Prelims

Ethnography

In contrast to traditional educational psychology studies of education, an anthropological framework using ethnographic methods is vital to teasing apart the complicated issues of language and education. Episodes and decision points in classrooms and board rooms documented in this study would have been unlikely to be uncovered and addressed in standard classroom-focused, experimental group versus control group educational psychology approaches to the study of schooling. I argue that a complex set of factors, based largely in power relations and the habitus, or learned habits, ³ of daily interracial and education-bound practices combined to undermine the full academic promise of bilingual education for Crow-speaking youngsters. This could not have been studied with a limited experimental psychology treatment.

While at times auto-ethnographic, this book is also the culmination of years of classic ethnography – including note-taking, interviews, and participant observation. There is, nonetheless, an auto-ethnographic character to the work in that my “voice” and my commitment to change in the education institution were a substantive intrusion into the status quo. That commitment continues in my drive to share what I learned with others through this book.

I believe the study also reveals a strong core of pride and resistance to outside interference that has protected the Crow people for centuries and still allows them to carry on using their native language, culture, and traditions while negotiating their own style of success throughout the monumental changes of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Native American Bilingual Education

The work explores a niche that has rarely been the subject of studies of bilingual education in the United States, that is, Native American bilingual education. The great majority of American bilingual studies are focused on Hispanic languages and cultures. Exceptions to this have been the work of Teresa McCarty reporting widely from the Navajo Nation and Nancy Hornberger's research among native people of South America. Both of these leading academics have empowered the work of indigenous teachers and have participated in bilingual education programs in cultural situations that I found very comparable to the work I pursued in the northern plains environment and that is reported upon here (Fig. P.1). ⁴

This research was conducted in a reservation-based, Native American community whose children study in schools located both on and just off the reservation. It is a historical ethnography of a multiyear endeavor to enrich the educational experience and life options of Crow Indian children through bilingual–bicultural instruction by promoting change in imbedded traditions of the Euro-American education institution to better meet the unique needs of a group of children who still spoke their native Crow language in twentieth-century America.

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Fig. P.1.

Crow Lodge on the Little Big Horn River.

It utilizes 30 years of language change data that were collected under the auspices of the tribe and the local public school district – before, during, and after my work in those schools. It recounts a story of the development, implementation, and continuous revision of a program of bilingual education that began in the primary grades and spread across multiple communities on the reservation and grew to encompass some middle school and high school implementation. Its spread culminated with implementation among preschoolers with federal Head Start support.

Basic Understandings about Language

Throughout this effort to implement successful bilingual education, I was often confronted with strong, emotional attitudes about the program that at times I thought represented misunderstandings of some basic principals of language. Human language is a universal. Thus, one might expect that everyone understands language the same way. This, I found, could not be further from reality. Destructive myths about language in general and specifically about bilingual education abound; and they are difficult to reverse. To that end, I have included some basic facts about language based upon years of study by linguists, brain scientists, and cognitive psychologists. For readers new to these concepts, read on; if you are already familiar, skip Fig. P.2 below.

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Fig. P.2.

Basic Understandings about Language.

For further reading on any of these topics, see any introductory linguistics text or for going deeper, consider these options. ⁵

Ethnic Terms

A brief note on the terminology used throughout this work is in order. Most authors of professional work on Native Americans in the United States have shifted away from use of the term Indian and have replaced it with the less stigmatized Native American or native peoples. In this work, however, I will often use the term Indian, as the Crow people themselves use it in everyday conversation and in their official designations such as The Crow Tribe of Indians. I am also called upon frequently to clarify Indian and non-Indian participants in the events chronicled here. In most cases, I have chosen the term white (with a small w ) for simple clarification. This is not intended to conform to United States federal identification terms that roughly represent racial categories in the United States.

