Grossman, Zoltan (2008). Indigenous Nations' Responses to Climate Change, American Indian Culture and Research Journal. On August 1st, 2007, Indigenous nations from within the United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa (New Zealand) signed a treaty to found the United League of Indigenous Nations. The Treaty of Indigenous Nations offers a historic opportunity for sovereign Indigenous governments to build intertribal cooperation outside the framework of the colonial settler states. Just as the Pacific Rim states have cooperated to limit Native sovereign rights and build polluting industries, Indigenous nations can cooperate to decolonize ancestral territories and protect their common natural resources for future generations. The treaty process has involved Indigenous political alliances such as the National Congress of American Indians (NCAI), the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) in Canada, and the Mataatua Assembly (including forty-four Maori tribes) in Aotearoa. The treaty identifies four main areas of cooperation: increasing trade among Indigenous nations, protecting cultural properties, easing border crossings, and responding to the urgent threat of climate change. The Treaty of Indigenous Nations builds a sense of community by including other tribal nations in the community, even those who live on the other side of imposed colonial borders or on the other side of the ocean. Indigenous peoples have survived the effects of colonialism and environmental destruction only by cooperating with each other. It is no longer just a good idea to build these relationships; climate change makes them much more urgent. This article explores some of the relationships being built, or that have the potential to be built, among Indigenous nations, local governments, national governments, and international agencies.   [More]  Descriptors: Indigenous Populations, Treaties, Tribes, International Cooperation

Duffy, John W. (2008). Teaching for Critical Literacy and Racial Justice, Democracy & Education. Eminent African American historian Carter G. Woodson in his book "The Miseducation of the Negro," published a generation before the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, concerned himself not with the racial composition of classrooms and schools, but with the curricula taught both in the schools and the larger culture. Certainly Woodson acknowledged the gross disparity of resources between White and Black schools, but most importantly he recognized that it was the significance of what was taught and not taught in American public schools that ultimately limited the potential of Black children to succeed in school and the larger society. Woodson understood that an education that ignored or distorted the cultural strengths of African and African American history and praised the supposed supremacy of White civilization was more harmful than the physical isolation of Black students sanctioned by the "Plessy v. Ferguson" guideline of "separate but equal," established by the Supreme Court in 1896. This article addresses how the author has shaped his curriculum in the wake of the post-Civil Rights era to cultivate in his students a respect for and commitment to racial justice and equal opportunity. The pedagogy he shares has largely developed around his teaching of U.S. history as a White American male in the two high schools where he has spent his career, one a predominantly White school with a significant percentage of students with Asian backgrounds and the other a predominantly African American school with a significant number of Latino students. While the principles, beliefs, curricula, lessons, and materials examined in this article focus on African American history, his teaching about the history of American Indians, as well as Asian Americans, Latinos, and other immigrant groups incorporates similar approaches to uncovering both shared and unique struggles for self-identity and justice in the past and present.   [More]  Descriptors: African American Students, United States History, History Instruction, Civil Rights

Daly, Heather Ponchetti (2009). Fractured Relations at Home: The 1953 Termination Act's Effect on Tribal Relations throughout Southern California Indian Country, American Indian Quarterly. In 1953 California Indians watched as the U.S. Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution 108 to effectively terminate federal trust protection of American Indian reservation lands. Included in the wording of the Termination Act is the following: It is the policy of Congress, as rapidly as possible, to make the Indian within the … territorial limits of the United States subject to the same laws and entitled to the same … privileges and responsibilities as are applicable to other citizens of the United States, to end their status as wards of the United States, and to grant them all of the rights and … prerogatives pertaining to American citizenship; and the Indians within the territorial … limits of the United States should assume their full responsibilities as American citizens: … it is declared … that, at the earliest possible time, all of the Indian tribes and the Individual … members thereof located within the States of California, Florida, New York, and Texas … should be freed from Federal supervision and control. This article illustrates how termination affected Southern California Indian Country and the challenges of working from within familiar Indian communities or from home.   [More]  Descriptors: Citizenship, American Indians, Tribes, Federal Legislation

Reamey, Becky Avery (2009). Native American Mascots in Contemporary Higher Education: Part 1–Politically Acceptable or Ethnically Objectionable?, Community College Journal of Research and Practice. The battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 was one of the last great wars fought by Native Americans on a grassy battlefield. The battle was fought over territory and the right to live in the Dakota and Montana territories. The Native Americans won the battle of Little Big Horn but eventually lost the war and were forced to live on a reservation away from their homeland. Today another great battle involving Native Americans is taking place, not on a grassy plain somewhere out West, but in courtrooms, classrooms, and tribal meetings across the country. The battle is over the use of historical Native American images and traditions as mascots and nicknames of higher education institutions. The research reported in this paper identified seven institutions of higher learning (not a complete list) which have abolished the use of Native American mascots on their campuses. Although these seven schools do not include a community college, much food for thought is presented for the benefit of community college educators who respect the thoughts and feelings of Native American Indians. The need is for this study to be replicated among community colleges with Native American mascots.   [More]  Descriptors: United States History, Conflict, American Indians, Federal Government

