Student Focus

New ways to nurture Native intelligence
By Steve Giegerich
(from Lumina Foundation's Fall 2007 Focus Magazine)

That fundamental idea - of looking out for others -is certainly nothing new to Austin Littlesun. Growing up on a Montana Indian reservation in the 1960s, he was steeped in the traditions of community and connection that still define his Northern Cheyenne heritage. Unfortunately, a college education wasn't among those traditions. And so, while Littlesun learned as a child to live off the land in the ancient ways, less was done to prepare him for success in the modern world. No one ever mentioned college. Even into his teens, Littlesun says, he didn't understand college or its purpose. And when it was finally defined for him, Littlesun put college into his own personal context: He was convinced it wasn't for "stupid" people like him. Everything he'd learned in school told Austin Littlesun that he wasn't meant for college.

Today, at age 51, Littlesun - a man just shy of earning the associate's degree he will use to launch a business career - finally knows that is untrue.

To understand why Littlesun and others on the campus of Olympic College in Shelton, Wash., are bursting with pride at his accomplishment, a history lesson is in order. The text is a short, tawdry story from America's past - one that stifles college participation among Native people to this day. It is Littlesun's story, as well as that of three generations of Dawn Stevens' family.

The saga begins with John Eliott, Stevens' grandfather, one of thousands of Native Americans who were taken to faraway boarding schools, often without the knowledge or permission of their parents. The intent of the government-run "residential schools" that existed from the 19th century to nearly the halfway point of the 20th century was to "help" American Indians assimilate into white culture. The idea was to purge tribal languages and other vestiges of Native culture from young Native Americans. The lessons were often harsh. John Eliott himself fled from his school three times to escape the abuse.

Although the boarding school era had all but ended by the time Stevens' father, Don Hardison, came of age in the 1950s, the suppression of Native students was far from over. Hardison's penchant for math, a talent his daughter believes could have led him to a career in engineering, screeched to a halt the day he asked a Shelton High School teacher about enrolling in calculus. Trigonometry and calculus, the teacher told him, weren't intended for students like him.

Even without the math classes, Hardison graduated from Shelton in 1957. There, his formal education stopped until - years later - he returned to school to earn an associate's degree. Hardison's eldest daughter at first achieved even less academically than he had. Bored and disillusioned with a high school that all but ignored her culture (even though more than 10 percent of its students lived on the Skokomish and Squaxin Island reservations), Dawn Stevens - herself a member of the Steilacoom tribe - left Shelton High before the start of her senior year. In doing so, she became part of an epidemic that continued long after her departure: a dropout rate that hovered near 65 percent among Native American students.

Stevens married, had two children and, at age 21, made the choice between education and welfare. She earned her GED and never looked back. The first in her family to attend college, she now holds an associate's degree from Olympic and a pair of bachelor's degrees as well as a master's degree from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash.

Stevens is now an information specialist with the Center for Native Education (CNE) at Antioch University in Seattle. But one of the first moves she made in her career as an educator was to go back home. In the early 1980s, she accepted a teaching position at Shelton High School - the very place that had once goaded her into abandoning education. "I wanted to come back to Shelton," she says, "because I had disliked it so much" and wanted to help change it for the better. "As a Native American, I wanted to bring Native culture and traditions back to the students."

Poking through a storeroom shortly after her return, Stevens found confirmation that her decision was the right one. She discovered several copies of the history textbook used during her days as a Shelton student; the fourth chapter in each book had been removed. Eventually, Stevens also came across an edition with the fourth chapter intact - the one that explored Native American history.

During Stevens' youth, culturally destructive or insensitive acts toward Native people certainly weren't limited to Shelton High School. In fact, the negative attitudes that drove such actions were commonplace, even pervasive, in some regions. Today, things have clearly changed at Shelton - and Dawn Stevens is one of many who helped institute those changes over the years by finding ways to incorporate Native culture and traditions into the school setting. For example, weights and measurements of arrowheads have been integrated into math lessons; geometry is taught using the configuration of an ancient Native container known as the Bentwood Box. Finally, and significantly, Stevens helped instill a critical component of Native education into the school's method of teaching literature and history.

"The Native way of learning doesn't necessarily come from sitting at a desk, minding your own business, reading and writing, but from listening and learning from your elders," Stevens explains. Working with school officials and with initially reluctant tribal elders, Stevens helped bring the tribes' oral tradition into the school's literature and history classes.