Bias

Who is the customer? Who is served in public education? How best to negotiate the tensions among federal, state, and local education politics? These are the questions of our time. As an education administrator and researcher, I also spent six years of my career while a school district superintendent, devoting personal time in service as a senior examiner for the Baldrige National Quality Program which seeks to promote and reward businesses, health care, and educational organizations that successfully apply the principles of performance excellence culled from the best business research of our time. I came to this work after extensive study of the research on complex organizations and change theory and after years of personal effort to effect what I hoped would be positive changes in the schools serving Crow Indian children and others where I subsequently worked. Some bias with respect to these principles will undoubtedly appear in my discussion of the issues of the current research. Simple but profound shifts in attitudes and practices (our habitus in Bourdieuian “theory of practice” terms) hold promise for changing schooling practices from hegemonic Euro-American-culture dominated practices to ones of utility and empathy for the different linguistic, cultural, and philosophical heritages of American Indian students (among others).

Culture in different schools and different communities varies widely as I can attest from my three-state experience. In fact, part of the draw for me of the places I have chosen to work has been to study the differences in the ways communities view their obligation to educate their young. As I recount this study of Indian bilingual education, I draw upon my intimate knowledge of education from the perspective of a central office administrator and superintendent. Given this perspective I compare

• The reservation community at 70% unemployment (using the methods by which unemployment was calculated in 1978) with

• A large, conservative, middle-class district of 34,000 students in 34 schools in Oregon; with

• A white, working-class community with a 65% free and reduced lunch count ⁹ for the total student body; and

• An elite commuter community north of San Francisco in an international vortex of research and cutting edge practices where the students' parents were engaged in careers at peak performance in their respective professions.

What I draw from this perspective is that the set of skills, practices, and arts we call education has grown exponentially over the last 40 years, and it has the potential to grow far more, and that politicians would do well to listen to educators.

Complexity

I expect to be challenged for having tried to tackle too much in one place with this work. My defense is that this is the world of education. This is how complex it is. To analyze discrete educational phenomena in isolation is valuable and provides depth; but without adequate understanding of the scope and range of human behavior that coalesces in the education process, complete understanding cannot be reached. Accounts of educational practice by anthropologists are frequently tinged with disapproval. In the current work, I seek to present a fair and balanced reporting of what I witnessed. As a district superintendent of schools, I am in daily awe of the work of the teachers and administrators around me. Charlotte Danielson, who provided the profession with her well-conceived framework for appraising the performance of classroom teachers, says,

The complexity of teaching is well-recognized. A classroom teacher makes over three thousand nontrivial decisions daily. It is useful to think of teaching as similar to, not one, but several, other professions, combining the skills of business management, human relations, and theater arts. ¹⁰

Central Question and Research Perspective

The central question addressed in the study concerns a grand political and educational experiment to implement bilingual, bicultural education on the reservation with the intent to improve the academic achievement of Crow Indian students enrolled in kindergarten through the intermediate grades of the local public school district. The perspective is that of a practicing linguistic anthropologist and school district administrator examining language-focused pedagogy and politics in the classroom, among parents and families, in staff rooms, the superintendent's cabinet, the board room, tribal council, state legislature, and as far away as the US Congress.

A generally accepted set of objectives of mass schooling in the history of the United States has been to impart the basic “Three Rs,” that is, knowledge of reading, writing, and arithmetic; teach rudimentary social skills; prepare kids for the world of work; and instill the cultural norms, democratic values, myths, and creeds of American public life. The related objective of bilingual education, in the public sphere, is that students learn all the same core curriculum while simultaneously completing intensive instruction in the vocabulary, structure, and function of academic English, which, in turn, enables the students' further educational development. There are so many variables in these processes, that developing proficiency in English as a second language varies by individual and can take from two to nine years or longer. Meeting educational objectives may be even more labor-intensive if a child's learning has been interrupted due to familial or emotional reasons (sometimes due to negative experiences with school), or health, or environmental disaster, causing the child to miss integral subject matter along the way.

The research reported on here takes up the issue of uninformed and unrestrained hegemonic power in the education of Crow-speaking Indian students that has unequal influence within the various realms of power: political, religious (including traditional belief systems), or economic – what I have come to label the “powerful forces.” This work captures the inequalities in Indian Country and demonstrates how the young people's use of their native Crow language indexes the shifting race and power forces in Indian Country.

