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

Abstract

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. NCLB’s focus on teacher quality and evidence-based curriculum and instruction and subsequent reform efforts have largely ignored the negative effects of American popular culture and assimilationist, English-only educational efforts on Indigenous children, which can attack their identity and lead to cultural disintegration rather than assimilation into the dominant culture. This article examines recent American Indian and Hawaiian efforts at language and culture revitalization in schools and how those efforts have helped students to develop a strong sense of identity and show more academic success. These recent efforts focus on human rights and are in line with the United Nations 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Keywords:

• identity
• language immersion
• history
• culture

Public Interest Statement

The future of our country and the world depends on decisions that our children will make, and the wisdom of those choices depends on their education. Historically 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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jon Reyhner

Jon Reyhner is Professor of Education at Northern Arizona University. He previously taught at Montana State University-Billings and before that he taught junior high school for four years in the Navajo Nation and was a school administrator for 10 years in Indian schools in Arizona, Montana, and New Mexico. He has written extensively on American Indian education and Indigenous language revitalization, including co-authoring Language and Literacy Teaching for Indigenous Education and American Indian Education: A History. He has also edited a column on issues in Indigenous education for the magazine of the National Association for Bilingual Education for over two decades. He currently maintains an American Indian Education website at http://nau.edu/aie with links to full text online copies of his co-edited books published by Northern Arizona University. The University of Oklahoma Press published in 2015 his newest edited book, Teaching Indigenous Students: Honoring Place, Community, and Culture.