Roughly two-thirds of school-age Navajo children now attend public schools; roughly a quarter still attend federal schools. Since the mid-1950s, the federal government has put large amounts of money into effecting a shift on the Navajo Reservation from smaller one-community federal schools to larger multicommunity public schools on the Navajo Reservation. The federal schools that remain have become multicommunity boarding schools. The public schools tend to draw students from more Anglo-like, more English-speaking, homes, but these Navajo students and particularly Navajo-speaking students average some years behind state averages. This article is about a Navajo community and school that went back to parental involvement and community control, that went back to the native language and to the community and Reservation as a source of content and curriculum, and that went forward to a more appropriate, more effective education for their children.
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References
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1. Throughout this article we will use the word “Bureau” to refer to the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
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2. The Chapter is now the basic community-level unit of Navajo political organization. It resembles the New England town meeting in that all adults considered to be from that community are voting members of that Chapter. Chapters now tend to meet three times a month, usually on weekends, to transact local and tribally related business. The areas of one or more Chapters become the electoral districts from which members of the 87-member Tribal Council are elected.
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3. The Rock Point School Board's account of the school's origins saw four schools or stages in the development of the current school. The first three schools or stages were characterized by construction. Although some minor construction followed the emergence of the fourth school, it was the act of going contract that the Board saw as characterizing the fourth school or stage. The Bureau might have divided the development of the school into somewhat different periods. The number four pervades Navajo narrative and thought as the number three pervades that of of Indo-Europeans.
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4. The term “English as a second language” is used in this country for almost any sort of program of consciously teaching English to initially non-or limited-English speakers. We sometimes made the British distinction between English as a foreign language and English as a second language. In the 1960s, we were teaching English as a foreign language; by the late 1970s, we were clearly teaching English as a second language.
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5. The Bureau was divided, geographically, into ten Areas, of which the Navajo Area was not only the largest but the only one-tribe Area. The Navajo Area in turn was at that time divided, geographically, into five Agencies. The Rock Point school and community lay within the Reservation-interior Chinle Agency. The Bureau at that time was not unlike a government within the government; it provided a wide range of services provided elsewhere by federal, state, and county agencies. Because of its size and complexity, there were often differences of perception and opinion at different levels of the Bureau and between different professional orientations within the Bureau. The people within Navajo Area Education, for example, were at that time somewhat more receptive to contracting than were those from Navajo Area Land Operations, who tended to dominate the Area Director's office. Some key people in the Central Office in Washington were much more interested in contracting with Indian tribes and communities than were key people in the Navajo Area Director's office at that time. The Navajo Area has since become much more open to contracting.
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6. The Young and Morgan dictionary, recently extensively expanded and revised, is one of the great works of American Indian lexicography. Robert W. Young, an Anglo, and William Morgan, a Navajo, began their long and fruitful collaboration in the 1930s. “YoungandMorgan,” one word, is the impersonal and ultimate arbiter in almost all Navajo language and literacy programs.
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7. Now Chapter 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. As has often been the case, such funds were made available to Bureau schools only after having been available to public schools serving Indian students for some time.
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8. The Office of Economic Opportunity in President Johnson's War on Poverty. Rough Rock may well have been the first contemporary Indian community-controlled school; certainly it was the one that has had the biggest impact. Indian education all over America was changed by Rough Rock's insistence that Indians could and should govern and conduct their own schools and that community and tribal content could and should be taught in those schools. Still inadequately recognized on the Navajo Reservation, Bob and Ruth Roessel have caused more positive changes in Indian education than any other persons in the second half of the twentieth century.
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9. There was some contracting of schools to mission groups in the late nineteenth century. This was discontinued when it was found to be in violation of church-and-state doctrine. In a sense, the so-called Johnson-O'Malley funds might have been conceived in the 1930s as a sort of contracting of Indian education to state-supported public schools. Many current contract schools now see the term “community-controlled” schools as more appropriate.