Methods

The methodology included participant observation, elder interviews, classroom discourse analysis, regional surveys, statistical analyses, and deep contextualization born of long-term research inspired by anthropologists like Foster and Spicer, and my mentors, Colson and Brandes. ¹¹ The years of site work were augmented with archival research at the University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library investigating early twentieth century anthropologist, Robert Lowie's field notes and correspondence from his time among the Crow people. I made many return visits to the reservation; and I have maintained continuous contact with project participants – at times assisting them with professional development, as at a tribal language summit, and training specifically for teachers to use their native language that was conducted at several reservation schools under the auspices of state and tribal leadership. I gathered additional language use data that were available from Crow Agency and had been collected with relatively consistent methodology, to a total of thirty-three years of language change data about Crow Indian students.

The ethnographic material takes into account contemporary scholarship and is informed by my ongoing “day job” in education leadership where I have engaged in continuous improvement efforts and established new standards and expectations for those of us working with children whose life experiences might differ from our own. I have been acknowledged for these endeavors by parents, educators, and organizations. Especially meaningful have been the personal gifts of gratitude from Native American parents, leaders, and coworkers. The sweet-grass braids, written words of encouragement, buffalo-hair and beadwork pins, my treasured breast-feather, and chiefly blanket presented to me in acknowledgment and gratitude over the years continue to guide me.

The study built on common methodologies but provides the unusual orientation of a school district administrator working from inside the executive offices of education – with access and entrée to the inner circle of decision-making and full exposure to the norms and counter-norms at play in policy-development discourse and practices. The work also demonstrates the use of multiple, cross-generational, triangulated research to create what approaches a holistic rendering of this reservation-based Native American education. Intimate interviews and classroom discourse analysis, as well as community-wide surveys, and participant observation in diverse settings, are followed by multivariate correlation and cluster analyses.

These methods, combined with narrative, are designed to contribute to understanding the interpersonal interactions that shape students' self-construction of unequal identity and the structural ideologies that enhance or undermine potential outcomes. More detail on the methods is to be found in the appendix.

Overview

Chapter 1: describes the setting and my intrinsic interest in this endeavor, which is broad field and builds on relevant work from anthropology, linguistics, history, sociology, psychology, brain science, and education. Motives and processes of indigenous language shift are central to this book, as are the approaches to bilingual education and second language learning. Development of the Crow Agency model largely paralleled ESL theory and pedagogy of the time, but with significant adaptations for implementation in an unwritten, non-Indo-European language. ¹² Contemporary brain science research was particularly helpful in dispelling common myths about bilingualism that were pervasive among parents and teachers. ¹³ Whipsaw changes in federal bilingual education law during its official 33-year lifespan are important to understanding some of the results.

The chapter also discusses the complexity of conducting comprehensive ethnography in a largely rural school district comprised of six schools, located in three communities, and enmeshed within multiple, structurally different, supra-ordinate entities – the United States of America, the State of Montana, and a non-Euro-American political organization known as The Crow Tribe of Indians.

Chapter 2: is devoted to expressing the beauty and the challenges of life on the reservation – as a sovereign Crow Nation – with its relationship to the powerful nation that surrounds it. The chapter charts the highpoints of Crow history and the geographic, ecological, cultural, and familial settings in which Crow children's identity is formed. Special attention is paid to the powerful connection the Crow people have to their ancestral homeland including its significant implications for their native language retention.

The Crow people's story since contact with the invading Europeans has been one of repeated reaction and adjustment to incursions from the European foothold on the country. First, it was for animal furs and hides, then gold, then “free” rangeland for the new cattle barons. Wide swaths of land were laid bare for trails of immigrant wagon trains moving across Indian lands, taking in their wake all the vegetation and wildlife the Indian people depended upon for their livelihood. Next, it was firewood, water, and huge corridors to build transcontinental railroads; and finally, the establishment of diminished and delimited portions of land as reservations. Targets of more recent avarice have been coal, water, and hunting rights, but the Tribe has been in a better position to fight back utilizing whiteman's strategy of litigation – all the way to the US Supreme Court. At its base, the struggle has been between the sense of identity and esteem that comes from “family, god, and Crow country” versus the power of the United States “political–financial–industrial–educational” complex.

