Native American Bilingual Education

An Ethnography of Powerful Forces

Cheryl K. Crawley

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781800433182
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

For over thirty years, a political and social battle over bilingual education raged in the U.S. and in and around the Crow Indian Reservation of Montana. This book, a period piece rich in political, historical, and local western context, is the story of language, education, inequality and power clashes between the dominant society and the Indian tribe as historical events unfolded.
This is a classic ethnography that documents eight years of the author's day-to-day experience as a teacher, bilingual education coordinator, and central office administrator during the socio-political dispute. The author showcases the familial, linguistic, and ancestral place-based strengths of the Crow families that empowered children to succeed in school against the odds, providing a secure foundation for their future leadership within the tribe. In doing this, the author builds strong support for bridging Native and Euro-American philosophies within a bilingual framework.
This book is important reading for teachers, administrators, and policy-makers. It provides hope, ideas, and concrete actions for those who would engage in change management to improve learning environments and better serve diverse students.

Chapter 1

A Study in the Anthropology of Education

Language is a way of life. I do not wish to regard language merely as a mechanically functional tool, but as a way of life which is a path… The language of a person is a road from inside himself to the outside.

–Simon J Ortiz, Acoma Pueblo. In The Man to send Rain Clouds ¹

Roots of Inquiry

My interest in this story of American Indian education has some unlikely roots stemming from a family outing to visit the old log cabin built by my grandparents two years after their arrival in Montana at the end of the 1800s. Those first two years my grandmother survived the Montana winter living in a tent with two very small children.

The day of our outing, in 1950, several aunts, an uncle, and my parents and I all piled into an old pickup truck and a car and drove south from the ranch, on Fly Creek east of Billings, across the northwest corner of the Crow Reservation past the home of Chief Plenty Coups in the little town of Pryor, then on through the Pryor Gap in the mountains – named for the Lewis and Clark explorer, not for the Indians who were there centuries earlier. Eventually our route dropped down onto an old river plain just north of the Wyoming state line, where a little group of immigrants had attempted to make a living in the 1890s. They clustered around the small store and post office of Bowler, Montana.

Water Wars, Law Enforcement, and Power Relations

The stories from those log cabin days include the tale of these northern European farmers building a rock dam on Sage Creek to back up a little irrigation water. The creek, itself, while small and occasionally dry, continues south into the Big Horn Basin of Wyoming. Livestock ranchers downriver took exception to their diversion and dynamited the dam one Sunday morning with a blast that my uncle recalled vividly half a century later.

This early event in the western water wars was ruled upon in a US Supreme Court decision written by Oliver Wendell Holmes. ² The decision established part of the doctrine of interstate water rights “among white men” on this landscape for centuries to come. The fact that Indian water rights were excluded from that decision as “irrelevant” became a recurring theme in much of my later thinking about Native Americans, American education, and American inequality.

My own deeply imprinted, psychic memory from that family outing is of the Crow Indian police descending on our picnic lunch to root out possible contraband alcohol. The reservation was “dry” ³ by law. I have no recollection of the police finding even so much as a beer bottle in our party; but this first-ever impression of being accosted by law enforcement etched a vivid memory in my mind. Realization that the event was a dramatic inversion of the usual Indian and white power relations came later. Yet this event clearly foreshadowed my desire to understand the hegemonic power relations that operate in Indian country.

Since the invasion of their lands by immigrant outsiders, Indian people have been massacred, moved by forced march, left to starve, defrauded by the government, imprisoned, and dehumanized into ever smaller, concentrated areas called “reservations.” Their unbelievable resilience and tenacity to persevere through these conditions is at the core of this piece of ethnographic history of education on the Crow Indian Reservation.

The research that culminated in this book began with the search for answers to my enduring questions about social and educational inequities and why and how these things happened to people. As life experiences drew me deeper and deeper into education, my questions grew broader and expanded to encompass language, education, and inequality.