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10. “Termination” is the name of the assimilationist Indian policy of the Eisenhower and several later administrations. The effect of terminating a tribe was to unilaterally abrogate treaty and trust relationships with that tribe. A number of tribes, among them the Menominee, the Klamath, and a number of Paiute groups, were actually terminated. Legally, these groups ceased to exist as federally recognized Indian tribes. No longer recognized by the federal government, the members of these groups no longer had those rights and were no longer eligible for those services promised by treaty and/or by law. Most people affected by Termination continued to perceive themselves as constituting a tribe or tribal group and often organized themselves politically in some alternative fashion. After more than twenty years, a number of these groups have been able to prevail upon Congress to rerecognize them as Indian tribes. The proponents of Termination saw that policy as an effort to “get America out of the Indian business.” There was much talk at the time of “setting the Indian free,” of “making them first-class, not second-class, citizens.” Most Indians perceived or have come to perceive Termination as a rather cynical effort to set Indian tribes free from increasingly valuable resources; land, water, timber, and minerals. This painful reminder that the federal government can, at any time, unilaterally abrogate treaties that had been made with then sovereign nations lies uneasily in the background of almost all subsequent federal-Indian relations. “Self-Determination” is the name of a counterpolicy that seems to have come out of the Office of Economic Opportunity in President Johnson's War on Poverty. It was espoused by President Nixon in 1970 and was formally made the policy of the U.S. government by passage of Pub. L. 93-638 in 1974. See fn. 15.
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11. Bureau school boards were later given much more extensive powers by Title XI of Pub. L. 95-561, in 1978. This made Bureau boards somewhat—only somewhat—more like community-controlled school boards.
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12. The delays in negotiating and then signing the contract were the result of a reluctance of a small number of key people in the Navajo Area Office to accept Self-Determination. Until the passage of Pub. L. 93-638, such people could stall a board intent on contracting almost indefinitely. Despite the way this account may seem to read, we do not see ourselves as Bureau bashers. We would agree with much of Edgar Cahn's analysis of the Bureau as “the compromised advocate”: given the historical and political realities of the last 200 years, the Bureau's role is an all but impossible one. The political and economic status of Indians today, however, would have been far worse without the best efforts of some good Bureau people over the years, compromised as the organization may have been.
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13. Throughout this article, we use the Rock Point terms “Navajo Language Teacher” and “English Language Teacher.” These terms refer to the languages of instruction and interaction, not the ethnicity of the teachers. While initially most ELTs were non-Navajos, for some years now all elementary teachers and most secondary teachers at Rock Point have been Navajo. That is, whether one is an NLT or ELT has to do not with one's ethnicity but with one's language abilities and/or preferences.
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14. This is not written to denigrate either Anglo teachers or diplomas. Rock Point has had the services of any number of good, hard-working Anglo teachers and administrators who believed in and contributed to making Rock Point a good Navajo school. Navajo teachers, having had to work so hard for their diplomas, certainly valued those diplomas very highly. But there comes a time in the decolonization process in which such symbols must be devalued as being causative or effective in and of themselves. Indigenous people have to come to believe that it is possible for them to do what theretofore the conventional wisdom had said they could not or should not.
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15. Actually, Pub. L. 93-638 allows Indian tribes or communities to contract to operate not just schools but a wide range of services from the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the Indian Health Service. As noted earlier, the Bureau was for many years a mini-government, providing a number of services available to other Americans through any number of other local, state, or federal governmental agencies. Many tribes now actually contract to operate many if not most of the programs previously operated by the Bureau. The operative concept of Pub. L. 93-638 is that if a tribe or community proposes to contract to operate a given service, the Bureau must contract that service unless one of a very small number of contraindicative conditions can be shown to exist.
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16. Of necessity, we have had to compress a great deal in this section of the article. We have had to omit all mention of the residential care and feeding components of the total school program, although some aspects of the transportation component are mentioned in passing.
