executives dressed in white shirts, wearing ties, and sitting behind business desks insinuated that similar occupational positions could be obtained by Indians,” Fixico notes (1986, p. 139). What many found upon relocating, however, were declining job opportunities in the postwar economy, racial discrimination, wage disparities, substandard housing, and an ill-prepared bureaucracy of relocation offices (Fixico, 1986; Rosenthal, 2012).
Bureau of Indian Affairs relocation brochure distributed to Native Americans, 1950s.
Termination and relocation were part of a comprehensive state effort at mass assimilation and the erasure, symbolically and physically, of Indian Country (Rosenthal, 2012, p. 52; Tuck & Wang, 2014, p. 224). 4 The third prong in that effort was compulsory English-only schooling. By the early 1950s, approximately 100,000 Native students attended public, federal, and parochial schools (Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Branch of Education, 1952). As Professor Lomawaima and I have written, the schools were designed to domesticate cultural differences deemed threatening to dominant White interests while preparing Native students for a servile class. Government-issued textbooks, for example, featured such titles as Shoe Repairing Dictionary, Please Fill the Tank, and I Am a Good Citizen. Forced abandonment of Native languages, often via physical and psychological violence, was intended to further sever children from their families, communities, and identities. In a 1953 publication titled Education for Cultural Change, then-BIA Education Director Willard Beatty summed up the underlying ideology of White supremacy: “[T]he richest future for Indians … lies in a mastery of the culture of the dominant race” (pp. 10–11). Thus, as Chief Justice Earl Warren proclaimed the Court’s unanimous opinion that the separate but equal doctrine “has no place” (emphasis added) in public education, the settler colonial project to forcibly separate Native peoples from their lands and life-ways continued, unabated.
Many of us working in the field know this story well. Yet this historical reading is deceptively reductive. Native American history is commonly presented as the record of Native-White relations, “the frame of reference [necessary] for adjustment to the dominant society’s aims and institutions” (Spicer, 1969, p. 3; see also Child, 2014, p. 268; Lomawaima, 1994, p. xii). But let us shift the frame of reference. If we proceed instead from the standpoint of Native-Native relations, both within Native communities and among diverse Native nations, a more complex picture emerges. For, despite the traumas caused by the exercise of federal force, Native people have never been passive recipients of federal dictates. Nor, as our colleague in Indigenous education, Allan Luke, reminded me as I prepared this lecture, should we take White mainstream normativity as “the starting place, or the resting place” of education control (personal communication, August 1, 2015).
To understand the conditions in Indian Country when the Brown ruling came down, we need to recenter the narrative within geographically and culturally emplaced Indigenous education systems. Those systems are as dynamic and diverse as the peoples and places that animate them, but extensive research reveals common patterns of intentionality—Indigenous ways of knowing are not arbitrary or haphazard—use of formal and informal teaching practices—“formal” education is not the sole purview of school—and situatedness within “language-rich environments” (Lomawaima, 2015, p. 367; see also Cajete, 2015; Grande, 2015; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). For example, “living Hopi,” explains Hopi scholar Sheilah Nicholas (2014), involves active participation by children “in the myriad activities associated with Hopi cultural institutions – baby namings, weddings … social dances, and religious rights of passage” (p. 74). Through these social and cultural processes, contemporary Hopi youth acquire a “collective and personal understanding of the purpose and meaning of the Hopi way” (p. 71). Yupiak scholar Angayuqaq Oscar Kawagley (2006) describes situated applications of science and technology that enable Alaska Native peoples to survive and thrive in the circumpolar North by learning to ask the right questions, use extensive observation, “experiment, memorize useful data, apply data for explanation of natural phenomena, and use available resources to develop their technology” (p. 84; see also Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005).
The point is that Native children brought—and bring—these habits of mind, body, and spirit to school. And although they have often found schools to be an alien, intrusive, and oppressive place, study after study testifies, in the words of Ojibwe scholar Brenda Child (2014), to the “resistant and resilient Indian students” and the “scores of resilient parents who insisted on remaining parents, staying in touch with their children who lived hundreds of miles from home” and expressing “high expectations for the education their children would receive in exchange for years of absence” (pp. 269, 281).