Wodtke, Larissa (2015). A Lovely Building for Difficult Knowledge: The Architecture of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies. One only needs to look at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) logo, with its abstract outline of the CMHR building, to see the way in which the museum's architecture has come to stand for the CMHR's immaterial meanings and content. The CMHR's architecture becomes a material intersection of discourses of cosmopolitanism, human rights, and national identity, but as this article argues, the reliance on a dominant hope narrative reinscribes problematic generalizations that do not challenge visitors to think critically about these discourses. How does the CMHR architectural structure respond to and represent "difficult knowledge" associated with the contents of the museum? The author utilizes Deborah Britzman's pedagogical theories of difficult knowledge, along with discourses of cosmopolitanism, human rights, and transnational "iconic" architecture, to argue that the CMHR architecture, in itself, falls short of addressing feelings of ambivalence that are so difficult to explore and tolerate through its symbolic narratives of hope, enlightenment, and progress.   [More]  Descriptors: Architecture, Civil Rights, Museums, Foreign Countries

Pember, Mary Annette (2007). Another Frame of Mind, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. This year, the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry announced the creation of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment, the first of its kind in the Northeast. According to its mission statement, the center will create programs that draw on indigenous and scientific knowledge to support the goals of environmental sustainability. The establishment of the center was announced last October at a teach-in at the college entitled, "Finding Common Ground: Indigenous and Western Approaches to Healing Our Land and Waters." The event was co-sponsored by the Haudenosaunee Environmental Task Force and other community organizations. The teach-in, according to Dr. Robin W. Kimmerer, director of the center, was a holistic effort to educate the general community about indigenous land rights issues, land stewardship and the environment. Using an approach called Traditional Ecological Knowledge, or TEK, which Kimmerer describes as a "way of knowing," the center is working to bring an American Indian mindset into the scientific conversation.   [More]  Descriptors: Position Papers, Forestry, Community Organizations, American Indians

Lynch, Eleanor W., Ed.; Hanson, Marci J., Ed. (2011). Developing Cross-Cultural Competence: A Guide for Working with Children and Their Families. Fourth Edition, Brookes Publishing Company. As the U.S. population grows more and more diverse, how can professionals who work with young children and families deliver the best services while honoring different customs, beliefs, and values? The answers are in the fourth edition of this bestselling textbook, fully revised to reflect nearly a decade of population changes and best practices in culturally competent service delivery. The gold-standard text on cross-cultural competence, this book has been widely adopted by college faculty and trusted as a reference by in-service practitioners for almost 20 years. For this timely new edition (see box), the highly regarded authors have carefully updated and expanded every chapter while retaining the basic approach and structure that made the previous editions so popular. Professionals will: (1) Get a primer on cultural competence; (2) Deepen their understanding of cultural groups; and (3) Discover better ways to serve families. Equally valuable as a textbook and a reference for practicing professionals, this comprehensive book will prepare early interventionists and other professionals to work effectively with families whose customs, beliefs, and values may differ from their own. Part I, Introduction, contains: (1) Diversity in Service Settings (Marci J. Hanson); (2) Conceptual Framework: From Culture Shock to Cultural Learning (Eleanor W. Lynch); and (3) Developing Cross-Cultural Competence (Eleanor W. Lynch). Part II, Cultural Perspectives, contains: (4) Families with Anglo-European Roots (Marci J. Hanson); (5) Families with American Indian Roots (Jennie R. Joe and Randi Suzanne Malach); (6) Families with African American Roots (Tawara D. Goode, Wendy Jones, and Vivian Jackson); (7) Families with Latino Roots (Maria E. Zuniga); (8) Families with Asian Roots (Sam Chan and Deborah Chen); (9) Families with Filipino Roots (Rosa Milagros Santos and Sam Chan); (10) Families with Native Hawaiian and Samoan Roots (Noreen Mokuau and Pemerika Tauili'ili); (11) Families with Middle Eastern Roots (Virginia-Shirin Sharifzadeh); (12) Families with South Asian Roots (Namita Jacob); and Postlude: Children of Many Songs: Diversity Within the Family (Eleanor W. Lynch and Marci J. Hanson). Part III, Summary and Implications, contains: (13) Steps in the Right Direction: Implications for Service Providers (Eleanor W. Lynch and Marci J. Hanson). Suggested reading and resources are included. [For "Developing Cross-Cultural Competence: A Guide for Working with Children and Their Families, Third Edition," see ED491776.   [More]  Descriptors: American Indians, Culture Conflict, Cultural Awareness, Filipino Americans

