Multi-Cultural Education

Bernadine DeAsis

October 24, 2013

Multi-Cultural Education

Statistically, Alaska Native students are considered the most at risk for failing to complete a high school or college education. According to a new study by The Civil Rights Project at UCLA's Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, "on average graduation rates for American Indians and Alaska Natives (46.6%) were lower than the graduation rates for all other racial/ethnic groups including whites (69%), Asians (77.9%), Blacks (54.7%) and Hispanics (50.8%)" (Faircloth, 2010). There is historical trauma among Alaska's Native people, which has resulted from forced assimilation. Cultural differences in the educational system have been overlooked, until recently. This paper will explore historical ethnographic literature and research on forced assimilation and the effects of rapid culture change experienced through the system of Western education by Alaska Native people. In conclusion, I will introduce the contribution that Alaska Native people are making to reform and transform education, which seeks to promote culturally healthy students and communities through diverse programming and curriculum development of cultural heritage.

Representation of Alaska's Native history in Western literature has been viewed by the world as the Euro-Americans perceived it; Alaska Natives were perceived as savages who were incapable of attaining, from a Western perspective, an acceptable standard of self-sufficiency and quality of life. These perceptions held unacceptable images and misconceptions of Alaska's Native people.

The McDowell Alaska Native Education Study: Statewide Study of Alaska Native Values and Opinions Regarding Education in Alaska reports that historically, federal government policy embodied the ideology to transform Alaskan Natives into "civilized" Christian Americans (McDowell, 2001). The racism and ethnocentrism of European missionaries was ingrained. As Christians, they believed they were superior and civilized human beings.

In 1819 the Civilization Fund Act appropriated an annual "civilizing" fund and initiated a program where the federal government contracted with religious groups to operate schools for American Indian and Alaskan Native children. With the passage of this act came the legal basis for federal responsibility for schooling. The first commissioner of education for Alaska, Sheldon Jackson, was a Presbyterian missionary, and under his leadership, the government made contracts with missionary societies, giving them jurisdiction over the education of Alaska Natives. The mechanism for achieving assimilation into American society was education.

Cheryl Easley, in her research paper "Boarding School: Historical Trauma among Alaska's Native People" reports that in 1886, Sheldon Jackson, in a lengthy report to Congress stated that "Alaska's indigenous population was uncivilized", and "He must try to educate them out of and away from training of their home-life" (Easley, 2005). Consequently, makeshift buildings were soon transformed into one-room schoolhouses, and the missionaries set out to eliminate traditional identity and knowledge by forcing Alaska Native children to reject their traditional belief system and practices (Easley, 2005).

It was the missionaries' goal to make fundamental changes to "Americanize" the Native people (Barnhardt, C. 1985, 1994; Darnell & Hoem, 1996; Dauenhauer, 1982; Ongtooguk, 1992; Shales, 1998). Missionaries told Alaska Natives that their culture and spirituality was evil, and if they wanted to be saved from a life of hell, they needed to adopt the religions of European missionaries.

The influx of Europeans into Alaska brought new and unknown diseases, killing thousands of Alaska Natives. Native people had no immunity to the new diseases; the traditional healers (shamans) had no cure for them, the catastrophic illnesses decimated many villages. Carrie Willard writes in Among the Tlingit's: The Letters of 1881-1883 that out of necessity, missionary groups and the federal government built orphanages. The orphanages eventually closed down and orphans were sent to large boarding schools (Willard, 1995). Thousands of children who survived disease and illness became orphans when their family members and people in the villages died out.

The assimilation process began when children as young as five years of age were taken from their homes and villages, and separated from the only life they had ever known. William Simone in Rifles, Blankets, and Beads: Identity, History, and the Northern Athapaskan Potlatch wrote that government authorities came and took thousands of Alaskan Native children from villages across Alaska. Most of the children had never been away from their village or families. Some boarding schools were strategically placed hundreds of miles from villages so the children would be unfamiliar with their surroundings and unable to return home (Simone, 1995). Children did not understanding what was happening to them, and they were riddled with fear. They often cried for their mothers and loved ones, and could not understand why they were taken from their homes. Once more they wondered why their parents allowed the strangers to take them away; it seems inevitable that the pain and loss felt by the children would eventually be internalized as rejection and abandonment.

According to J. Shales in One Tlingit Mans Journey through Stormy Seas a large majority of the Alaska Native children in the boarding schools didn't speak any English at all; disregarding that fact, instructors continued to teach children reading, writing, and arithmetic in English. It didn't matter where a student was, if they were caught speaking their Native language they were severely punished. Often times they would get their mouths washed out with soap, or were locked up in dark closets, spanked or whipped with belts, and had their hands beaten with sticks and rulers (Shales, 1998). Constant punishment for speaking their Native language eventually began to reinforce cultural assimilation of Native children in the boarding schools.

Native children perceived their cultures, heritage, and languages as detrimental to their survival and well being thus; acculturation into the dominant society was achieved. Many children began to reject anything associated with their language and culture, for fear of punishment. After many years of attending boarding schools, parent role models were virtually non-existent for Native children; consequently, children returned to their villages estranged from their parents and their traditional life. Most cultural groups suffered a significant loss of children who