I close this first movement with two additional pathways—both little known and largely invisible in the historical record—that help us understand the preconditions in Indian Country at the time of the Brown ruling. These two sets of pathways reveal historical interconnections between Native Americans and African Americans in the Brown legacy and the resistance and resilience of students and their teachers.
A well-documented consequence of Brown was the dislocation of thousands of African American teachers in the wake of massive White resistance to school integration and the simultaneous dismantling of Black community-run schools in the South (Anderson, 2006; Ladson-Billings, 2004). Between 1954 and 1964, nearly 40,000 African American educators lost their jobs. These “scars that Brown inadvertently created,” writes James Anderson (2006), constitute Brown’s “troubled legacy … debts that cannot be paid” (pp. 31–32).
What is less well known, and a recent dissertation by Khalil Johnson (2017) brings to light, are the hundreds of African American educators who brought their talents and skills to work in BIA schools. 5 In 1948, President Harry Truman signed two executive orders banning racial discrimination in the federal workforce. At the same time, World War II military deployments left a huge shortage of teachers in federal Indian schools. Over the next three decades, the post-Brown dislocation of African American teachers in the Jim Crow South and teacher shortages in Indian schools led the BIA to mount a strategic African American recruitment plan, building what came to be called the “Black BIA.” “Teaching in the Indian Service was, perhaps, the one place in the United States where African Americans enjoyed the full protection of the 14th Amendment,” Johnson (2017, p. 4) relates. But, he is clear to add, at the cost of serving a colonial bureaucracy.
Glover Rawls was one such educator whose story, brought forth in Johnson’s research, exemplifies African American teachers’ influence on Native pupils during this time. In 1953, Rawls began the school year in the small Navajo settlement of Many Farms, Arizona, with 60 students in a cannery-turned-schoolhouse designed to accommodate 40. There was no electricity, toilet, or running water. As Christmas approached with no improvement in sight, Rawls took matters into his own hands, writing to his area superintendent. “His question confronted every generation of African Americans since enslavement,” says Johnson (2017): “‘Can we expect any improvement in our conditions in the future?’” (p. 2).
We come to the last account of this movement. As educators like Rawls fought for equality for their Native students, so too did Native students carve pathways out of the same colonizing structures. The image in Figure 6, ostensibly depicting masses of docile Native and African American students, belies the innovation, resilience, and humanity of the young people who occupied this school. As Child (2014) writes, “the extraordinary part of the boarding school story emerges because Indians, even children, refused to act powerless” (p. 268). Abundant research attests to the ways in which Native students appropriated White school space, building peer and school cultures that reinforced rather than negated Indigenous identities, and constructing intercultural social networks that would outlast their time in the schools (e.g., Horne & McBeth, 1998; Lomawaima, 1994; Trafzer, Gilbert, & Sisquoc, 2012). Those alliances would intersect with a national and international Indigenous self-determination movement, reflected in the 1911 founding of the Society of American Indians, the 1944 establishment of the National Congress of American Indians, the 1959 creation of the first Indian Education Research Center, 6 and the 1961 Declaration of Indian Purpose asserting the inherent right of Indigenous self-determination (Cobb, 2008, p. 52). Built by the labors of generations of Native intellectuals, educators, leaders, grassroots activists, and non-Indigenous allies, that movement would come of age in the post-Brown struggles for civil rights and American Indian self-determination.
“School Assembly in Hampton Institute, Hampton, VA, 1899–1900.”
These, then, were some of the preconditions in Indian Country at the time of Brown v. Board. These preconditions set the stage for Movement 2, to which we now turn.
Movement 2—The Push for Self-Determination
“And they said, ‘Can you come home? We have a job for you here.’”