Thematic Currents

Identity, Mobility, Language, and Education

Identity development is a discursive process that works throughout maturation and builds upon feedback from those around us. Next to skin color, language may be the most popular index to generalizations about people's social standing or social identity. People use linguistic diacritica to announce their impression of their own status in the social hierarchy, and they recognize the imputed status of others based partly on dialects and languages. However, language is very malleable and is one of the first things to change in the case of individual social mobility – sometimes consciously and intentionally, sometimes not. Cant and jargon are verbal memes that are often used as tools to create or maintain boundaries around special interest groups, and dialect differences can map the social strata of a society or a community. ⁴

Research questions ignited by racial events of the civil rights movement soon began to be addressed by sociolinguists. These scholars and others produced important research that overcame the racial, deficit, and dysfunctional family hypotheses of earlier decades. ⁵ The linguists' findings came to be known as the “difference model,” and demonstrated that there was nothing inherently “deficit” about any kids' language or culture. They were just adapted to different lifestyles than their white, middle-class peers.

Cultural systems are tightly connected to their language. Creation stories, folk tales, and ritual activities are often maintained and supported through mnemonic devices and linguistic memory. Latin used in church services in English-speaking countries is an example that sometimes the aura around the language is more important than the literal meaning of the words.

Stereotyping and negative reactions to various indicators of social stratification do not stop with the ether world. They are also carried into school classrooms where students rank one another, and where teachers' knowledge and attitudes toward nonstandard English may present significant hurdles for some of their students.

Such issues reemerged from the research and became subthemes that are explored throughout the work. One such theme is about the ubiquitous human activity of “ranking” things that operates between and among individuals, groups, and even nations. In academic work, it has come to be labeled hegemony. ⁶ A complementary theme is one inherent in the sociopolitical judgments about oralcy and literacy that seem to pop up at moments of tribal discord and underlie many teacher attitudes. A third inescapable current in Native America is the slow but consistent shift toward the English language and away from general use of the native tongue – especially by the young. The question has been, what can or should be done about it. People are divided.

Hegemony

What are the power relationships in the community? Or, “on what, or on whose, authority do things get done around here?” As I noted at the outset with the story of the Indian police accosting our family picnic, that experience left a salient, lifelong memory for me. In 1950, near the time of our incident, there were still frequently signs in the windows of public establishments in reservation border towns warning: “No dogs or Indians” welcome here. Indians had virtually no power to defend against such things. Despite the fact that their movements were already restricted to the reservation boundaries, they were not allowed to travel from one section of that reservation to another to visit family or to conduct business, without a special permit that could only be issued by the white government's superintendent of the reservation. Thus, on a hierarchy of restrictions, a police officer – even a member of the Indian police – had a lot of power; but not enough to have authority off the reservation. And, of course, that is still the case today.

Thus, for members of a newly authorized tribal police to accost a white family was daring for them and unusual for us. Moreover, the fact that I was not yet nine years old at the time suggests how young we are when the elements of these social mores are imprinted as warning signs in our brains. Negative interaction – especially with authority figures – imprints itself first in the amygdala and the limbic system, then ultimately in the hippocampus, in the effort to leave a brain-based, warning system that is intended to keep us safe from current or future harm. Hammond ⁷ explains the social and physical process she calls an “amygdala hijack,” by which the body reacts to a stimulus such as the policeman with an adrenalin rush (or more accurately, a cortisol release) that “blocks rational thinking and reduces the capacity of the working memory” to function properly. This can happen on the street, in the classroom, or as in our case, during a picnic lunch interrupted by several, very serious, Indian police officers.