As Shelton High awakened to the value of using local Native culture to teach all of its students, other entities stepped up as well. The Center for Native Education(CNE) used grants from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropic organizations to bring the Early College High School initiative, a national dual-enrollment program, to the school. And the evolution of Shelton High hasn't stopped there.

"The district has embraced and improved the situation for Native students in ways that just did not exist before," says Linda Campbell, CNE's executive director.

Today, Shelton is immersed in a five-year strategic plan that actively integrates and promotes Skokomish and Squaxin Island culture in the school and the non-Native community at large. Late in 2006, for example, nearly300 Shelton teachers, administrators and classroom aides attended a daylong seminar that introduced them to the Squaxin Island's heritage, values and world view. In short, a true partnership has emerged, one that includes CNE, the area tribes, the school system and the community.

That partnership effort has been supported by a Lumina Foundation grant, which CNE has used to start a companion program to Early College called New Path. While the Early College model enables students to graduate from high school with both a diploma and an associate's degree, New Path makes the degree accessible to students' adult family members - an innovation that was suggested by members of the Native community, and one that fits perfectly with the intergenerational learning style that is rooted in tribal tradition. Through small classes that give students lots of one-on-one time with instructors -and often with respected elders - New Path taps into the potential of low-income students who aspire to become the first in their families to attend college.

At Olympic College in Shelton, New Path's intergenerational learning model involves students ranging in age from 16 to Austin Littlesun's age - 51. The Shelton campus, one of three Olympic locations spread around Puget Sound, honors the area's Native heritage with "longhouse buildings" designed in the tradition of the Skokomish and Squaxin Island tribes. Providing quality education in basic math, English, computers and physical education is the primary objective of Shelton's New Path effort. But the program's on-campus director, Kim McNamara, also hopes it will foster the academic skills and habits that appeal to local employers. Such efforts are vital in a region where jobs are evolving from fishing and logging to service-oriented casino, governmental and high-tech positions requiring proficiency in math and English.

The students who trickled into Olympic classrooms this summer spanned the chronological and academic spectrums. There was 16-year-old Bailey Higgs, a shy Shelton junior who enrolled in college-level classes because her high school courses failed to challenge her. As a dual-enrollment student, Bailey turned to New Path/Early College to get a "running start" on college by earning course credits before enrolling as a full-time college student.

There were James Runnels and his sister Randee, who arrived with their family in Shelton six years ago after around about journey that began on an Oglala Sioux reservation in South Dakota and ran through several states. For James, 21, the English and math courses were away to prepare him for a return to education, hopefully at the University of Washington and, beyond that, a business career. For Randee, a home-schooled 18-year-old, New Path/Early College was a first step toward college and a career as a sports photographer.

Then there was Nolin Sadlier, a Shelton junior who came to Olympic for what can best be described as credit retrieval. In three years of high school, Nolin never passed an English class. On the verge of dropping out, thereby ending all hope of one day becoming a police officer, Nolin enrolled at Olympic - pushed there by his parents and school officials. To his surprise, the college turned out to be a perfect fit.

"I'm straightening out, and I'm working on school now," he says. "I like it... I've never done this well in an English class. I'm actually getting my work done and not putting my head on the desk and falling asleep."

As campus director, Kim McNamara became the poster child for multi-tasking, simultaneously serving as an administrator, academic counselor, instructor, logistics coordinator (for the student in a family that could claim no one with a legal driver's license) and social worker (for the student who required a mentor to see to it that she arrived on time for class each day).

Austin Littlesun, the oldest of the program's 170 students and one of 98 Native Americans enrolled, was one person McNamara never had to shepherd. Littlesun's educational odyssey began at age 6, in an off reservation Montana public school. Though fluent in the language of the Northern Cheyenne, he was able to understand just a few rudimentary words of English. "I was kind of treated bad," Littlesun says slowly, his eyes averted. "And I think that really damaged my opportunity for - what do you call it? - the American Dream. The school really set me back. I didn't want to learn. They told me the way I talked was the devil's language."

Humiliated, he left the public school after the sixth grade, barely able to read or write. The memory of the principal's paddle - the consequence of failure - haunts him to this day. With his family's blessing, Littlesun moved from Montana to Washington, where he lived with a Mormon family for three years. The experience gave him self-respect and, with it, enough confidence in his own intelligence that later - despite leaving school for good after the eighth grade - he found work as an ambulance attendant, a firefighter and in law enforcement.