Thirteen years after Glover Rawls sent his plea to the Navajo area superintendent in December 1953, Lynda Teller, who grew up at Rough Rock, Arizona, 15 miles from the place where Rawls taught, prepared to graduate from Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma, 900 miles away. In an oral history interview with me undertaken to document the innovative Navajo school at Rough Rock—Tsé Ch’ízhí Diné Bi’ólta’, Rough Rock The People’s School—Lynda Teller relayed how the advent of the school literally redirected her life’s path (McCarty, 2002, p. 92). Both a product and an instrument of the American Indian self-determination movement, the Rough Rock Demonstration School (now Rough Rock Community School) was the first contemporary school to teach in and through a Native American language and the first to be run by a locally elected, all-Indian governing board (McCarty & Roessel, 2015; Roessel, 1977).
On September 12, 1966, the Rough Rock School opened its doors to 220 Navajo elementary students, almost all primary speakers of Navajo. Lynda Teller, whose boarding school education had steered her toward employment hundreds of miles from home, was hired as a bilingual teaching assistant at the new school—one of the community’s many young people called home to a career in education unimaginable just a few years before.
Rough Rock was the first of many American Indian community-controlled schools founded, not unlike the alternative system of African American schools that grew up in the Jim Crow South, in response to unrelenting colonialism—a response that repositioned Native American families, communities, languages, and knowledges from the periphery to the center of Native children’s education. Bilingual-bicultural-biliteracy education constituted the pedagogical heart of these schools. I cannot overstate the revolutionary character of this approach at the time. “People were shocked when we suggested using Navajo language,” recalled Agnes Dodge Holm, a Diné (Navajo) educator who, with her husband Wayne Holm, cofounded the acclaimed Navajo bilingual program at nearby Rock Point, Arizona. In a 1996 oral history interview with me, Agnes Holm cited racialized ideologies of English superiority that echo from Hampton to the present day: “Nobody ever suggested using Navajo in the school to learn. … School is to learn English” (as cited in McCarty, 2002, p. 113).
Indigenous educators well understood that the radical pedagogy upon which they embarked—teaching Native children to read first in their mother tongue—though a practice unquestioned for children from dominant race, class, and language backgrounds, would be subject to intense government surveillance. 7 They armed themselves with data. The most extensive early database on Native American bilingual education comes from Rock Point, where longitudinal research by Holm and Holm (1990, 1995) showed that Navajo-speaking children who learned to read first in Navajo outperformed comparable students in English-only programs on standardized tests—discriminatory as those tests are for nondominant students (see also Rosier & Farella, 1976). Moreover, Rock Point students’ academic gains were cumulative, indicating the benefits of long-term, late-exit bilingual-bicultural education. And of course, these students had the benefit of becoming literate in their mother tongue, while gaining greater self-confidence and cultural pride (Holm & Holm, 1990, 1995).
But educational outcomes are only one piece of a larger decolonization and self-determination project. As we saw in the Hampton example, decisions about the language of instruction are never neutral; they call into question who will teach, what will be taught, and how it will be taught—in essence, who will control the schools (Read, Spolsky, & Neundorf, 1975). “We grew up with the school,” recounted my late colleague at Rough Rock, Galena Sells Dick, describing the widely shared experience whereby Native teaching assistants gained access to Navajo literacy and higher education opportunities that would move them into teaching and leadership positions formerly held by Whites (McCarty, 2002, p. 121).
And so we must imagine the Rough Rock experience, and the experiences of Native educators like Galena Sells Dick and Lynda Teller, multiplied many-fold, as hundreds of Native American communities took control of local schools. This grassroots movement both benefited from and helped create a larger infrastructure of education support. In this surge of social movement, Indigenous educators, activists, and allies pried open windows of policymaking opportunity, turning back the termination policy and pushing forward the most significant American Indian education legislation of the 20th century: the 1972 Indian Education Act, the 1975 Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act, the 1978 Tribally Controlled Community College Act, and the Native American Languages Act of 1990/1992. 8 Fueling this movement was one insistent call—for Indigenous control over Indigenous education.
I now turn to Movement 3 and the current moment.
