Affirming identity: The role of language and culture in American Indian education

Jon Reyhner,Jioanna Carjuzaa

doi:10.1080/2331186x.2017.1340081

Abstract

Highlights

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, the United States spent millions upon millions of dollars in a largely unsuccessful effort to close the academic achievement gap between American-Indian and some other ethnic minorities and mainstream Americans
In the United States and elsewhere Indigenous children have been “left behind” by colonizing powers who too often provided them with a second-class education, sometimes in a language they did not understand, that described their home languages and cultures as “savage.” Since World War II there has been an emphasis on human rights, and in 2007 the United Nations adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which states that Indigenous people have a right to a culturally appropriate education
This article describes how assimilationist English-only education that sought to erase Indigenous students’ heritage languages and cultures has failed and gives examples of Indigenous language immersion teachers helping Indigenous children become bilingual in their heritage language and English and more successful in life, both academically and behaviorally

Summary

Introduction

With the passage of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001, the United States spent millions upon millions of dollars in a largely unsuccessful effort to close the academic achievement gap between American-Indian and some other ethnic minorities and mainstream Americans. Critics like Riley tend to ignore the long ethnocentric history of efforts in the United States and other colonizing countries to educate Indigenous peoples by bringing them from “savagery to civilization” (see, e.g. Adams, 1995; Reyhner & Eder, 2017; Szasz, 1999) by denigrating Indigenous languages and cultures and seeking to replace them with English and a Euro-American culture.

Results

Conclusion