After reading the articles for this weeks topic,

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aim to exert educational control while confronting colonial influences embed- ded in curriculum, pedagogy, standards, policies, and Indigenous communi- ties themselves. We conclude with a vision for a democratic policy orientation that resists reductive pedagogies and engages both the possibilities and the tensions within CSRP.

Three key questions guide our discussion:

What does CSRP look like in practice? What are its possibilities, tensions, and challenges? How can community-based CSRP work in service to the goals of Indig- enous education sovereignty, which include what Paris (2012) calls “the democratic project of schooling?” (p. 95)

Setting the Educational and Sociolinguistic Scene: A “Race Against Time”? In 2012, 5.2 million people in the United States self-identified as American Indian or Alaska Native (1.7 percent of the enumerated population), and 1.2 million people self-identified as either Native Hawaiians or “Other Pacific Islanders” (.4 percent of the enumerated population) (Hixson, Hepler, & Kim, 2012; Norris, Vines, & Hoeffel, 2012). These figures represent 566 fed- erally recognized tribes and 617 reservations and Alaska Native villages. How- ever, the 2010 census also showed that 67–92 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives reside outside of tribally held lands (Norris et al., 2012, pp. 12–13). This demographic is significant because a growing number of Native American children attend off-reservation public schools.

The more than 700,000 American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawai- ian students who attend K–12 schools in the United States are ser ved by a plethora of school systems: federal Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) schools; tribal or community-controlled schools under BIE pur view but operated by local Native school boards; state-supervised public schools, including charter schools; and private and parochial schools (National Caucus of Native Ameri- can State Legislators, 2008). Nearly 90 percent of Native American students attend public schools, and in more than half of these schools Native students constitute less than a quarter of total school enrollments (Brayboy, Faircloth, Lee, Maaka, & Richardson, forthcoming; Moran & Rampey, 2008). These public and often off-reser vation schools are much less likely to have Native American teachers or teachers with Indigenous cultural competency (Moran & Rampey, 2008), which complicates but does not vitiate the possibilities for CSRP as an expression of Indigenous educational sovereignty.

Adding to the complexity of schooling for Native American learners is the diversity of Native American languages spoken—170, according to recent esti- mates (Siebens & Julian, 2011)—and the simultaneous threats to that diver- sity. In the 2010 census, only one in ten young people ages five to seventeen

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reported speaking a Native American language (Siebens & Julian, 2011). The causes of a community-wide shift from an Indigenous or minoritized language to a dominant one are multiple, but in this case they are directly linked to federally attempted ethnicide and linguicide—what Kenyan literar y scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (2009) describes as “conscious acts of language liquida- tion” (p. 17). Beginning in the 1800s and lasting well into the twentieth cen- tury, such policies were carried out through punitive English-only instruction in distant boarding schools (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006; Reyhner & Eder, 2004; Skutnabb-Kangas & Dunbar, 2010). “While trust responsibility and sov- ereignty were supposed to be the guiding principles of Indian education,” writes Brayboy (2005), “‘appropriate’ education was . . . that which eradicated Indianness or promoted Anglo values and ways of communicating” (p. 437). These policies have had multigenerational impacts, one of which, say Hermes, Bang, and Marin (2012), is that many Native children and their families “have no choice about the language they use in everyday speech”; school, work, and “routine daily practices occur in the English domain” (p. 398). This places Indigenous communities in what some scholar-activists have called a “race against time,” making language revitalization a paramount educational goal (Benally & Viri, 2005; Sims, 2005).

Native American communities have taken a variety of approaches to their language reclamation and revitalization efforts. For instance, many revitaliza- tion programs operate outside of schools—in family homes, neighborhoods, and communal settings (see Hermes et al., 2012; Hinton, 2013; Romero-Little, Ortiz, McCarty, & Chen, 2011; Warner, 1999). Many programs are situated within reservation settings, but as Hermes and King (2013) point out, “there is active demand for and interest in language revitalization” (p. 127) in diverse urban areas as well. Indeed, some of the most successful Native American lan- guage and culture revitalization programs (e.g., Hawaiian) have operated for decades in large urban settings. Each revitalization effort must be under- stood according to locally defined needs, goals, and available material and human resources. What is shared among these projects and their personnel is a strongly held sentiment that Indigenous languages constitute invaluable repositories of distinctive knowledges that children have a right to and need for full participation in their communities, and that “are central to self-deter- mination and sovereignty” (Sims, 2005, p. 105). To explore these issues in greater depth, we turn now to our cases.

Introducing the Cases We developed the two case studies in this section based on our individual research at each of these study sites. Both cases need to be understood in light of persistent disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes for Native American learners. Biennual national studies of American Indian and Alaska Native schooling continue to document ongoing and even widening

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gaps between the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) per- formance of Native American students and their White mainstream peers (NCES, 2012). Similar disparities are found in graduation rates, postsecond- ar y completion, and disproportionate representation in special education (Castagno & Brayboy, 2008). This national database also documents limited instruction in Native language and culture content (NCES, 2012). Further, although Native students increasingly enter school speaking English as a first language, they often speak varieties of English influenced by their Native lan- guages and are subjected to school labeling practices that stigmatize them as “limited English proficient” (McCarty, 2013).