Movement 3—The Current Moment
Richard Ruiz (1991), to whom this Brown Lecture is dedicated, made a distinction between language and voice. Language, he wrote, “is general, abstract … [and] exists even when it is suppressed.” In contrast, “when voice is suppressed, it is not heard—it does not exist” (p. 220). Richard maintained that “to deny people their language”—as in colonial schooling—“is, to be sure, to deny them voice; but, to allow them ‘their’ language … is not necessarily to allow them voice. Indeed,” Richard instructed, “this may be the most evil form of colonialism, because everyone, even the colonizers, recognizes it as just the opposite” (p. 220). Richard Ruiz equated voice with agency—the power to act. He was adamant that empowerment is not “a gift from those in power to those out,” but is people realizing their own power such that individual voices can be joined “to effect social action on behalf of the community” (pp. 222, 224).
Richard Ruiz’s call for voice is ever more urgent in the current policy moment, when students’ accomplishments are measured against normalized English monolingualism and high-stakes standardized tests (Flores & Rosa, 2015), when textbook companies rewrite the violent history of African enslavement as immigration for the purpose of “work” (Fernandez & Hauser, 2015), and when, even as the nation’s schools grow increasingly diverse, many states forbid students—and teachers—to use their language as a resource for learning (Gándara & Hopkins, 2010). Studies in Indigenous education reinforce a large body of research showing that this high-stakes environment creates pressures to “teach to the test,” crowding out what becomes positioned as “low stakes” subject matter—Native language and culture instruction—even in Indigenous community schools (Beaulieu, Sparks, & Alonzo, 2005; McCarty, 2009).
There is no evidence that these high-stakes standardizing regimes have alleviated enduring education disparities and considerable evidence of their harm. Drawing on 2013 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) data on fourth- and eighth-grade reading and mathematics scores for 19,000 Native students in 3,900 schools, Lumbee scholar Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy and Māori scholar Margaret Maaka (2015) show that, over the 11-year period corresponding to the implementation of the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, “the so-called achievement gap widens in every area, with the exception of eighth-grade reading, which remains the same between 2000 and 2013” (p. 65). 9 Further, they point out, just 51% of all American Indian and Alaska Native students graduate from high school, compared with 80% of White students, and fewer than 10% of Native high school graduates complete a college degree (Brayboy & Maaka, 2015, p. 74). As one indicator of how deep these disparities run, a 2011 federally sponsored National Indian Education Study reveals that, of more than 10,000 Native American eighth graders surveyed, almost two-thirds (63%) reported never talking to a school counselor about classes for high school or future plans (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012, p. 43).
It is under such conditions that we should, in Richard Ruiz’s (1991) words, “devise strategies by which we can take advantage of the transformative possibilities that exist even in the worst cases” (p. 224). This, then, is the third movement—a movement by Indigenous educators, parents, communities, and allies to reclaim school space in ways that support Native students in achieving academically while promoting what Joyce King (2006) calls the “rights of cultural citizenship” (p. 338). In the spirit of the important role of research that undergirded the Court’s decision in Brown (and acknowledging necessary brevity), I offer four contemporary examples of these transformative possibilities. We turn, then, to the question of what is to be done.
In New Mexico, home to 22 Indigenous nations, Isleta Pueblo scholar Theodore Jojola, Diné-Lakota scholar Tiffany Lee, and their associates (2010) conducted a 2-year statewide study of promising educational practices for Native students. What distinguishes promising practices culled from this research, says Lee (2016), is a relational pedagogy embodied in the Diné concept of k’é, meaning family, kinship, cooperation, love, solidarity, and peacefulness. Teachers in programs characterized as “successful” practiced a kinship-based pedagogy, cultivating family-like relationships of mutual respect and reciprocity with their students, tying lessons to place and Indigenous lands, and engaging in social justice projects to investigate enduring inequities in students’ home communities so that they can, in one teacher’s words, “develop tools to positively change their communities” (Jojola et al., 2010, p. 46; Figure 7). Apropos of k’é and Ruiz’s distinction between language and voice, another teacher stated: “I envision … Native young people, really having a voice and … advocating for themselves and for others and really giving back to their community” (Jojola et al., 2010, p. 46).