The lack of education caught up with him 11 years ago when a divorce rocked his life. A single father with full custody of seven children and no job prospects at age 40, Littlesun went on public assistance. As the clock ticked toward the end of his eligibility, a local socials ervice agency, the South Puget Intertribal Planning Agency, placed Littlesun in workfare. There, job training counselors encouraged him to climb the next rung. And that is how, two years ago - to his own amazement -Littlesun became a college student.

It hasn't been easy. In those moments when he fails to immediately grasp a math problem or comprehend a sentence, he can feel himself slipping back to a place where failure and humiliation walked hand in hand.

Fortunately, when that occurs, Abigail Portugal is there for Littlesun and other New Path/Early College students. A student herself at St. Martin's University in Lacey, Wash., this diminutive summer intern officially held the title of "instructional support coordinator." On campus, she had a more unlikely and gender-inappropriate moniker: the "Whipman." Cracking the whip was barely half of it. More often, the personal relationship she forged with the students called on her to cajole, plead or, most often, simply listen. "It is constantly encouraging people to do the work," says Portugal.

Over the summer, an unexpected ally joined Portugal in the effort - though Littlesun modestly shrugs off the suggestion that he has become a role model for the younger students. "They look up to me, I look up to them," he says. "It's because I know life; they're still growing." One thing he's proud to claim, however, is the example he is setting for a select group of other young people, ages 13 to 26. "I'm doing this for my own kids," he says, "because I want them to realize that education is important. It's the only way we can all understand each other and get along."

James and Randee Runnels have a family role model, too - their grandmother, Helen Malagon. Thanks in part to her example, James and Randee decided to spend their summer afternoons brushing up on English and math instead of relaxing on the horse ranch shared with their parents, an older brother and various cousins on the edge of Shelton. Like Littlesun, Malagon resumed her education later in life, entering college at age 34, the first step toward gradually moving through the academic ranks. Today, as her grandchildren note proudly, she has a college degree and a title: She's a supervisor of bilingual education for the Washington State Department of Public Instruction.

Reserved, steely and determined, Randee and James aren't the types to talk about themselves. "I'm a quiet person," Randee explains, speaking for her brother as well. It's left to their proud grandmother to draw the portrait.

"Randee is actually my teacher," she says. "I always learn something from the conversations I share with her." Randee was always artistic, and the gift of a digital camera in her early teens proved to be a turning point. Taking pictures of her father during his rodeo days sparked her desire for a future in sports photography.

Watching James put a horse through its paces on a clear August morning, Malagon revealed that her grandson suffers from a kidney ailment that will eventually require a transplant. "It hasn't stopped him," she hastens to add. "He still wants to go to college, and he still wants to major in business. I see him doing it."

In the long term, James has his eye on a career as a concert promoter. Short term, his focus is on a family run foundation that helps at-risk and troubled youth find a better way through horsemanship. "Training a horse has a way of humbling kids," he explains.

On the New Path/Early College spectrum, James and Randee fell squarely in the middle. Neither troubled nor on the fast track, the siblings got a helpful nudge in the right direction from the program. Through years of classroom observation, Malagon says, she has mastered the shorthand of understanding student behavior. She says she can look in the eye of a student - any student -and quickly determine if that student is engaged and involved. When Malagon looks into the eyes of her grandchildren, she sees "a little fear, for sure. But there's also an 'I can do it' attitude. They know where they want to go. They know what they want to accomplish." Malagon paused to watch James work the horse as Randee adjusted her camera. Gazing resolutely at her grandchildren, Malagon quietly added: "They're going to do it."

So, too, will Austin Littlesun.

He will never abandon his heritage. Each morning, he still burns cedar needles and sage in a shell, smudging the ashes on his face in a daily prayer ritual. If necessary, he boasts, he could still live off the land. And as a Northern Cheyenne, he says he will honor another tradition: the SunDance. Four times in his lifetime, each Cheyenne male is required to participate in a ritual of nonstop dancing, without food, for four days and four nights. Littlesun danced five years ago. In his remaining years, he vows to fulfill his tribal obligation by dancing three more times.

"But first," Littlesun says with a smile, "I'm going to finish my education."

Steve Giegerich, formerly an education writer for the Associated Press and a onetime journalism instructor at Columbia University, covers education for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.