Honoring Cultural Traditions of Native Graduates – Diverse Issues

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by Robert Cook

One of the proudest moments in my life was graduating with my master’s in education administration from Oglala Lakota College and receiving an eagle feather for achieving a lifelong dream. That was until 2012, when our oldest son graduated from high school, and my wife and I had the honor of tying his eagle feather on him. And we are looking forward to proudly supporting our youngest son when he graduates from high school in 2017.

Eagles are known by many tribes to be a messenger to the Creator, symbolizing bravery, respect, personal achievement and honor. Eagles are protected under two federal laws: the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. These prohibit the possession, use and sale of eagle feathers and parts, with an explicit exception for American Indians who are enrolled members of federally recognized tribes. American Indian tribal members may wear feathers legally in their possession or utilized to create religious or ceremonial items for personal or tribal use.

This month, thousands of American Indian students across the country are graduating from high school and college, fulfilling a dream for themselves and an honor for their families. And with only 49 percent of Native students graduating from high school nationwide, this is a moment to be celebrated and cherished. Honoring our graduating Native students who attend the 187 tribal schools across 23 states has been a longstanding cultural tradition. Native graduates receive their eagle feathers and plumes and proudly wear them on their graduation caps or tied in their hair. This is a part of who we are and continues to affirm our identity and connection to our ancestry and culture.

Unfortunately, this cultural adornment isn’t always permitted for American Indian students who attend public schools off the reservation, as was the case for two students in Oklahoma and Washington. Some Native students graduating from schools off the reservation face opposition and resistance from school districts and administration. Many schools state that they have “no adornment” dress codes or policies that prohibit Native students from donning their feather. Some districts claim that “if we allow one group or student to ‘break tradition,’ then we have to let all students behave in the same manner,” and others have even instructed Native graduates to hide their feathers or risk not taking part in the graduation commencement ceremonies.

It is disheartening to see schools and districts prohibit our children from celebrating their academic success through sacred cultural traditions. American Indian tribes and members are indigenous inhabitants of this country. These traditions date back hundreds of years, prior to European settlement and American colonization and governance. Treaties were established, many unwillingly, between our sovereign nations and the federal government, and in return for the taking and seizing of land and resources, tribes were made promises of education for their children, access to health care and infrastructure within tribal lands. Tribal sovereignty is still honored and respected today under the U.S. Constitution and executive and congressional actions and Native students’ unique cultural identity and access to quality programs within public education is protected under the ESEA’s Title VII Indian Education Act.

I am not suggesting that students undermine school policy and risk not graduating or not walking with their peers to receive their diploma. Rather I urge communities nationwide to come together, such as the citizens of Grand Forks, North Dakota, who supported student rights and encouraged the Grand Forks school district to change its graduation dress code.

It is my hope that as students from diverse backgrounds and experiences turn their tassels to attain a career or pursue higher education, school and districts will practice cultural sensitivity and embrace customs and sacred traditions from communities and cultures represented amongst their student populations.

We can help support all students and families in navigating this important step and honor in their lives through petition by writing, calling or attending meetings with schools, district leaders and board members to ensure graduation policies are inclusive of diverse cultures and traditions. Together we can make sure that our students’ cultural identities are protected and honored.

Robert Cook (Oglala Lakota) is the director of Teach For America’s Native Alliance Initiative, where he works in partnership with tribal communities in Hawaii, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Washington and South Dakota to improve outcomes for Native students. He resides in Summerset, South Dakota, and is a former K-12 administrator, an award-winning teacher and a board member of the National Indian Education Association.

In Like a Lamb: Out Like a Lion

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Yes, this is a flipped version of the quote meteorologists use to describe March. Prior to Spring Break MSPS club activities were invisible. The statement reflects how MSPS clubs impacted the Notre Dame and Michiana communities after the break. I had the pleasure of witnessing the multiple talents of our students in the 2015 Luau sponsored by the Hawai`I Club. More than 200 students from the surrounding universities/colleges and cities were immersed in Hawaiian culture ranging from performances to cuisine. It was a pleasurable escape from the sunny yet blistery day.

The following week Shades of Ebony held their Women’s Week Celebration in conjunction with the Gender Relations Center. The week was filled with panel discussions, events including local middle and high school students and their annual dinner.  Dr. Eleanor Walker (`84), Haley Scott DeMaria (`95), and Amanda Peña (`15) shared their experiences as women pursuing their Notre Dame degrees.  They acknowledged the foresight of Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C. to make Notre Dame a co-educational institution and enriched the experiences of those who attended.