Yoon, So Yoon; Gentry, Marcia (2009). Racial and Ethnic Representation in Gifted Programs: Current Status of and Implications for Gifted Asian American Students, Gifted Child Quarterly. The Elementary and Secondary School Survey data and Civil Rights Data Collection of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) were analyzed to describe the issue of overrepresentation of gifted Asian American students in gifted education programs in the United States. Nationally, Asian and Whites have been overrepresented in gifted education since 1978, whereas, students from other ethnic backgrounds, such as those from American Indian or Alaska Native, Hispanic, and African American groups, have been underrepresented with gradual increases in this underrepresentation since 1994. When the data were disaggregated by state for the period from 2002 to 2006, each racial and ethnic group displayed varied ranges of representation. Those varied distributions can be attributed to each state's unique demographic profile, varied definitions of giftedness, identification procedures, and identification policies. By focusing on Asian American students, this study addressed some difficulties that gifted Asian American students may face concerning the image of model minority and through the acculturation processes as immigrants or descendents of immigrants. Furthermore, this study suggests a need for disaggregated data collection and more research concerning gifted Asian American students from various ethnic Asian groups. Putting the Research to Use: Findings from this study highlight the need for carefully collected data in the field of gifted education concerning race and ethnicity of students in programs and provide the reader with a picture of both underrepresentation and overrepresentation of students by state and ethnic group. Attention needs to be paid to sub-groups within categories of race and ethnicity to understand representation. By considering the issue of Asian Americans and their overrepresentation, this research has raised awareness about factors, such as identification processes, acculturation, and academic motivation that might promote recognition of giftedness among some ethnic groups. Finally, this research offers readers with a new, multiple-year, current, analysis of the representation in gifted programs nationally and by state for racial/ethnic groups, an area of continued concern to those in the field of gifted education.   [More]  Descriptors: Ethnicity, Gifted, Acculturation, Disproportionate Representation

American Indian Quarterly (2003). Who Supports Urban American Indian Students in Public Community Colleges?. In 1977 a group of urban American Indian organizations got together to protest the leveling of rental housing for urban renewal; then they learned that a community college was going up to replace that housing, right in the middle of the Indian community. Realizing the opportunities for jobs, education, and training, the community leaders decided to approach the college with a research proposal. That proposal surveyed the education and employment needs of the surrounding Indian people. In 1977 there were only six Indians with college degrees in that community. There were no lawyers, no doctors, no professors. Over half of the community lacked even a high school diploma. That proposal and the state funding that followed created the first American Indian Support Program (AISP) within a public community college in that state. This article describes the problems encountered by the AISP, the accomplishments of the students, and the end of the program after twenty-three years.   [More]  Descriptors: Community Colleges, Urban Renewal, Urban American Indians, American Indian Education

Alliance for Excellent Education (2009). Students with Disabilities in U.S. High Schools. Fact Sheet. Nearly one third of the more than six million students with disabilities in U.S. public schools are of traditional high school age. Though research indicates that the majority of high school-age students with disabilities and their parents are satisfied with the services they receive, many still face barriers and challenges to receiving an equitable education. Students with disabilities are more likely than other groups to report discrimination; they are consistently involved in more than half of the complaints investigated by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights. Also, African American, American Indian, and Alaska Native students are largely overrepresented in special education, while Latino, Asian, and Pacific Islander American students are underrepresented, which suggests that many students in each of these groups may not be receiving an education appropriate to their respective, individual needs. This report presents the available data on the following issues: (1) dropout rates, college- and work-readiness, and transition; (2) students of color and disabilities; and (3) information on specific categories of students with disabilities.   [More]  Descriptors: Civil Rights, Dropout Rate, Pacific Islanders, American Indians

