American Indian Education

Counternarratives in Racism, Struggle, and the Law

Matthew L. M. Fletcher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135908263
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

America Indian culture and traditions have survived an unusual amount of oppressive federal and state educational policies intended to assimilate Indian people and destroy their cultures and languages. Yet, Indian culture, traditions, and people often continue to be treated as objects in the classroom and in the curriculum. Using a critical race theory framework and a unique "counternarrative" methodology, American Indian Education explores a host of modern educational issues facing American Indian peoples—from the impact of Indian sports mascots on students and communities, to the uses and abuses of law that often never reach a courtroom, and the intergenerational impacts of American Indian education policy on Indian children today. By interweaving empirical research with accessible composite narratives, Matthew Fletcher breaches the gap between solid educational policy and the on-the-ground reality of Indian students, highlighting the challenges faced by American Indian students and paving the way for an honest discussion about solutions.

CHAPTER 1
Commodifying Indian Students and Sport Mascots

The Lake Matchimanitou Warriors

Parker saw the black van drive by on Lake Matchimanitou Road while she ate lunch with her mother, Emma. The blazing markings on the side of the van said, “Scalp the Cowboys! Go Warriors!”¹ Parker recognized the van as belonging to Dave and Sandi Thompson. She had seen it parked outside of the high school during school board meetings at Lake Matchimanitou High many times. Parker attended school board meetings on a regular basis to contest many of the decisions made by Dave Thompson, Robin Jeffries, and Jefferson Madison, the long-standing members of the school board. Her voice, as a member of the Lake Matchimanitou Band of Ottawa Indians, was in the minority more often than not and she tended to resent people like the Thompson family.

“Go Warriors,” she muttered under her breath, tossing down a used fork onto the table. “What a load of crap.”

Parker Roberts was in her early twenties and taking classes at the Michigan State University extension at Northwestern Michigan College. She had long, straight black hair that she wore in a long braid down the center of her back. She had intense dark eyes, what her grandmother called a moon face, and ran four miles every other day. She considered herself an activist, but she was frustrated by the difficulties in getting her ideas heard by the town’s great white fathers. The large majority of the population of the village of Lake Matchimanitou was non-Indian. That made it very easy for the village council, the school board, and all the other governmental or legal entities to ignore Ottawas like Parker.

Emma and Parker ate lunch together every chance they could get. During the summer and fall, they would meet at Kejara’s Bridge, the only restaurant in Matchimanitou County that served a tasty breakfast and lunch menu that involved no deep-frying. In fact, much of the food served at the restaurant was grown using organic methods in a garden on the side of the building. The founders of Kejara’s were sisters just older than Parker who graduated, like Parker, from Lake Matchimanitou High. And the Lake Matchimanitou Band had just purchased the restaurant from the sisters. A two-lane highway snaked through the village, which rested on the lake narrows, and linked the ten miles of road between Madison Bay and Collier. From the four tables on the patio in the front of the restaurant, one could see the traffic go by. In the summer time, when the tourists from downstate flocked to the area to visit the sand dunes and vineyards, to sample the carnival atmosphere of the cherry festival, and to get away from their busy Detroit, Chicago, and Grand Rapids lives, the traffic was constant and brutal. But after the tourist season melted away with the last of the summer after Labor Day, the traffic was all local and relaxed. The small village of Lake Matchimanitou didn’t have much more than a gas station, a bar, a small grocery, and a few antique shops in addition to Kejara’s.

Emma was reading an old copy of The Sun from the collection of magazines that patrons of Kejara’s Bridge would share with the restaurant. She didn’t look up from the article, but said, “Parker, what’s the trouble, dear?” She knew her daughter would complain every now and again about the name, logo, and mascot of the high school’s sports teams. She knew her daughter would get around to doing something about it one of these days. It was late summer and the school year had begun. There were school board meetings to attend.

Emma Roberts was the Vice-Chair of the Lake Matchimanitou Band tribal council. She had been a council member since 1983, the year the federal government extended federal recognition to the Band for the first time since treaty times. The Band’s electorate sent her back to the council every four years for reasons she didn’t really understand. Emma had been instrumental in petitioning and lobbying and cajoling federal officials and Congressmen to recognize the Band’s government, working for a decade behind the scenes, sometimes alone. She wasn’t a firebrand leader or great public speaker at the council meetings; she didn’t believe herself to be well-suited to the task of wading through the legalese and technical writing of the business of the council every week; she didn’t consider herself too wise or stoic, especially in comparison to her own mother, Louise; and the Roberts family wasn’t very numerous, not a helpful demographic attribute when it came to tribal elections—but they kept sending her back to the council every four years.

Parker and Emma could have been sisters, people often said. Emma had the same long, straight hair and moon face. And they said Emma looked like her own mother, Louise.

“What a load of crap,” Niko said without looking up, copycatting his mother while working on his coloring book. He was coloring a cat purple and wasn’t staying in the lines.

Emma and Parker looked up at each other. “See how you are,” Emma said. “If that boy comes over to my house with a potty mouth, I’ll wash your mouth out with soap.” The women laughed.

Since Parker set her class schedule for the afternoon, Emma watched Niko in the afternoons during the summers. Being Vice-Chair for LMB wasn’t all that lucrative. She received a monthly stipend that covered her property taxes for her house on the reservation, but not much else. Parker could have lived with her mother, but she was an independent type and opted for renting a small house in Sutton’s Bay. Parker’s husband, Strickland, had been called to active duty in Afghanistan. Other than the occasional vague email from Strick mentioning the bad food and crabby co-workers, they were out of contact.

“Your cousin Frank is coaching the peewee football or whatever it is,” Emma said. “I think it’s good for him to be doing something. He loved to play so much.”