The Latino Student Alliance continued the global excursion with the 2015 Latin Expressions Raíces: return to our roots. The audience viewed the Latino Diaspora through the lens of the hosts, who were role playing as prospective students on a campus visit. The audience was engaged and joined the performers on the stage during the closing song. Congratulations to Erik Mendoza and Nidia Ruelas 2015 Julian Samora Scholarship recipients, who were selected after a rigorous interview process and review of their involvement in the Notre Dame and Latino communities. The Hispanic Alumni Board announced the winners at Latin X.

The Black Cultural Arts Council ended the month with their signature fashion show, “Risqué.” Sheldon Day, Marquis Dickerson and Mario Berkley navigated the audience through the world fashion that challenged the senses. The audience rocked to the music and were delighted by spring fashions and entertained by the re-visioning of the infamous Tom Cruise scene from Risky Business. The Black Alumni of Notre Dame presented eight of the fourteen Frazier Thompson Scholarships at the event. Congratulations to the 2015- 2015 recipients:  Derek Bland, Chizo Ekechukwu, Patricia Ekwueme, Kereknaan Fiannaan, Ashley Henry, Ray`Von Jones, Anna Kiely, Lena Madison, Alexandra Rice, Francesca Simon, Trenton Templeton, Amber Thomas, Aaron Vernon, and Steven Waller. These students met the academic requirements and have been actively involved in the African American and Notre Dame communities.

The 29th Annual Student Leadership Awards Banquet highlighted the achievements of MSPS constituents who have made a significant impact on the Notre Dame community. We would like to acknowledge the winners also:  Irish Clover Award – Hermana Abera; Student Leadership Awards – Demetrius Murphy, Ally Kwun, Reagan Li, Deandra Cadet; John W. Gardner Student Leadership Award – Christina Guiterrez;  Mike Russo Spirit Award – Lauren Vidal; Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C. Award – Matthew Wong; and Rev. A Leonard Collins , C.S.C. Award –Juan Rangel.  The last three are the highest Student Affairs Awards given to undergraduate students. Kudos to all the winners and numerous nominees. It was an honor to see these students recognized in the presence of faculty, administrators and their peers.

April has several major events occurring to keep the campus engaged. April 11 – Wabruda’s Black Man’s Think Tank – Finding Your Passion, FASO – 2015 Fiestang KAPAMILYA of the same family, April 17 – Shades’ Skating Party, and  April 18 – Voices of Faith Spring Concert; PFresh Show. Please support these clubs by coming and bring a friend or two.

Lastly, Welcome the Spring Weather. Look forward to seeing you at these events and on campus.

Peace,

Ms. Iris  

The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in Schools – If We Knew Our History Series

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If We Knew Our History Series

The Real Irish American Story Not Taught in SchoolsMarch 16, 2012

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By Bill Bigelow

“Wear green on St. Patrick’s Day or get pinched.” That pretty much sums up the Irish-American “curriculum” that I learned when I was in school. Yes, I recall a nod to the so-called Potato Famine, but it was mentioned only in passing.

Sadly, today’s high school textbooks continue to largely ignore the famine, despite the fact that it was responsible for unimaginable suffering and the deaths of more than a million Irish peasants, and that it triggered the greatest wave of Irish immigration in U.S. history. Nor do textbooks make any attempt to help students link famines past and present.

Yet there is no shortage of material that can bring these dramatic events to life in the classroom. In my own high school social studies classes, I begin with Sinead O’Connor’s haunting rendition of “Skibbereen,” which includes the verse:

… Oh it’s well I do remember, that bleak

December day,

The landlord and the sheriff came, to drive

Us all away

They set my roof on fire, with their cursed

English spleen

And that’s another reason why I left old

Skibbereen.

 

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By contrast, Holt McDougal’s U.S. history textbook The Americans, devotes a flat two sentences to “The Great Potato Famine.” Prentice Hall’s America: Pathways to the Present fails to offer a single quote from the time. The text calls the famine a “horrible disaster,” as if it were a natural calamity like an earthquake. And in an awful single paragraph, Houghton Mifflin’s The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People blames the “ravages of famine” simply on “a blight,” and the only contemporaneous quote comes, inappropriately, from a landlord, who describes the surviving tenants as “famished and ghastly skeletons.” Uniformly, social studies textbooks fail to allow the Irish to speak for themselves, to narrate their own horror.

These timid slivers of knowledge not only deprive students of rich lessons in Irish-American history, they exemplify much of what is wrong with today’s curricular reliance on corporate-produced textbooks.

