The High Achieving Sioux Indian Child: Some Preliminary Findings from the Flower of Two Soils Project

Abstract

This paper focuses on thirty Oglala Sioux children from the 2nd and 4th grades and attempts to identify a variety of emotional, cognitive, and cultural factors that differentiate high academic achievement from low academic achievement. The small sample was taken from within a large, ongoing prospective study, The Flower of Two Soils, of approximately one thousand children at four reservation sites in the United States and Canada. High achieving children score better than their low achieving classmates on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children- Revised (WISC-R), but not on the Draw-A-Person test. They tend to come from intact, two parent families with a solid employ- ment history, a strong social network, frequent contact with the school, and acculturation tendencies toward the majority culture. The children show an identification with overall educational aims. These tentative findings await confirmation from the full project. This paper reports preliminary analyses of year one data collected