This document summarizes the key topics around indigenous resistance and renewal in education. It discusses how indigenous peoples resisted assimilation policies through education that aimed to eradicate their cultures and languages. It also focuses on how indigenous communities are renewing their cultures and languages through community-driven education programs, with a particular emphasis on language revitalization efforts. Challenges to these efforts include lack of resources and disagreement around language transmission methods. Overall, the document examines the historical practices of assimilation and the ongoing indigenous resistance and cultural renewal movements.

1. INDIGENOUS
RESISTANCE
AND RENEWAL
EDCS 311 Report
Carthy Joy T. Aguillon
by Donna Deyhle, Karen Swisher,
Tracy Stevens, Ruth Trinidad Galvan

2. Focus of the Study:
RESISTANCE
Continued attempts by policy
makers, teachers, and
administrators to eradicate
Indigenous lifestyles, religions
and languages, and Indigenous
peoples’ effort to resist .

3. Focus of the Study:
RENEWAL
How Indigenous sovereign
human rights are used to
strengthen and enhance the
future of Indigenous children.

4. Assimilation Practice: America
• Basis: Sovereignty and Trust
Responsibilities
• Action: Americanize the Indian
through education
(to solve Indian Problem)
• Result: Tribal peoples seek control
of the education of their
youth so that culture will not
be lost.

5. Assimilation Practice: Latin
America
• Motive: Create a unified
nation as a symbol of
progress and heightened
civilization
• Action: Education
• Result: deskilling of cultural
knowledge and ways
of life (culture, language,
and tradition)

6. Assimilation Practice: Mexico
• Motive: Pluralism = Mestizo
• Action: Programs to preserve
divisive categories of
Indian and non-Indian
while simultaneously
assimilating Indigenous
communities into society.
• Result: Colorblind view of society;
no clear roots for people

7. Assimilation Practice: Ecuador
• Motive: Modernize citizens that
can surpass “uncivilized”
and “deprived”
circumstances
• Action: Education
• Result: De-skilling (de-skill people
of their forest knowledge in
favor of the pro-agriculture
advocacy)

8. Assimilation: Religion and
Residential Schools
• Repeated History
• Marriage of organized religion and
schooling has been an insidious
means by which to systematically
eradicate Indigenous culture.

9. Religion and Education: First
Nation’s Experience
–Terrible legacy of physical and
emotional abuse
–Racism was rampant among staff
–Speaking of Aboriginal language
was banned

10. Religion and Education: First
Nation’s Experience
–Children (especially siblings)
were isolated from each other to
prohibit any form of cultural
transmission
–Children lived “lonely desperate
lives in an alien and sometimes
brutal environment”

11. Religion and Education: The
Indian Experience
– Punishment
– Use of native languages by
children was forbidden under
threats of corporal
– Semi-skilled vocational training
was encouraged for Indians

12. Religion and Education: The
Indian Experience
–Students were placed among
White families’ homes during
vacation time
–Native religions were
suppressed
–Family visits are at best annual
visits

13. Religion and Education: The
Twist
– In many ways, Indian identity in
Canada and the US is as strong as it
was 100 years ago.
– Resistance to assimilation practices
helped create Indianness.
– Retained strong ethnic identity
– Either returned reservations or
asserted themselves in lives outside
reservations.

14. RESISTANCE: Cold War
• Cold War against those who want
to “shape and stamp them
[students] into becoming dutiful
citizens, responsible employees,
or good dutiful Christians.”
• Silent Indian: a political and
resistant strategy, not a self-
esteem or cultural deportment
problem (Foley, 1996).

15. RESISTANCE: School
Withdrawal
Initial reaction was one of hopelessness,
but then that hopelessness spurred them
on to action. The action that they chose
was that of dropping out of or
abandoning school for a time. To them,
staying in school would have been an
unwise choice. Their adaptive strategies
required withdrawal because the setting
was impossible. They chose
psychological survival. (Wilson, 1991, p. 138).

16. RESISTANCE: Humor
As seen critical skits,
presentations, plays, poetry
readings.
• Performances challenged teacher
school’s efforts to banish their
Indianness.

