Federal Language Policy and American Indian Education

Abstract

The past two-and-a-half decades have witnessed tremendous change in both the content and the context of American Indian education. Content refers to curriculum, pedagogy and the micro processes that occur within Indian classrooms, schools and communities. Context refers to the larger institutional framework in which those processes operate. Change at both levels has resulted from a dynamic interplay between federal language policy on the one hand, and initiatives generated at the level of Indian schools and communities on the other. Integrating an historical analysis of federal language policy with comparative ethnographic data from several well-documented Indian bilingual programs in the southwestern U.S., this paper examines that interplay and its implications for local control over Indian education.