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17. While the school seldom used the term “bilingual-bicultural,” the school program had a strong bicultural emphasis; what elsewhere might have been termed bicultural activities were integrated into the total school program. There were, as well, what Serafina Colombani called strong “biliteral” and “bicognitive” emphases. Bernard Spolsky once said that there should come a time when we no longer talked of Navajo bilingual education; we would talk instead simply of appropriate Navajo educations.
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18. For many observers, one of the most striking characteristics of school at Rock Point was the low teacher-student ratios. Believing strongly in the need for the interpersonal mediation of instruction, the school chose to put a very high proportion of its funds into people. Another characteristic often noted was the low hum of interpersonal activity throughout the school. The school was a talking school. There was a very Navajo, very matter-of-fact feel about the school; students were on task most of the time. One door to each classroom was left open at almost all times to keep classrooms accessible to parents. This low hum of meaningful student talk contrasted markedly with the sometimes deathly silence of some more seatwork-oriented Reservation schools—or the near chaos between classes in some other Reservation schools.
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19. We made a distinction between the terms “Navajo Science” and “Science-in-Navajo.” Science-in-Navajo courses involved a process approach to teaching Western science through activity and extensive discussion in Navajo. There is, as Oswald Werner and Ken Begishe have demonstrated, a Navajo science—or sciences; but we are not sure that even now there are adequate resources for extensive elementary or secondary Navajo Science courses.
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20. We used the term “Navajo Social Studies.” The notion of teaching Navajo Culture is an emotionally charged one in many Navajo communities. Some non-traditional or less traditional people see teaching Navajo culture as the teaching of Navajo religion in the school. Navajo culture programs have sometimes tended to focus almost exclusively on things as they were, as if Navajo culture was something that existed only in the past. We tend to see Navajo Social Studies as a way of enabling students to look around them to see things as they are now. This includes but is not limited to coming to understand how things were, and how they came to be the way they are now. Hence the more neutral term “Navajo Social Studies.”
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21. “Clanship” is a Rock Point neologism having to do with both kinship and clan relationships. The Navajo term k'é is an extremely powerful and pervasive concept in Navajo thought; kinship in the widest sense is intimately related with notions of good and appropriate behavior.
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22. We say “state” schools because from a community-controlled-schools' point of view, public school boards and administrators seem to be allowed only to select the personnel with which to implement what is essentially the state's program. Good people still make a difference, but there seems to be relatively little room allowed for any extensive programmatic changes to meet local or reservation needs.
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23. Realizing that few local teachers were initially prepared to teach at the upper-elementary or secondary levels, and that many Anglo teachers tended to remain for only a Peace Corps-like tour of two or three years, the Board set out to develop its own upper-elementary and secondary teachers.
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24. The Board was extremely fortunate in the quality and dedication of those who interpreted for them. Boards are often limited in their dealings with non-Navajos by their interpreter's lack of control of rhetorical English—or commitment to what the speaker was saying. Under such circumstances, even the most eloquent and effective Navajo speaker may seem simple to non-Navajo-speaking listeners. Among those who worked as the Board interpreter were Danny Yazzie and the late Eddie Thompson; among those who interpreted at particularly critical times were Francis Begay, Agnes Holm, and Victoria Sorrell. In critical negotiations, they interpreted not just what had been said but something of the vision and moral commitment behind those words.
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25. The Native American Church is a pan-Indian religion that uses peyote as a sacrament. Peyote had long been used in Mexico; the religion as we now know it seems to have appeared on the Southern Plains in the 1870s. It began to take hold among Navajos following Stock Reduction in the late 1930s. Peyote came relatively early to Rock Point; a majority of the people can probably be considered to be affiliated with the NAC formally or informally.
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26. Jim Cummins, “Empowering Minority Students: A Framework for Intervention,”Harvard Educational Review, 56(1):18-36 (1986).