17. RESISTANCE: Appropriation
• Taking something symbolic of
something for personal use
• Use of school uniform to equalize
men, women, children, in or outside
the school
• Use of school knowledge in defining
and driving collective ethnic projects
• Use of school knowledge to assert
rights and self-determination

18. RENEWAL
• As you’re growing up here [pueblo
community in New Mexico] you will
hear things, see things, and be
involved in activities where the
white man’s tongue has no place.
They can never be explained in
English because that language
does not have the capacity to
explain these things.
--Suina, 2004, p.289

19. The Language Issue
• Through our mother tongues, we
come to know, represent, name,
and act upon the world. Knowledge
is embedded in the terms, subtle
understandings, ways of talking,
and histories inherent in language.
Something is irretrievably lost when
language is not expressed in and
through Native culture.

20. The Language Issue
• Language loss and revitalization
are human right issues.
• The death of a language
essentially means the real loss of
culture, traditions, and religion.
This the reason to revitalize it!

21. BILINGUAL & IMMERSION LANGUAGE
REVITALIZATION PROGRAMS
• Aotearoa Program (New Zealand):
Started as bilingual program that
used transitional approach and
after 12 years became full
immersion program initially ran by
parents. 5 years later, Maori
became a co-official language.

22. BILINGUAL & IMMERSION LANGUAGE
REVITALIZATION PROGRAMS
• Punana Leo (Hawaii): Total
immersion pre-school that was
expanded to K-12. Imagine a
language being silenced for 2
decades being revitalized, learned
by increasing number of people,
and making its way to other
domains of communication.

23. BILINGUAL & IMMERSION LANGUAGE
REVITALIZATION PROGRAMS
• Hualapai (USA): Bilingual program that
had the following features: thematic
curriculum content organized around
local language and social environment,
affirmed students’ identities, capitalized
on students prior knowledge
(bilingualism) as a means of enhancing
their school experience, increased
number of Native teachers in school.

24. BILINGUAL & IMMERSION LANGUAGE
REVITALIZATION PROGRAMS
• Navajo Reservation Project (USA): K-12
instruction in Navajo to reinforce cultural
and linguistic resources for lowest-
achieving students in the Navajo Nation;
Authentic use of language in the home
and school—where students use the
language in letters, journals, lists, and
notes to express themselves.

25. THE COMMUNITY AND LANGUAGE
REVITALIZATION
• Use of community resources
• Use of the Indigenous
Language in Different Domains
• Elders as Mentors, Instructors,
and Cultural Keepers of
Knowledge

26. OBSTACLES AND CHALLENGES IN
(RE)CLAIMING LANGUAGE
• Disagreement on the role of native
language, its place in schools,
method of transmission (oral or
written)
• Malpractices such as isolation of
language programs and treatment
of students as second-class
citizens

27. OBSTACLES AND CHALLENGES IN
(RE)CLAIMING LANGUAGE
• Non-speakers often appropriate
and misdirect goals of language
programs in an attempt to control
resources associated with them.
(Only native speakers should
teach the language).
• Curriculum not sensitive to the
broader community of hegemonic
race relations.

28. OBSTACLES AND CHALLENGES IN
(RE)CLAIMING LANGUAGE
• Lack of authentic materials, trained
teachers, resources, or texts and
TIME to create them.

29. LOOKING AHEAD
The Western and Eastern
knowledge clash in terms of
science, philosophy, and even
epistemology. And Indigenous
people will continue to have to
struggle to authenticate, reclaim,
and protect Indigenous knowledge
and cultural traditions.

30. LOOKING AHEAD
• However, as by linking Western research
to the Native knowledge base already
established in local communities and
organizing core principles that
incorporate both world views,
“Indigenous communities are more likely
to find value in what emerges and to put
new insights into practice as meaningful
exercise in self determination.” (Barnhart
& Kawagley, 2000, p. 21)

31. If to help us is your wish then stand
behind us.
Not to the side.
And not to the front…