“Oh, the Bears?” Parker asked. “That’s great. I know how awful it was for him when they told him he couldn’t play anymore after he hurt his knee.”

* * *

No one expected the Matchimanitou Bears to compete in the Matchimanitou County 78’er Football League. They never did. Maybe they’d win a couple games a year but they never qualified for the playoffs, where the top four teams advanced, in the ten years the eight-team league had existed. Maybe it was because the team consisted of Indians—citizens of the Lake Matchimanitou Band of Ottawa Indians. It was well documented that few of the LMB members had any money. The Band contributed a few hundred bucks a year to the team, but the tribe had no money to pay for new helmets and shoulder pads, or uniforms.

In fact, only a handful of the Matchimanitou Bears had anything that resembled uniforms. The helmets and equipment, much of it 1970s vintage, had been handed down from generation to generation of Matchimanitou teams. When the team hit the field—many of them wearing their grandfathers’ old sweatshirts over their cracked shoulder pads—they all looked like they played for separate teams. Because few of the Bears’ parents could afford to take time from work to coach the team, the Bears didn’t know who would show up at games and practices to run them through their drills or to call their plays. Every game played by the Bears was an away game; they had no field to call their own.

In contrast, the other teams of the Matchimanitou County league had new uniforms every couple of years, stark and blazing reds and blues and violets, matched by clever decals on their state-of-the-art helmets. The parents that organized these players into football teams lived on Lake Matchimanitou, the forty-mile-long body of water that dominated the county, and on the Great Lake that bordered the western edge of the county. Property values on both lakefronts were extravagant and it was not unheard of for a summer cottage to sell for seven figures. Each team was organized through a parents’ booster group, funded through private donations, and coached by a former high school or college football standout.

Few of the residents of the area knew that Matchimanitou County exactly matched the borders of the reservation created by the Treaty of Lake Matchimanitou, signed in 1855 by the Lake Matchimanitou Band ogemuk (tribal leaders, or headmen) and the Michigan Indian agent. Shortly after the ogemuk signed the treaty, non-Indian speculators rushed in to stake out the best lands on the lakeshore, believing that the treaty signing meant that the land in Matchimanitou County was open for public sale. By the time the Matchimanitou Band relocated from their homelands a few hundred miles away in southwestern lower Michigan, all the best land in their reservation had been taken by non-Indians. For the next 150 years, LMB members lived in the stony, sandy, and almost worthless land between the Great Lake and Lake Matchimanitou, away from the lakefront homes and off the main roads, virtually forgotten by the non-Indians living in the Band’s own reservation. By the time of the Indian New Deal in 1934,² even the Band’s trustee—the federal government—had forgotten them. Their lawyers named that pitiful state of existence “administrative termination.”

In 1983, the federal government re-affirmed its recognition of the Lake Matchimanitou Band and began to fund some of the tribe’s government programs.³ However, the influx of government funds was never enough and most of the Band’s members remained in poverty. Gaming was not an option for the Band, with the membership voting it down year after year. But something was better than nothing. In 1990, LMB families got together and petitioned the Matchimanitou County 78’er League for a football franchise to call their own.

Parker’s cousin, Frank, a Lake Matchimanitou High honors student, had been the back-up quarterback with the varsity team until he had been injured in a pick-up game in the spring. He’d never play competitive football again, the doctors said. So in the fall he directed his attention to the twelve- and thirteen-year-olds in the dirty gray pajamas. Frank had been obsessed with football since he was five and, as a former high school quarterback, knew enough about offensive and defensive schemes to put amateur coaches, such as those he’d be opposing in the 78’er league, to shame. In his time, he had played two seasons at quarterback and safety for the Bears team; his teams won a total of five games in two years but were still considered to be the best Bears teams ever fielded. In the three weeks of practice before the season started in September, he realized his three best players were the girls on the team. In a decision that surprised even himself, he informed the team that the three young women would start at quarterback and both running back positions on offense and would be his three linebackers on defense.

At the pre-season league meeting in August, Frank attended on behalf of the Bears. The league drew up a schedule and went over rules changes. Several of the other representatives knew Frank from his days as back-up quarterback of the varsity and some even remembered him from the 78’er games years earlier.

The Bears played the Wayland Razorbacks in their first game. Wayland was located at the southern tip of Lake Matchimanitou, and the Razorbacks were the defending league champions. The book on them was that all their best players had moved on to high school, so they would be weaker that year. The Bears’ quarterback, Leelu Smallings, scored on the Bears first play from scrimmage. On the Razorbacks’ first play, the Bears’ middle line-backer, Tina Wilson, knocked the quarterback on his duff before he could hand the ball off to his halfback. On second down, Leelu stripped the ball from the halfback, Tina recovered the fumble, and Reggie Manitou, the Bears’ undersized nose tackle, picked it up and rumbled in for the score. During the course of the game, the third Indian girl, Mary LaPorte, scored three times on fullback dives. The Bears won 56–0, by far their biggest win in the fifteen years they’d played in the league.

By the end of September, the Bears were 5–0 and had given up only one touchdown, winning each game by an average of forty points. It was clear from even the casua...

Table of contents

• The Critical Educator
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Commodifying Indian Students and Sport Mascots
• CHAPTER 2 Burying Indian Histories in the Curriculum
• CHAPTER 3 Criminal Injustice and Demonizing Indian Students
• CHAPTER 4 Intergenerational Character of Indian Experiences in Education
• CHAPTER 5 Indian Academic Fraud
• CHAPTER 6 Indian Literary Fraud
• CHAPTER 7 Indian Cultural Restoration
• CHAPTER 8 Indian Political Resurgence and Affirmative Action
• Notes
• Index