Thus, despite the shift to English, Native students are not, as a group, expe- riencing greater success in school. “Schools are clearly not meeting the needs of Indigenous students,” Castagno and Brayboy (2008) conclude, “and change is needed if we hope to see greater parity in these (and other) measures of aca- demic achievement” (p. 942). The cases here represent schools and educators that have determinedly embarked on this path of needed change.

Since 2005, Tiffany Lee has been a researcher, coordinator, parent, and gov- erning council member at the first case study site, the Native American Com- munity Academy (NACA).1 In this capacity she has observed and been involved in the successes and challenges of NACA to fulfill its mission while adhering to state mandates and regulations for operations. Her research at NACA took place between 2008 and 2010 and involved in-depth interviews, focus groups, and recorded daily observations of language teaching. Lee undertook one com- ponent of this research, and she and her colleagues undertook another as part of a larger statewide study of American Indian education (Jojola et al., 2011).

Between 2009 and 2011, Teresa McCarty conducted research at the second case study site, Puente de Hózhǫ́ (PdH). This research was part of a larger national study undertaken in response to Executive Order 13336, which called for research to evaluate promising practices for enhancing Native American students’ academic achievement, including the role of Native languages and cultures in successful student outcomes (Brayboy, 2010). Data for the PdH study included extended ethnographic observations of classroom instruction and Native teachers’ monthly curriculum meetings; individual and focus group interviews with key program personnel, parents, and youth; document analy- sis (e.g., school mission statements, teachers’ lesson plans, and student writing samples); and photographs intended to capture how the local Native language and culture were represented in the visual environment of the school.2

In both cases, our methodology was ethnographic and praxis driven, with the specific intent of collaborating with local stakeholders in their efforts to effect positive change. As a guiding research ethic, we foregrounded com- munity interests based on respect, relationship building, reciprocity, and accountability to participants’ communities (Brayboy et al., 2012). We regu- larly shared qualitative data and our interpretations of them with program

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participants. We also collected state-required achievement data to supplement our qualitative data.

NACA: Sustaining “the Seeds”

Someone planted the seed for me to start learning my language, or something did that for me, and I’m excited to have the opportunity to try and do that for these students.

—Mr. Yuonihan, NACA Lakota language teacher

The Native American Community Academy is a state-funded public charter school serving middle and high school students in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a city of approximately 500,000 in a state that is home to twenty-two sovereign Native American nations. Charter schools have played a growing role in Native peoples’ efforts to gain control over their children’s education (Ewing & Fer- rick, 2012; Fenimore-Smith, 2009; Kana‘iaupuni, 2008). NACA is an example of this trend as it embodies Indigenous education sovereignty and CSRP. The school’s founders opted to propose NACA as a charter school because charter status afforded greater autonomy and flexibility than a typical public school and enabled the school to provide an academic focus tailored to community needs and interests. Although NACA gained some degree of control, it must still adhere to many state regulations, including state-determined monolin- gual norms monitored by English standardized tests. Schools like NACA offer state-mandated courses, including three years of math and two years of lan- guage, and their teachers must be state certified. The challenge for charter schools whose missions are connected to community, culture, and wellness is to implement an educational approach that simultaneously meets their own goals and the requirements of the state.

Approximately 5,500 Native American students are ser ved by the Albu- querque public schools. These students represent Native nations within and outside of New Mexico. Additionally, many students are of mixed ethnic and racial heritage (e.g., Navajo/Cochiti Pueblo; Lakota/Anglo; Isleta Pueblo/ Latino/a). The student body at NACA represents diversity within communities of color. Overall, NACA students come from sixty different Native nations and sixteen various non-Native ethnic and racial backgrounds. Ninety-five percent of the student body identifies as Native American (Anpao Duta Flying Earth, NACA associate executive director, personal communication, December 17, 2013). As more Native people move outside their Native nation’s boundaries, this population of school-aged children continues to grow, making schools such as NACA particularly noteworthy sites to look for examples of CSRP and Native American educational sovereignty in action.

In the fall of 2006, NACA opened its doors to approximately sixty students in sixth and seventh grades. Today it serves approximately four hundred stu- dents in grades 6–12. With the goals of serving the local Native communities

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and offering a unique approach to Indigenous education, the school inte- grates an academic curriculum, a wellness philosophy, and Native culture and language. NACA’s mission is to provide a holistic or well-rounded education focused on “strengthening communities by developing strong leaders who are academically prepared, secure in their identity and healthy” (NACA, 2012a). The school’s wellness emphasis follows Indigenous educational philosophies of holistic attention to students’ intellectual, physical, emotional, and social development within a community and cultural context (Cajete, 2000).