Native American Community Academy high school students in a morning circle adapted from the kinship-based practices of diverse Native communities, Albuquerque, NM, 2014.
My second example comes from work by Native Hawaiians, who share histories of U.S. colonization and education disparities similar to those of American Indians and Alaska Natives, and whose programs serve as models for the mainland United States. There is a Native Hawaiian concept, kuleana, that drives a movement to reclaim Indigenous voice in Hawaiian public schooling. Kuleana, says Native Hawaiian scholar Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2013), translates as rights, responsibilities, and authority but more fundamentally implies genealogy, place, and the well-being of families and communities. Kuleana undergirds the proliferation of Hawaiian language- and culture-based public charter schools. One such school is Nāwahīokalani‘õpu‘u (Nāwahī) Laboratory School on the island of Hawai‘i, a pre-K–12 school that teaches all classes, including English language arts, through Hawaiian. The school’s goals are to graduate students who are highly proficient in Hawaiian with academic and English-language outcomes on par with or surpassing their peers in non-Hawaiian medium programs and with “high identification” with Native Hawaiian ethnicity (Wilson & Kamanā, 2011, p. 48). Since its founding in 1994, Nāwahī has had a 100% graduation rate and an 80% college-going rate and has attained the topmost rating on state-mandated NCLB testing (Wilson & Kamanā, 2011, pp. 46–47; Figure 8). Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2013) is clear to distinguish Hawaiian language- and culture-based charter schools from market-based school choice reforms. Rather, like the pre-Brown African American community-run schools in the Jim Crow South, these schools represent a response to colonialism—“people realizing their own power by taking action to collectively build the structures that nurture their preferred futures” (Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, 2013, p. 10).
Elder Isaiah Kealoha working with kindergarten children in the Nāwahī School’s traditional gardens, Kea‘au, HI, ca. 2012.
A third example comes from my own research in two national studies of Native American student achievement undertaken with Cochiti scholar Mary Eunice Romero-Little, Tohono O’odham linguist Ofelia Zepeda, and Bryan Brayboy. I highlight here one school studied in this research, Puente de Hózhó˛ , Bridge of Beauty in Spanish and Navajo. The school’s name signals its mission to connect and valorize the three predominant ethnolinguistic groups it serves—Spanish/Mexican American, Navajo/Native American, and English/Anglo American (Fillerup, 2011). A K–5 public magnet school in Flagstaff, Arizona, Puente de Hózhó˛ aims to build multilingual, multicultural competence among all its students. To do this, the school offers a Spanish-English dual language program and a Navajo-language immersion/revitalization program for Native American students learning Navajo as a second, heritage language. The two parallel programs grew out of the expressed desires of Mexican American, Native American, and Anglo American parents seeking an educational alternative to Arizona’s otherwise English-only public school system (Fillerup, 2011). As illustrated in Figure 9, the importance of place and community accountability is visibly marked at the school’s front door. 10 Since Puente de Hózhó˛ began in 2001, it has remained accountable to its community, while ranking among the top performing schools in the district on state-mandated English-language tests. And of course Puente de Hózhó˛ students are developing bilingual and biliterate competencies while gaining “cultural citizenship” (King, 2006).
Exterior wall mural created by students and Navajo artist Shonto Begay depicting the morning run of the Navajo girl’s coming-of-age ceremony, Kinaaldá, entrance to Puente de Hózhó˛ Trilingual Public Magnet School, Flagstaff, AZ.
