On most measures of educational success, Native American students trail every other racial and ethnic subgroup of students. To explore the reasons why, Education Week sent a writer, a photographer, and a videographer to American Indian reservations in South Dakota and California earlier this fall. Their work is featured in this special package of articles, photographs, and multimedia. Commentary essays offer additional perspectives.
Education in Indian Country: Running in Place
December 4, 2013 Education Week
Article by Lesli A. Maxwell
Like many Native American students, Legend Tell Tobacco, a 10-year-old on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation, must outrun the odds against his educational success
Ten hours after leaving in the dark for the 15-mile ride to Loneman School, Legend Tell Tobacco bounds down the steps of the yellow school bus and runs back home.
He takes off in a full sprint, black hair flopping, down Tobacco Road, a half-mile-long stretch of dirt named for his family. He slows to a trudge when the rutted road rises steeply to reach his house on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, a place where the promise of youth is often stifled by the probabilities of failure.
A starkly beautiful place, the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation is home to the Oglala Lakota Nation where education for most remains a yet-to-be fulfilled promise for moving families out of profound poverty.
Legend just turned 10 and is in the 4th grade, and yet, he must constantly confront obstacles that could cause him to stumble into one of the grim statistical categories for which Pine Ridge—like much of the nation’s Indian Country—is well known:
High school dropout.
Unemployed.
Dead before 50.
Legend grins widely when announcing that he reads the same “chapter books” as 7th and 8th graders. He likes math, too, especially multiplication.
“Most of all,” he says, “I love to run.”
After a long day at Isna Wica Owayawa, the Lakota name for Loneman School, the laughing shrieks of his cousins beckon. But his aunt, Mary Tobacco, asks about homework. “I don’t have any,” he says quietly, stubbing his silver sneakers into the dirt. She raises an eyebrow and asks again. “No, really,” he says.
“Be back at six for dinner,” she tells him firmly, as he darts off to play in the horse corral.
Ms. Tobacco, a college graduate, prays this nagging and nurturing will keep her nephew on a course to high school graduation, a college degree, and a decent job. More urgently, she prays she’ll get a call from Red Cloud, the private Jesuit school where she believes Legend would get the best shot at succeeding. He’s on the waiting list.
“The two most important things I want for Legend,” she says, “are for him to get his education and for him not to drink. But I don’t know if I can completely protect him from ending up on a path that so many other youth on this reservation take.”
On the 2.8 million-acre Pine Ridge Indian Reservation—home to nearly 40,000 members of the Oglala Lakota Sioux nation—alcoholism and suicide, especially among young people, occur at alarmingly high rates. Families that have been poor since the U.S. government forced tribes onto reservations more than 120 years ago see few prospects for breaking out of seven or eight generations of profound poverty.
Outrunning those odds for Legend and other American Indian youths living on and off reservations is perpetually challenging. Over the past decade, as the high-stakes school accountability era saw every other racial and ethnic subgroup of students make steady, if small, improvements in education outcomes, Native American youths, on the whole, stalled or lost ground.
“The state of American Indian education is a disaster,” says David Beaulieu, a professor of educational policy and community studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe-White Earth.
Read more here.