The chapter concludes with a brief history of Crow education – from traditional, extended-family enculturation to the advent of boarding schools, often engineered to reprogram children for assimilation while protecting the dominant society from the perceived dangers Indian progeny presented in the minds of European settlers and their political–military allies and protectors.

Chapter 3: This chapter discusses the role language plays in culture and identity and describes the structure of Crow and its high level of retention among tribal members. It also describes the challenges of developing effective bilingual instructional strategies for a previously unwritten language and implications for educational success. Competence in mathematics is a watershed issue. A central portion of the chapter is devoted to the complications for teachers and students struggling to generate meaning in mathematics instruction – difficulties that are exacerbated when complicated by yet a third language, the language of mathematics.

The chapter explores the inherent problems associated with teaching academic content in a setting where the many levels of administrative power implement competing policies. A decision to skirt the rules regarding the transitional model of bilingual education is explained while making the case for parallel language development in bilingual education.

Chapter 4: Congress enacted the federal Bilingual Education law in the era following the Civil Rights movement when governing bodies were challenged with finding new ways to address American poverty and inequality. The relationship between race and poverty had to be addressed. This chapter sets out some theoretical groundwork and explores some of the legal and social identity issues of the time. It then describes the development and implementation of a bilingual program set squarely in the midst of dissident voices of all kinds: parents, elders, school personnel, and governing boards – in other words, complex organizations vying with dense networks of familial and community relations. Opinions differed, mistakes were made, many Indian parents were reluctant to get involved; but the elders were clear that they did not want to lose their language – or their land.

Chapter 5: This brief chapter introduces the milieu of “powerful forces” and applies complex organization change theory to Indian bilingual education.

Chapter 6: This chapter takes a close look at the Crow Agency model of bilingual education that was designed according to law as a transitional bilingual program – under which children were allowed to spend most of their time learning in the native language in kindergarten then transitioning throughout the elementary grades to a higher proportion of instruction utilizing the English language. Many parents wanted the children to retain the native language, and the bilingual program developed advanced Crow language and social studies curricula for grades four through eight.

Chapter 7: Speak English, Talk Indian, analogizes some basic findings of this research. To live and prosper in today's reservation economy, English and education are critical. But to participate in tribal activities and to stay wrapped and supported in family tradition, talking Crow is basic.

Appendices : include the bilingual program's Policy on Collecting and Processing Crow Cultural Materials and the author's approach to the research.

Preview of Findings and Conclusions

Drawing conclusions is equally complex, and one that I came to characterize as “immeasurable success” and “unsuccessful measures.” Project research findings explore, through ethnography, the issues of ethnic solidarity and internal variability and analyze objective data on the declining numbers of youth who continue to use the Crow language, as well as the subjective data on the Crow people's attitudes in the midst of great change. Awareness of the possibility, and protection against, the loss of the Crow language and Crow lands remained of the utmost importance to many tribal leaders and elders.

This work concludes that a complex set of factors based largely in the hegemonic power relations of interracial, intereconomic, and general intergroup practices – from local to national – combined to undermine the full academic promise of bilingual education for Crow-speaking youngsters. Such practices no doubt helped keep Crow Indian culture and mainstream American culture out of sync with one another – like cogs on asynchronous wheels – for over 150 years of contact; and yet, the pragmatic Crow response to hegemonic practices also appears to have contributed to keeping the Crow people strong, proud, rather isolated, and very much a factor to be reckoned with in the new century. Remarkably, a new generation – albeit still with pluralistic opinions and actions – but with greater local Indian community control and led by the tribal college is quietly undertaking dual language immersion instruction, and students have been emerging into substantive leadership roles among their people and beyond.