I am often asked about situations where, unlike the foregoing examples, Native students constitute a tiny minority of school enrollments—a common situation in the urban public schools that Native children and youth increasingly attend. As a final example, I draw on work by Indigenous scholars Ananda Marin and Megan Bang (2015) from extraschool teacher design meetings in one of the largest and oldest urban Indian centers, the American Indian Center of Chicago. As hubs of Indigenous cultural activity, urban Indian centers constitute significant personnel and knowledge resources. In community design meetings facilitated by Marin and Bang, the teachers—parents and extended kin of Native students who also served as mentors in the Center’s afterschool programs—framed their own Indigenous oral traditions and storytelling in relation to science teaching and learning. Many design meetings were held outdoors, in the places where lessons were to be enacted. Indigenous stories became the basis for designing and implementing middle school curricula and pedagogies that draw on “everyday and community-based experiences as resources for lesson planning and teaching” (Marin & Bang, 2015, p. 46; Figure 10). The researchers intentionally sought to reverse the positioning of researchers as decision-makers and teachers as implementers. “For us, this was particularly important,” Marin (personal communication, February 12, 2018) explains, “because many Native students were the only Native person in their school and this often meant that families had little influence within school. The American Indian Center became a place where families could imagine the education they wanted for their children and then make it happen—they could enact educational self-determination.” This work “calls us to shift our line of vision toward investing in community-based power and traditions,” Marin and Bang (2015) write, and to shift “our basic notions of what it looks like and means to be a ‘teacher’” (p. 47). 11
American Indian Center of Chicago intergenerational science program, Urban Explorers. Curriculum design and enactment reflects the seasons and land-based pedagogies.
What binds these examples together? All share what Richard Ruiz (1984) called a language-as-resource orientation. Each is a response to local conditions, histories, and desires that links children’s academic development tangibly with their ability to both learn from and contribute to the well-being of their communities. Each exemplifies what Django Paris and H. Samy Alim (2014) call culturally sustaining pedagogies that are also culturally revitalizing (McCarty & Lee, 2014). 12 Educators and parents in these contexts understand that sameness—uniformity of approach—does not equate with fairness. So, for example, having equal access to a Common Core elides the question of whose Common Core—whose languages, knowledges, and voices are included—and which knowledges, languages, and community futures are placed at risk? These education projects take seriously the promise that “any child may be expected to succeed,” understanding that not every child succeeds through the same experiences or measures, and that definitions of success are themselves race-, class-, and power-linked.
If we are to fulfill the promise of Brown, we must fight for policies whereby these types of self-determined education practices are not mere examples—unexpected oddities to be pulled out for a talk, or alternatives reserved for “worst case” scenarios (Ruiz, 1991, p. 224). Instead, the policies we need—and that our children deserve now—are those by which these “transformative possibilities” are normalized, expected, and systematically supported. These examples—just a few from the research literature—demonstrate that this is not a utopian dream. With vision, knowledge, and commitment, this work can be done and with great success.
I speak and write as a non-Indigenous woman. Most of us gathered in this place are non-Indigenous. Through the honor of giving this lecture and of working alongside Indigenous educators for many years, I ask us to think about the stories of resilience, courage, commitment, and forgiveness that you have just heard. Our lives are not separate from this history, nor can we hear that history without considering its meaning for our life’s work. We are all fellow travelers on these pathways. In that spirit, I call on each of us to work from our individual and collective positions of power and agency and, as Richard Ruiz (1991) advised, to join our individual voices with other voices to press for the social actions that are needed “so that any child may succeed.”
Epilogue
In these three movements, I have walked through the symbolic and material pathways toward justice forged by Indigenous individuals, communities, and non-Indigenous allies, and the dynamic interactions of multiple peoples in time and place. We come now to a final “hidden transcript” (Cobb, 2008)—a powerful story yet a little-known link in the Brown legacy—that brings the lessons of the prior movements full circle.
