What are the challenges ahead for Native American education?
This era of choices is very recent. Native people are still working through a lot of the challenges, and a lot of the legacies, those historical legacies. Native people need to re-educate themselves. This is very important. Things are changing, but to keep pushing the envelope, we need to learn ourselves to recognize some of those legacies of what’s gone before. It may be our ideas about schooling today are still being shaped by our parents, our grandparents, or our own experiences in boarding schools. There are certain possibilities we don’t even see yet, about how might Native pedagogies be re-introduced into a setting, whether it’s a classroom or some other setting. There’s nothing simple about this. Q: Many people have a vision of Native American culture as something that exists only in the past. How do you, as a teacher, deal with that? How do we understand that resistance, the resistance of the non-native student who says, “I don’t want to hear about tribal sovereignty, I don’t w