Greco, Michael D., Ed. (2010). CURA Reporter. Volume 40, Numbers 1-2, Spring/Summer 2010, Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota. The "CURA Reporter" is published quarterly to provide information about the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA), an all-University applied research and technical assistance center at the University of Minnesota that connects faculty and students with community organizations and public institutions working on significant public policy issues in Minnesota. Items in this issue include: (1) Improving the Education of Minnesota's Students from Pre-K through College: Measuring Student Progress and Using Data to Drive Decision Making (Michael C. Rodriguez, Kathleen Matuska, Julio Cabrera, and Stacy Karl); (2) Learning to Bridge Different Ways of Knowing: The Dream of Wild Health American Indian Seed-Garden Project as Mentor (Craig A. Hassel); (3) Attorneys' Perspectives on the Violation of the Civil Rights of Immigrants Detained in Minnesota (Jacob Chin, Katherine Fennelly, Kathleen Moccio, Charles Miles, and Jose D. Pacas); (4) Advancing Neighborhood Goals: The Role of Geographic-Based Community Development Corporations (Noel Nix); (5) The 2010 U.S. Census: Ensuring Everyone Counts in Minneapolis (Margaret Kaplan); (6) Designing a Social-Welfare Safety Net that Supports Low-Income Workers (Jodi R. Sandfort); (7) Will Craig Earns Spot in GIS Hall of Fame; (8) Project Funding Available from CURA; (9) Estrogen Mimics in Industrial Wastewater: Sources and Treatment (Mark S. Lundgren and Paige J. Novak); (10) Achieving Success in Business: A Comparison of Somali and American-Born Entrepreneurs in Minneapolis (Shannon Golden, Elizabeth Heger Boyle, and Yasin Jama); and (11) Kris Nelson Earns Outstanding Community Service Award. Individual articles contain tables, figures and footnotes.   [More]  Descriptors: Civil Rights, American Indians, School Community Relationship, Corporations

Hernandez, Juan A. Avila (2004). Blood, Lies, and Indian Rights: TCUs Becoming Gatekeepers for Research, Tribal College Journal of American Indian Higher Education. The article reports that a wayward research project shattered the trust last year between Arizona State University and a small American Indian tribe in the bottom of the Grand Canyon. This scandal exposed once again the need for tribal governments and Native American communities to get involved in regulating research on human subjects. In response to this need, tribal colleges and universities are slowly but increasingly adopting procedures to make themselves gatekeepers for research conducted at their schools and among their affiliated American Indian communities. They want to prevent exploitation of Indian people, train their own students in research and encourage the medical research field to meet the health needs of the Indian community.   [More]  Descriptors: Tribally Controlled Education, Medical Research, Health Needs, American Indians

Janda, Sarah Eppler (2005). "Her Heritage Is Helpful": Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Politicization of LaDonna Harrris, Great Plains Quarterly. This article chronicles LaDonna Harris's experiences with the media, the public, and government leaders as she rose from humble origins in the Great Plains to national prominence as a leading advocate of Native American rights in the latter half of the twentieth century. Harris helped to integrate Lawton, Oklahoma, in the early 1960s, founded Oklahomans for Indian Opportunity (OIO) in 1965, and established Americans for Indian Opportunity (AIO) in 1970.   [More]  Descriptors: Women Administrators, American Indians, Civil Rights, Advocacy

McCarty, Teresa L.; Nicholas, Sheilah E.; Wyman, Leisy T. (2015). 50(0) Years out and Counting: Native American Language Education and the Four Rs, International Multilingual Research Journal. Fifty years after the U.S. Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA), Native Americans continue to fight for the right "to remain an Indian" (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006) against a backdrop of test-driven language policies that threaten to destabilize proven bilingual programs and violate hard-fought language rights protections such as the Native American Languages Act of 1990/1992. In this article we focus on the "four Rs" of Indigenous language education–rights, resources, responsibilities, and reclamation–forefronting the inherent sovereignty of Indigenous peoples in language education decision making. Drawing on our work together and our individual long-term ethnographic work with Native American communities, we present three case studies that illuminate larger issues of language rights, resources, responsibilities, and reclamation as they are realized in these communities. We conclude by "reflecting forward" (Winn, 2014) on language education possibilities and tensions, 50 years out from passage of the CRA and more than 500 years out from the original Indigenous-colonial encounter.   [More]  Descriptors: American Indian Languages, Language Maintenance, Language Skill Attrition, Civil Rights Legislation

Whitney, Stephanie Rae (2010). Multiple Representations and Rate of Change: The Nature of Diverse Students' Initial Understanding, ProQuest LLC. Access to quality mathematics content and instruction has been equated as a civil right (Moses & Cobb, 2001). However, access to empowering mathematics is not a reality for many urban youth. Data show an achievement gap between Black, Hispanic and American Indian students and their peers which, in turn, result in unequal access to education and economic opportunities (NAEP, 2007; U.S. Department of Education, 1997).   This evaluative case study focused on eight racially diverse high school students from an urban charter school who were studying Algebra 1 in classroom contexts that were student-centered and discourse-based. The study took place after a sequence of six lessons that introduced representations of linear functions through geometric patterns. Pairs of students participated in a series of interview tasks which were largely modeled from problems in their curriculum Algebra Connections (Dietiker, Kysh, Sallee, Hoey, 2005). The tasks focused on their understanding of representations of functions (tables, graphs, equations and context), the embodiment of rate of change in the representations and translating among the representations.   The study sought to understand the nature of the students' initial understandings of representations and translations including their natural language when describing observations, the perspectives from which they approached the tasks (explicit or recursive) and how their thinking compares to literature in the field. The students were able to translate linear functions directly between any two representations and many were able to extend their thinking to novel problems involving non-linear functions.   [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.%5D   [More]  Descriptors: High School Students, Urban Youth, Urban Schools, Charter Schools