We rejoin our narrative where it began, in the year 1923, when Hampton Institute, under pressure that it encouraged racial “mingling,” shuttered its Indian program. As Hampton’s last Native student prepared to graduate, on the other side of the continent, in a California town called Big Pine, a 15-year-old Paiute (Numuu) girl named Alice Piper and six of her peers sought admission to the newly constructed Big Pine public school (Figure 11). 13 Big Pine—Tovowahamatu, The Place Where Rice Grows—sits on the eastern edge of the Sierras near the California-Nevada border. In Big Pine and many rural California communities at the time, California’s School Law barred Native students from attending local public schools. The only nonpublic local school available to Big Pine Paiute children was an underresourced federal Indian day school that required students to perform manual labor for a portion of each school day, effectively limiting the education program to five grades (Wollenberg, 1978, pp. 91, 94). 14
Owens Valley Paiute community members in front of their community center, ca. 1923. Fifteen-year-old Alice Piper is standing in the back row, far left.
A few years earlier, the Paiutes had been urged by local public school trustees to vote for a measure that would finance construction of a combination elementary-secondary school, “with the understanding that if the election was successful, the Indians would be admitted to the school” (Wollenberg, 1978, p. 94). The measure succeeded, but when the time came for the Paiute children to enroll, the trustees refused their admission, citing this section of California’s School Law: The governing body of the school district shall have power to exclude children of filthy or vicious habits … and also to establish separate schools for Indian children and for children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage. When such separate schools are established Indian children and children of Chinese, Japanese or Mongolian parentage must not be admitted to any other school. (Piper v. Big Pine School District, 1924, 926, 928, quoting California Political Code, 1921, § 1662; emphasis added)
The Paiute families sued, with Alice Piper named as lead plaintiff. Not unlike the process in Brown, in bringing the Piper case to the California Supreme Court, the lead attorney buttressed the legal argument with research showing that federal Indian schools provided an education vastly inferior to that available in White public schools (Blalock-Moore, 2012).
On June 2, 1924, the California Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, arguing that “denial to children whose parents, as well as themselves, are citizens of the United States … admittance to the common schools solely because of color or racial differences is a violation of the … fourteenth amendment of the constitution of the United States” (Blalock-Moore, 2012, p. 371). In much the same language that would frame the Warren Court’s ruling 30 years later in Brown, the California Court noted the foundational role of education in preparing young people for citizenship and employment. Twenty-three years later, in 1947, Piper v. Big Pine School District of Inyo County would be invoked in the successful antisegregation suit filed on behalf of Mexican American plaintiffs in another California case—Mendez v. Westminster—which, as Luis Moll’s 2009 Brown Lecture showed, constituted a major legal victory for education equality, sharing a lineage with Brown (Moll, 2010).
But Piper complicates that lineage, for the California Supreme Court made clear that its ruling was guided by the plaintiffs’ status as nonreservation, nontreaty Indians; they were “children of taxpaying Indians,” said the Court, and the district had not established a separate school as stipulated in California’s School Law (Blalock-Moore, 2012, p. 374). Now, here is the catch, and what defines Indigenous experiences as distinct: The Big Pine reservation was established not by treaty but by a land exchange agreement between the federal government and the City of Los Angeles (Pamela Jones, personal communication, October 1, 2015). 15 Moreover, Alice Piper and her family did not reside on the reservation (Blalock-Moore, 2012; Wollenberg, 1978). Had Alice Piper and her peers been “treaty Indians,” their tribal status would have made moot the claim of racial discrimination.
The Piper ruling thus did not directly challenge the “separate but equal” doctrine that, 30 years later, Brown would bring down (Blalock-Moore, 2012; Wollenberg, 1978). Yet Piper brings us face-front with the enduring coloniality of Indigenous struggles for equality and justice, even as it illuminates the ways in which Indigenous activism has intertwined with that of Asian Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, and others.
Today, more than half the students who attend Big Pine public school are Native American. On June 2, 2014—90 years after the Piper ruling and 60 years after the historic achievement of Brown—the Big Pine Tribe of the Owens Valley and the Big Pine School District unveiled a life-size statue in the image of Alice Piper (Figure 12). 16 It stands today outside the school she and her peers fought to attend, testimony to the pathways forged, against great odds, by many people in many places—and Paiute people in this place—in the ongoing quest to fulfill the promise of Brown.
Alice Piper statue, Big Pine Public School, Big Pine, CA, 2014.