Robert A. Roessel Jr. and Navajo Community College: Cross-Cultural Roles of Key Individuals in Its Creation,1951-1989

Abstract

Estelle Fuchs and Robert J. Havighurst presented the results from a national study of American Indian education in their book To Live on This Earth. Based on data obtained by researchers at the University of Chicago in 1972, the authors characterized the general state of Native American education in the following way: “With minor exceptions, the history of Indian education had been primarily the transmission of white American education, little altered, to the Indian child as a one-way process. The institution of the school is one that was imposed by and controlled by the non-Indian society, its pedagogy and curriculum little changed for the Indian children, its goals primarily aimed at removing the child from his aboriginal culture and assimilating him into the dominant white culture.”1 The creation of Navajo Community College (NCC) represented the establishment of a cross-cultural brokerage intended to overcome these assimilationist tendencies and to serve five additional purposes: (1) to give the Navajo people a Navajo-owned and -operated college with a curriculum taught by Navajos to help achieve Navajo educational self-determination in higher education; (2) to make higher education for Navajo college students