McKenna, Brian (2011). Staging a Christopher Columbus Play in a Culture of Illusion: Public Pedagogy in a Theatre of Genocide, Policy Futures in Education. In the foreword to "The Politics of Genocide", political theorist Noam Chomsky writes that denial of the American Indian holocaust is a potent force in the United States. He argues that "the most unambiguous cases of genocide" are often "acknowledged by the perpetrators, and passed over as insignificant or even denied in retrospect by the beneficiaries, right to the present". That is very true in the United States, where the author of this article discovers that few of his college students know much, if anything, about the capacious genocide of North American Indians. In this article, Brian McKenna explores the power of aesthetic theory and praxis to help overcome the rigid psychological defenses of besieged students. He carefully informs students about the genocide spawned by Columbus and the Spanish, and then draws connections between that history and the history of US Indian genocide and imperialism, up to the present day in Iraq and around the globe. The article presents a five-part exercise, refined over seven years, that shows how McKenna lets the "truth" dazzle gradually and then thunder mightily in revealing students to themselves. He requires students to imagine themselves as high school teachers where they must produce the written outlines of a play that is based, in part, on the truths of the Spanish genocide as depicted by America's first de facto cultural anthropologist, Father Bartolome de las Casas. The ultimate aims of the exercise are threefold: (1) Will students, in the politically charged setting of a high school, construct a Theatre of Genocide about the Arawak Indians and the Spanish? (2) Will students draw the educational links between the Spanish and the theatres of war and genocide associated with the United States? And (3) How will students grapple with the pedagogical relationships between knowledge and power; censorship and self-censorship; truth and art? The article also asks, "Who controls the play curriculum? How can critical public pedagogues challenge the ubiquity of high school productions such as "Oklahoma!" and "Hello, Dolly!" to create forms of drama that speak directly to the issues of the day?   [More]  Descriptors: Teaching Methods, Power Structure, War, High Schools

Morris, Kate (2011). Running the "Medicine Line": Images of the Border in Contemporary Native American Art, American Indian Quarterly. In this article the author is concerned with the intersection of two congruent phenomena: (1) an increasing number of references to borders in contemporary Native American art; and (2) an increasing occurrence of border-rights conflicts between Native nations and the governments of the United States and Canada. Focusing on the period roughly 1990 to the present, she acknowledges the shifts in both art and politics after September 11, 2001; however, she does not suggest that tension or even outright conflict around borders is new to Indian Country–indeed, the right to free passage is a basic tenet of American Indian and First Nations sovereignty. She argues that as border-zone frictions "intensified" post-9/11, the visual and philosophical complexity of artworks situated within these zones also increased. The evolving situation at Kawehno:ke and the installation of Alan Michelson's artwork at Massena provide an ideal entry point into this discourse.   [More]  Descriptors: American Indians, Foreign Countries, Art, Conflict

Lindsley, Sheryl L.; Braithwaite, Charles A.; Ahlberg, Kristin L. (2002). Mending the Sacred Hoop: Identity Enactment and the Occupation of Wounded Knee, Great Plains Quarterly. The occupation of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1973 by the leaders of the American Indian Movement (AIM) represented a culmination of frustration felt by Native Americans. The news media mocked the occupation and minimized the seriousness of the event. However, the historical significance of the Native American occupation of Wounded Knee, as well as the ensuing trail, which was viewed as a major civil rights case for Native Americans, justifies their rhetorical analysis and augments understanding of the American Indian protest movement.   [More]  Descriptors: Civil Rights, American Indians, American Indian Education, Rhetorical Criticism

Justice, Daniel Heath (2001). We're Not There Yet, Kemo Sabe: Positing a Future for American Indian Literary Studies, American Indian Quarterly. The mechanisms by which the scholarly integrity of American Indian studies is pressured to conform to the colonialist, Euro-American ideals of the academy are examined. The future of American Indian studies depends on increased visibility and tribal advocacy by American Indians and recognition by non-Indians that Indians have the right and responsibility to represent themselves. Descriptors: American Indian Literature, American Indian Studies, American Indians, Culturally Relevant Education

