from HEARTBREAK BUTTE: "Becoming Wild Again"

EDUCATION   AS   EXTINCTION

Education is obviously a great cultural force, not only sustaining culture, but also changing and even extinguishing it.  The sharpest question of all has been how to reconcile conflicting cultures without genocide.  There are two kinds of genocide:  that which causes the physical death of people and that which slowly snuffs out their way of life by displacing it with our own.  Like the appalling extinctions of species through the displacement of habitat, it is the slower way that is the more deadly and final.  Contemporary materialism, media-driven, eliminates more Native Americans than the U.S. Cavalry ever did.  Darrell Kipp says wryly,  "If these kids were to have Sacred Bundles, the contents would be athletic shoes, VCR's, and the keys to a pickup."  [This is already out of date --  surely an iPod ought to be in there!]

The dilemma seemingly presented by the task of educating young tribal members is whether to let them be what we think of as "Indians"-- and therefore crippled economically, even second-class citizens -- or to assimilate them so that they are "white" except for their appearance.  But this is a false dilemma.  By going back to the source of the culture -- which is always the land and always preserved in the language -- and by opening up to the new future that all human beings must find on this planet, "Indian" education can be freed to be both inspiration and tool.  None of us will be the same tomorrow.  We must create a new culture.

People of the land should be leading us.  All our cultures are challenged by our increasing detachment from the sources of our food and fuel.  Ultimately our teacher is the planet itself.  Reservations, because they are still circumscribed and have a potentially self-regulating polity, can become cutting-edge cultures: the old folded into the new in the way that has always meant human renaissance.  Almost secretly, this has already begun.  [There are wind turbines whirring in Browning.]

A psychiatrist once said to me,  “I don’t see why you would even want to live in a place like Browning.  You tell me how dangerous it is, how difficult life is.  Why stay there when there are better places?”  His question released an answer I didn’t know I had:  “If something happens to me in Browning, I know who did it and who his people are.  I can be angry at a known individual with a face and tell him so.  In fact, I can tell his grandmother on him and then he’ll be in REAL trouble!”  The grandmothers aren’t so powerful as they once were, but community pressure still exists and no lives are secret.  The reservation world is a human-sized one.  There is no need to resort to television personalities to create the impression that we don’t live among strangers.  Someone once remarked that human beings have probably evolved to handle true relationships with a hundred people, maybe a few more.  The reservation is that kind of world.

At the other end of the scale, when people recommend reforms to schools, they rarely take into account the broadest political, historical, geographical, and ethnic factors.  No one wanted this book to include talk about the Cretaceous Era, though that prehistoric eon still affects the high prairie in the form of weather, soil types, fuel sources and valuable fossil bones now being "rustled" off Blackfeet lands.  Such broad ideas are considered dangerous, likely to entangle everyone in unmanageable problems.  But this is because of limited educations that have provided no coherent framework for big ideas.  We have been stuck with too many unconnected facts and concepts.  We know a lot, but there is no ordering principle.

Over time, communities form some kind of habitual way of seeing "school."  But the schools, particularly when they pursue goals that will change the community, can be a disturbing influence.  Communities don't want the schools to be troublesome.  The educational establishment does not want change that will displace those now in power.  Kids don't want change -- they don't even want to grow up.  Parents want school to be what it was when they were kids.  All these groups conspire without realizing it to prevent change.  Schools that don't change become destroyers, chains, suffocators, but as someone has remarked,  “Change has no constituency.”

People do not get elected to school boards by being unpopular, so only popular changes are supported by the board.  This is why athletic programs so easily dominate schools.   The most popular platform is always the Status Quo, because change necessarily means that some of those who are now powerful will lose, and some of the present weak will become strong.  Only if enough people feel they are losing can change begin.  We are getting close to that point now.  And all the time the small world tries to be consistent, the larger context is slowly evolving.

In most communities, tax payers are effective monitors who want results for their money.  Specifically, they want graduates who can be successfully employed so as to share the tax burden.  A school that awards at graduation empty boxes with no real diplomas inside is a scandal.  A town that cannot sustain ordinary businesses because of burglary and disorder from unemployable young men cannot grow and succeed.  Mothers who are children cannot shelter their babies.  Families sustained only by welfare checks cannot function.

If the school is not supported by local tax-payers -- as in the case of federally subsidized local reservation schools -- but is only guided by local vote-getters and family heads, the school staff has a formidable task of education. Leaders must educate the community to do what is unpopular -- like maintaining universal high standards no matter whose child gets flunked -- in the interest of a long-range benefit.  At the very least they must present a coherent plan and goals that are truly helpful to the community rather than to themselves, the employees of the school.  Most of all, they must resist acting as parents who let the true parents remain children.  This is a lot to ask.  It can only be asked of leaders who will stay and share the outcomes.  Leaders need to be allowed time to build-- not discarded at the first sign of conflict.  A culture accumulated out of broken beginnings is no culture at all.