In their effort to attend to the mission of the school, teachers and staff have identified core values related to the mission—respect, responsibility, community/service, culture, perseverance, and reflection—and expressed an expectation that students and staff will display behavior and attitudes that rep- resent each core value. These core values reflect those held in NACA students’ tribal communities. NACA staff members have designed activities to integrate those values into their curriculum and teaching methods. Such practices are intended to instill a foundation for students’ cultural identity and are part of the implementation of CSRP. As one example, a community member, Carrie, discussed a weekly morning ritual that draws on Native songs and communal gathering practices to incorporate this custom into the school: “They gather in a circle on Monday mornings, and they begin with the drum. They actually sing together . . . And that’s so important to have and so I think that . . . makes it feel like it’s a community and it’s unified.”

The challenge for teaching values such as respect at NACA has been to con- front generalizations and stereotypes of those values. Native American people have often been portrayed as one culture and one people (Diamond, 2010), essentializing the diverse beliefs and traditions practiced by Native peoples. NACA students come from diverse Indigenous and other ethnic backgrounds. Teaching to each respective student’s community’s values is unfeasible. Con- sequently, maintaining the integrity of new school-based rituals and traditions for exemplifying school values becomes a complex and constantly negotiated endeavor. In some cases, the teachers, staff, and parents utilize specific tra- ditions of particular communities. In other instances, school-based practices are jointly created by teachers, students, and staff, who are mindful of avoid- ing any essentializing and stereotyping of Indigenous peoples. For example, the morning circle that Carrie described is an adapted practice based on tra- ditions of many Native communities. The school’s associate executive direc- tor discussed it in this way: “The morning circle is an extension of traditional protocols for openings/closings where blessings, songs, and information dis- semination happens in a circle” (Anpao Duta Flying Earth, personal com- munication, December 11, 2013). CSRP at NACA requires careful attention to the diversity of Indigenous peoples and fostering practices that build and strengthen community, including the NACA community.

Building community through NACA’s core values occurs in the classroom as well. Some teachers report using assessment practices that respond to a holis-

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tic view of students and their performance as a way to create meaningful con- nections to the school’s core values. Lakota language teacher Mr. Yuonihan describes assessing more than students’ content knowledge. He also focuses on their development as caring and empathetic human beings and on the quality of relationships they have with one another. He said, “Another way that I evaluate if they’re receiving some of the things that I’m teaching them is how they treat each other out here when they’re not in class.” He looks for his students to demonstrate respect, compassion, and helpful behavior with oth- ers, as these are also attributes associated with the way the Native language is used and how Native people treat one another. Likewise, he strives to create a reciprocal and respectful relationship with his students. He described how he explains this to his students:

The relationship that we’re gonna have in this classroom—I’m gonna treat you like one of my nieces or nephews, so that it does not end once we are out of this class. It does not end once you’ve graduated from NACA. We’re always gonna have that relationship, and I expect you guys to acknowledge me and I will acknowledge you like that.

Indigenous languages are inseparable from this educational approach. Lan- guage is vital to cultural continuity and community sustainability because it embodies both everyday and sacred knowledge and is essential to ceremonial practices. Language is also significant for sustaining Indigenous knowledge systems, cultural identifications, spirituality, and connections to land (Benally & Viri, 2005; Benjamin, Pecos, & Romero, 1996). Additionally, strong Native language and culture programs are highly associated with ameliorating per- sistent educational inequities between Native students and their non-Native peers by enhancing education relevancy, family and community involvement, and cultural identity (Ar viso & Holm, 2001; Lee, 2009, 2014; McCardle & Demmert, 2006a, 2006b; McCarty, 2012).

Reflecting students’ linguistic and cultural backgrounds, NACA offers three locally prevalent Native languages for middle and high school students: Navajo, Lakota, and Tiwa. While students want more local languages to be taught (such as Keres and Tewa, languages spoken in nearby Pueblo com- munities), NACA respects the sovereign authority of the local communities and takes seriously its commitment to community accountability. Hence, the school seeks permission from local communities to teach their languages. Keres, for example, has seven dialects representing seven different Pueblo nations. Teaching Keres involves collaborating and gaining permission from each of those communities.

Teaching Native languages to students is a culturally sustaining and revital- izing practice. NACA language teachers make clear the importance of hav- ing autonomy and flexibility for teaching cultural values that instill cultural identity through language-based methods. Mr. Awanyanke stated that these teachings “set a spark inside of [students] to have them want to learn more.”

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Teaching the language is also associated with creating a sense of belonging for students—a way to strengthen their cultural identities, pride, and knowledge of the cultural protocols associated with being Navajo or Lakota or Isleta (Tiwa language). As Navajo mentor teacher Ms. Begay noted, through this pedagogy educators are able to teach students

the etiquette of when someone comes to visit you, how you tell them come in, wóshdéé’, and they shake your hands, and you also address them by who they are to you. If it’s an aunt, uncle, grandma, grandpa, then you always ask them to have a seat and offer them a drink and something to eat.

This aspect of teaching Native languages connects deeply to local cultural communities. The teachers engage in CSRP as they teach the protocols of using the language, rather than simply language mechanics, and empha- size the connections among language, culture, and identity. NACA teachers believe it is their responsibility to pass on the language. They share the view that schools must be able to accommodate, respect, and value this high level of community-oriented education. Ms. Tsosie, for …