Perry, Barbara; Robyn, Linda (2005). Putting Anti-Indian Violence in Context. The Case of the Great Lakes Chippewas of Wisconsin, American Indian Quarterly. The Chippewas of Northern Wisconsin continue to experience a peculiarly American form of apartheid, characterized by segregation, discrimination, cultural imperialism, and everyday violence. While the blatant stigmatization, disempowerment, and violence reached its modern day zenith in the spear fishing conflict of the 1980s and 1990s, ongoing patterns of racism and violence remain embedded in the culture. The purpose of this paper, then, is to explore the ways in which contemporary patterns of oppression continue to shape the climate in which anti-American Indian violence occurs in this particular region. Native Americans across the country continue to experience myriad and interrelated forms of economic, political, and social oppression. This is evident in practices ranging from negative cultural imaging, treaty abrogations, and even violence. Recent years have seen extensive resistance on the part of American Indians, as they reassert their remaining treaty rights around land, resources, and self-governance. That American society at large is not ready for this relatively novel activism has been apparent in episodes of retaliatory violence intended to reassert Western control of American Indians and their resources. In what follows the authors examine recent experiences of Wisconsin Chippewas as an illustration of this cycle. In particular, this article provides an overview of the oppressive conditions in this part of the nation, followed by consideration of recent American Indian activism and resistance in the region. Finally, the authors trace the patterns of reactionary violence that have met such efforts at self-assertion.   [More]  Descriptors: Academic Achievement, American Indians, Violence, Racial Discrimination

Pember, Mary Annette (2007). Farewell to the Chief, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. The battle over the use of American Indian names and mascots among college and professional athletic teams has a seldom-told economic backstory. It is more than simple alumni sentimentality. Money, influence and power often play a significant role in decisions regarding the use of these symbols. Paraphernalia bearing the images bring in millions of dollars each year to the institutions. But the names and images have been decried as disrespectful and insensitive to American Indians. And it is the tribes, along with philanthropic, education, professional and civil rights organizations, that are leading the movement to retire the symbols. The National Congress of American Indians, the National Education Association, the NCAA and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have all voiced their opposition to the mascots. Last year, the NCAA ruled that teams featuring offensive mascots would no longer be able to host postseason tournaments and would be subject to other penalties and restrictions. That rule, combined with the waves of negative publicity the mascots have generated, has led many colleges and universities to shelve the mascots permanently. The most recent and possibly most visible mascot retirement came in February when University of Illinois trustees chose to discontinue the use of the school's mascot, Chief Illiniwek. The circumstances of the Chief's demise shed a glimmer of light on the powerful economic forces at play behind these struggles. To date, four schools have negotiated agreements with local tribal leadership eliciting support for their American Indian-nicknamed teams and mascots: The Catawba College Indians, the Central Michigan University Chippewas, the University of Utah Utes and the Florida State Seminoles. Of the four, FSU is the only one that still maintains a mascot.   [More]  Descriptors: American Indians, College Athletics, Ethnic Stereotypes, Court Litigation

Murphy, Sharon; Lemire, Lynne; Wisman, Mindi (2009). Complex Personhood as the Context for Intimate Partner Victimization: One American Indian Woman's Story, American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research: The Journal of the National Center. This qualitative case study explores one American Indian (AI) woman's experience of intimate partner violence and the subsequent murder of her abusive partner. The lens of complex personhood (Gordon, 1997) has been applied as a method for understanding "Annie's" multiple identities of AI woman, victim of intimate partner violence, mother, and convicted felon. The aim of the current case study was to uncover implicit and explicit meanings embedded in the experiences of moving from a victim of IPV to an offender by applying a framework of hermeneutic phenomenology as the methodology. Three relational themes emerged from the interview data: "Getting out of Hand," "They're in my Footstep all the Way Now," and "What's a Miranda Right"? Lastly, this article begins an exploration into the complex link between victimization and offending as it applies to one battered woman.   [More]  Descriptors: Family Violence, American Indians, Phenomenology, American Indian Culture

Roppolo, Kimberly (2007). Vision, Voice, and Intertribal Metanarrative: The American Indian Visual-Rhetorical Tradition and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, American Indian Quarterly. American Indian cultures tend to be right hemispheric because of the ways in which they acquire knowledge. Over the thousands of years that American Indian peoples have lived in this hemisphere, strong visual rhetorics were developed, because of this tendency to engage in visual thinking and the socioeconomic need to communicate with others who might not speak the same language or who share situations in which speech was either inappropriate or dangerous. Because of the unique cultural developments in Native America and because of the relationship of that heritage to their contemporary literature, the author deems it important to examine how image has acted and continues to act "as" and "with" text in their cultures. In this article, the author provides a few examples of how some visual rhetorics have evolved over the years and shows their continuing importance in Native American life and literature. In addition, the author examines the visual rhetoric of Leslie Marmon Silko's "Almanac of the Dead" by focusing briefly on one image: the snake. The author chose the snake, along with Silko's "Almanac of the Dead," because she saw it as being metonymic for the intertribal metanarrative with much slipping between signifiers.   [More]  Descriptors: Rhetoric, American Indians, Visualization, American Indian Culture