The simplest definition of hegemony is that influence or authority that one group has over another. As a writer and a teacher working with English language learners, I resist using terms, borrowed from classical languages – in this case, Greek – that are not commonly used nor readily understood without higher education. However, the term hegemony is becoming more widely used as it sums up the pervasive, implicit power that constitutes “white privilege” that white Americans have by virtue of the color of their skin and socioeconomic culture that give them a significant advantage over other people in the nation. It is not restricted to the United States, but formulates itself somewhat differently in different nation-states. Antonio Gramsci, ⁸ an Italian member-of-parliament and social philosopher imprisoned in fascist Italy, suggested in his writings that hegemony formulates itself as “common sense” and the “way things are done.” Moreover, he would say, cultural hegemony is originated within and reproduces itself by the dominant class through the institutions that form the national superstructure. Paolo Freire, ⁹ another twentieth century hegemony theorist, applied the concepts to education. What I came to understand is how literally the people in our systems and institutions – the economy, social welfare, criminal justice, and yes, even in education – believe they are “doing the right thing,” but, often only because “this is the way it has always been done.” Not because it is technically the “right thing.” Despite years of college and targeted professional development training, many teachers go on to deliver instruction to their students in very much the same way their teachers taught them when they were in school many years earlier. It is extremely difficult to break that pattern – just as it is difficult to break a parenting pattern – and, thus, many instead simply replicate it.

Oral and Literate Traditions

Another theme that weaves its way throughout this analysis of Indian bilingual education is the difference in the way oral traditions support the social compact compared with literate traditions. The Crow people passed along their history, mores, stories, and happenings utilizing a face-to-face, oral tradition. They conducted their tribal meetings in the oral tradition. This differs in significant ways from the literate tradition of Euro-American education and governance. The people are in a time of tremendous transition. The oral sessions used to take place within the family in the form of story-telling around the hearth in the winter. Now with all the other activities, such sessions rarely, if ever, take place. Crow was not a written language until an anthropological linguist named Robert Lowie arrived on the reservation in 1907 and began collecting Crow word lists as part of the Boasian effort to document the languages of Native America before they disappeared. Even then, no one but Lowie and perhaps a few of his colleagues ever seem to have used the phonetic symbols written to capture the sounds of the Crow language in any kind of written, communicative message. ¹⁰

The first example I could find of a Crow person using written Crow was in a 1954 letter, handwritten – his letters were usually typed – by the Crow Indian superintendent of the Reservation, to his friend, Berkeley anthropologist Robert Lowie. Lowie and the superintendent, Robert Yellowtail, became friends following the deaths of Lowie's earlier turn-of-the-century informants. Yellowtail very much enjoyed Lowie's work and took it upon himself to learn Lowie's writing system. He wrote the 1954 letter in Crow and then followed up on several occasions asking Lowie if he had managed to translate and read it. This was clearly a novel experience for both men. It was evident from other documents in the Lowie archives that he had difficulty understanding Superintendent Yellowtail's message. He has carefully notated a translation, morpheme by morpheme, by penciling it in above the Crow, but does not appear to have ever completed the task, and it is lost to history if he fully understood his friend's message in written Crow (Fig. 1.1). ¹¹

Fig. 1.1. Letter Written in Crow from Robert Yellowtail to Robert Lowie, 1954. Source: Robert H. Lowie Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Language Shift

A third thematic current in this work is that of linguistic shift and the possibility of the loss of the Crow language. This thought weighs especially heavily on the Crow elders. For them their lives and struggles were interwoven with the land and the language and the traditions embodied therein. The shift they see taking shape as more and more young people resist responding in the Crow language, when they are addressed in Crow by their elders, is of grave concern to them. ¹²

Introduction

Powerful Forces

In the spring of 1976, distinguished linguist Dr. G. “Hu” Matthews, recently arrived in Montana following an appointment in Linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, presented a paper entitled Bilingual Education at Crow Agency at a conference at the University of Illinois. His paper was subsequently published in the journal of Studies in Language Learning. This in itself is unremarkable. What was startli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Editor
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Endorsements
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Series Editor Preface
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 A Study in the Anthropology of Education
• Chapter 2 Crow Country
• Chapter 3 The Language of Education in Crow Country
• Chapter 4 Indian Bilingual Education
• Chapter 5 Complex Organizations Change Theory
• Chapter 6 The Bilingual–Bicultural Project on the Crow Reservation
• Chapter 7 Speak English; Talk Indian: Conclusions and Implications
• Appendix 1 Policy On Collecting And Processing Crow Cultural Materials
• Appendix 2 Research Design and Procedures
• References
• Index