First, does anyone really think that students will remember anything from the books’ dull and lifeless paragraphs? Today’s textbooks contain no stories of actual people. We meet no one, learn nothing of anyone’s life, encounter no injustice, no resistance. This is a curriculum bound for boredom. As someone who spent almost 30 years teaching high school social studies, I can testify that students will be unlikely to seek to learn more about events so emptied of drama, emotion, and humanity.

Nor do these texts raise any critical questions for students to consider. For example, it’s important for students to learn that the crop failure in Ireland affectedonly the potato—during the worst famine years, other food production was robust. Michael Pollan notes in The Botany of Desire, “Ireland’s was surely the biggest experiment in monoculture ever attempted and surely the most convincing proof of its folly.” But if only this one variety of potato, the Lumper, failed, and other crops thrived, why did people starve?

“Paddy’s Lament” recounts the famine and the Irish diaspora to America.

Thomas Gallagher points out in Paddy’s Lament, that during the first winter of famine, 1846-47, as perhaps 400,000 Irish peasants starved, landlords exported 17 million pounds sterling worth of grain, cattle, pigs, flour, eggs, and poultry—food that could have prevented those deaths. Throughout the famine, as Gallagher notes, there was an abundance of food produced in Ireland, yet the landlords exported it to markets abroad.

The school curriculum could and should ask students to reflect on the contradiction of starvation amidst plenty, on the ethics of food exports amidst famine. And it should ask why these patterns persist into our own time.

More than a century and a half after the “Great Famine,” we live with similar, perhaps even more glaring contradictions. Raj Patel opens his book, Stuffed and Starved: Markets, Power and the Hidden Battle for the World’s Food System: “Today, when we produce more food than ever before, more than one in ten people on Earth are hungry. The hunger of 800 million happens at the same time as another historical first: that they are outnumbered by the one billion people on this planet who are overweight.”

“Stuffed and Starved”: Raj Patel’s comprehensive investigation into the global food network is useful for students to reflect on patterns of poverty that persist today.

Patel’s book sets out to account for “the rot at the core of the modern food system.” This is a curricular journey that our students should also be on — reflecting on patterns of poverty, power, and inequality that stretch from 19thcentury Ireland to 21st century Africa, India, Appalachia, and Oakland; that explore what happens when food and land are regarded purely as commodities in a global system of profit.

But today’s corporate textbook-producers are no more interested in feeding student curiosity about this inequality than were British landlords interested in feeding Irish peasants. Take Pearson, the global publishing giant. At its website, the corporation announces (redundantly) that “we measure our progress against three key measures: earnings, cash and return on invested capital.” The Pearson empire had 2011 worldwide sales of more than $9 billion—that’s nine thousand million dollars, as I might tell my students. Multinationals like Pearson have no interest in promoting critical thinking about an economic system whose profit-first premises they embrace with gusto.

Hunger on Trial teaching activity available online.

As mentioned, there is no absence of teaching materials on the Irish famine that can touch head and heart. In a role play, “Hunger on Trial,” that I wrote and taught to my own students in Portland, Oregon—included at the Zinn Education Project website— students investigate who or what was responsible for the famine. The British landlords, who demanded rent from the starving poor and exported other food crops? The British government, which allowed these food exports and offered scant aid to Irish peasants? The Anglican Church, which failed to denounce selfish landlords or to act on behalf of the poor? A system of distribution, which sacrificed Irish peasants to the logic of colonialism and the capitalist market?

These are rich and troubling ethical questions. They are exactly the kind of issues that fire students to life and allow them to see that history is not simply a chronology of dead facts stretching through time.

So go ahead: Have a Guinness, wear a bit of green, and put on the Chieftains. But let’s honor the Irish with our curiosity. Let’s make sure that our schools show some respect, by studying the social forces that starved and uprooted over a million Irish—and that are starving and uprooting people today.

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Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor of Rethinking Schools magazine and co-director of the online Zinn Education Project, www.zinnedproject.org. This project, inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn, offers free materials to teach a fuller “people’s history” than is found in commercial textbooks. Bigelow is author or co-editor of numerous books, including A People’s History for the Classroomand The Line Between Us: Teaching About the Border and Mexican Immigration.

Bill Bigelow taught high school social studies in Portland, Ore. for almost 30 years. He is the curriculum editor ofRethinking Schools magazine, co-director of the online Zinn Education Project, www.zinnedproject.org, and is author of A People’s History for the Classroom.