James, Nancy Ellen (2011). Engaging the Whole Mind: Transmediation between Pictures and Print Construction of Reading/Writing Understanding by Ten African American Second Grade Students in Response to Art, Read-Alouds, and Small Group Experiences, ProQuest LLC. The purpose of this study was to investigate the ways second grade children signaled the meanings they made from pictures and print and to identify ways they signaled new meanings when transmediations between these two semiotic systems took place. The study was a mixed methods study using qualitative methods in a case study format for the first three questions, supported by a quantitative component for the fourth question. The researcher was also the teacher, teaching and collecting data from ten second grade, African American students in an after-school bookmaking program. The ten participants were selected because they all made very low reading scores on standardized tests. Observations, video and audio recordings, memos, artifacts, interviews, surveys and standardized test scores served as data collection vehicles.   American public schools were founded on Western European written rhetoric. Because of the importance of reading, writing, math and science, a verbal mode of teaching dominates, placing great value on left-brained thinking. Unfortunately, verbocentric pedagogy is not meeting the needs of our constantly changing culture. Oral rhetoric from indigenous cultures such as American Indians, or minorities such as African Americans are based in the arts; dance, music, storytelling, and visual art of all kinds. These are right-brained functions. They are also the natural and preferred methods of communication for young children of all cultures. This study will enable the reader to reflect on their beliefs about engaging the whole mind, placing verbal and visual semiotics on an equal, parallel and complimentary plane.   [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.%5D   [More]  Descriptors: African American Students, Standardized Tests, Rhetoric, Video Technology

Waszak, Susan (2010). Contemporary Hurdles in the Application of the Indian Child Welfare Act, American Indian Culture and Research Journal. In 1978 Congress passed an astonishing piece of legislation that gave Native American tribes a considerable amount of jurisdiction over matters of child custody and the adoption of their children. In 1976, the Association of American Indian Affairs gathered statistics relevant to the adoption of Indian children that Congress found "shocking [and that] cries out for sweeping reform at all levels of government." The statistics revealed that Indian children were roughly 20 percent more likely than non-Indian children to be taken from their Native homes, and the vast majority of these children were placed with non-Indian families. The Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) sought to remedy this situation by vesting jurisdiction with tribal courts when one of their children was in danger of leaving the tribal community through state or private efforts to terminate an Indian parent's parental rights. In this commentary, the author outlines the procedures set out in the ICWA, explores jurisdictional issues that arise when an Indian child custody case evoking the ICWA is brought to court, investigates successful attempts of the state courts in diminishing the strength of the act through judicially created exceptions–namely the "existing Indian family exception" and the "good cause" exception, and analyzes the tribes' equally successful attempts to use tribal custom as a tool in formulating their own unique rule of law in governing the affairs of their children.   [More]  Descriptors: Parent Rights, American Indians, State Courts, Child Welfare

Shirley, Valerie J. (2004). On the Right Path: Over the Past 20 Years, Colleges and Universities Continue to Experience an Increase in the Number of American Indian-Alaska Native Students Receiving Degrees, Black Issues in Higher Education. Accounting for only 1 percent of the total U.S. population, American Indians have a 60 percent to 70 percent high school dropout rate, the highest among all minority groups. At the same time, however, more American Indian students than ever are graduating from high school and leaving their home communities behind in pursuit of a higher education. Leaving their communities behind also means trying to maintain a balance between their indigenous values and beliefs and that of the dominant culture's. And despite their high dropout rates and the fact that 30 percent of the American Indian population lives below the poverty line, they recognize that education is the key to a better future. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (1999-2000), there has been tremendous growth in the number of earned degrees in postsecondary institutions serving American Indian and Alaska Native students. Descriptors: Enrollment Trends, Postsecondary Education, College Bound Students, Poverty

Pember, Mary Annette (2007). A Painful Remembrance, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. Many in Indian country have expressed that the trauma from the boarding school experience continues to terrorize the hearts of American Indians. Although much has been written about this history that looms so large in the North American indigenous experience, it remains an obscure topic in mainstream America. Dr. Eulynda J. Toledo, a member of the Dine tribe and project director of a grant from the National Institute for Disability Research and Rehabilitation, is working to bring attention to the "intergenerational trauma" of the boarding school era through the recently founded Boarding School Healing Project. Toledo and her colleagues maintain that many of the social ills plaguing current generations of American Indians, including sexual abuse, child abuse, violence towards women and substance abuse can be traced to the generations of abuse experienced at Indian boarding schools. Toledo describes intergenerational trauma as posttraumatic stress disorder that has been passed down through generations. The project's goals are four-fold: healing, education, documentation and accountability. According to their mission statement, "the project is a starting point to address child sexual abuse. By framing abuse as the continuing effects of human rights abuses perpetrated by government policy, they hope to take the shame away from talking about these issues and provide space for communities to address the problems and heal."   [More]  Descriptors: Substance Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Child Abuse, Boarding Schools

Trujillo, Octaviana V.; Alston, Denise A. (2005). A Report on the Status of American Indians and Alaska Natives in Education: Historical Legacy to Cultural Empowerment, National Education Association. On October 27, 2004, the National Education Association (NEA) joined with the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) to host "Moving from Research to Practice: A Summit on Indian Students." Over 100 American Indian and Alaska Native education practitioners and researchers from Alaska to Mississippi gathered to share their knowledge of effective educational strategies for American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) students. Presentations focused on four themes: Using Native Language and Culture to Promote Success in Indian Students; Preparing Educators to Be Effective Supports for Student Achievement; Reaching Out to the Community to Create Success; and Promoting Policies that Benefit Indian Students. This report draws, in part, on the presentations and discussions held at the Summit, and explores several aspects of the American Indian/Alaska Native historical, social, and cultural experiences as they relate to the development of Indian education. Using these experiences as a context, the report suggests a few broad strategies for improving the status of AI/AN education and provides recommendations for action. Multiple resources round out the text to encourage further investigation into how to make a positive impact on the education of American Indian and Alaska Native students. Contains the following: (1) Endnotes; (2) History Timeline: Selected Dates in Indian History and Indian Education; and (3) Resources. [This report was written with the assistance of Douglas Martin.]   [More]  Descriptors: American Indians, Alaska Natives, Empowerment, American Indian Education

Willows, Noreen D.; Marshall, Dru; Raine, Kim; Ridley, Denise C. (2009). Diabetes Awareness and Body Size Perceptions of Cree Schoolchildren, Health Education Research. Native American Indians and First Nations are predisposed to obesity and diabetes. A study was done to understand Cree schoolchildren's diabetes awareness and body size perceptions in two communities that had diabetes awareness-raising activities in the Province of Quebec, Canada. Children (N = 203) in grades 4-6 were classified into weight categories using measured heights and weights and grouped on diabetes awareness based on dichotomous responses to the question "Do you know what diabetes is?" Children selected a drawing of an American Indian child whom they felt most likely to get diabetes and described their body size perception using a closed response question. Although 64.5% of children were overweight or obese, most (60.1%) children considered their body size to be "just right", with 29.6% considering it "too big" and 10.3% considering it "too small". A minority (27.6%) of children had diabetes awareness. These children were more likely than children without diabetes awareness to consider their body size too big (42.9 versus 24.5%) and to choose an obese drawing as at risk for diabetes (85.7 versus 63.3%, odds ratio 3.48 and 95% confidence interval 1.53-7.91). Culturally appropriate health education programs to increase schoolchildren's diabetes awareness and possibility to have a healthy body weight are important.   [More]  Descriptors: Foreign Countries, Obesity, Health Education, American Indians

Cooper, Kenneth J.; Pyrillis, Rita; Rosario, Ruben; Stuart, Reginald; Zinngrabe, Elaine (2007). Media Matters, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. This article presents five vignettes, written by veteran journalists, that focus on the current and future state of journalism. Despite almost daily reports of media consolidation and newspaper layoffs, the journalists sound a cautionary but optimistic tone about the industry. They weigh in on everything from the threats to diversity to the future of how the news is delivered. These vignettes are: (1) "The Many Sides of Media Consolidation," by Kenneth J. Cooper; (2) "Coverage of American Indians Is Usually Wrong," by Rita Pyrillis; (3) "From Watchdog to Lapdog," by Ruben Rosario; (4) "Job Prospects Limited, But There With Right Skills," by Reginald Stuart; and (5) "Reinventing and Sustaining Journalism With New Media," by Elaine Zinngrabe. Graphics show (A) Minority Representation in the Newsroom by Race/Ethnicity and Job Category, 2007; and (B) Regional Comparison of Minority Newsroom Employment, 2007.   [More]  Descriptors: Journalism Education, American Indians, Journalism, Job Layoff