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Early College Initiative and Northwest Indian College programs aim to reverse poor educational outcomes for Native students

By Christina Twu*

When Colville tribal member Laurie Sison became a mother at 16 in White Swan, Wash., she dropped out of high school and received her GED.

Later in her adult life, Sison wanted to get an associate’s degree at Yakima Valley Community College, but her abusive ex-husband threatened to slash her face if he ever saw her talking to another man on a school campus.

She became shy, nervous, alienated.

Later, when she moved to Auburn and remarried, she tried taking a few courses at Green River Community College. But nothing seemed to stick until she came across Antioch University Seattle’s First Peoples’ Native educator program at the Muckleshoot Tribal College. The tribal college is one of the region’s emerging efforts to help fight the persistent barriers facing Native students.

Still, Sison’s debut presentation at First Peoples proved to be a daunting task.

“It lasted like 45 seconds,” Sison recalls. “I rushed through it, and then, I was done. Now I can get up and do a presentation and speak to people to their faces like a teacher. They’ve made a teacher out of me. And people tell me that that was always there, they just got it out of me.”

Her newfound confidence was a result of the personal nature of class structure, where the stories, experiences and perspectives of each student were drawn upon to enhance group learning.

Historically, the American school system has had a dismal track record in relation to Native American students. As late as the 1930s, Native children were forcibly taken from their communities to attend federally funded boarding schools.

Capt. Richard Pratt, who opened the first off-reservation Indian school in 1879 at an abandoned Pennsylvania military post, famously said that his goal in forcing assimilation upon Native American children was to “kill the Indian, not the man” in them. For decades, his reprehensible legacy would be replicated at other boarding schools where young children were forbidden from speaking their language, and parenting’s closest cousin resembled a rigid, disciplinarian and often abusive hand, as Native youth suffered a bleak existence away from the warmth and education of family and culture.

But lately, more culturally specific educational resources have been available to Native American and Alaskan Native children, as well as Native adult learners. The landmark Indian Education Act of 1972, which was amended to support teacher training programs the following year, paved the way for more Native educators in school systems.

In more recent years, the success of Native education has been bolstered by national advocacy efforts, such as The Early College High School Initiative, which Antioch University Seattle’s Center for Native Education (CNE) has applied in seven high-school sites across Washington state since 2004 and at four other sites in three additional states: two in Oregon, and one each in California and Alaska. It is the first college-access effort of its kind specifically designated for Native American youth.

Another, the First Peoples’ Program, launched in 2002 and housed at Muckleshoot Tribal College in Auburn, is designed primarily for adult learners who are seeking post-secondary education to become teachers in tribal and public schools and other Native youth communities.

Not only do these secondary and post-secondary education models prove to be culturally relevant and seated in the heart of Native communities, they also play a part in combating Native dropout rates and making degrees more accessible for adults who wish to continue to pass on Native teachings as educators.

At Ferndale High School near the Lummi Reservation in Bellingham, where the Early college model program was implemented in 2004, dropout rates of Native high school students decreased from 69 percent to 16 percent after the first semester, according to Ferndale High School records. On the WASL test that year, 92 percent of Native students met reading standards, compared to 73 percent of the general student population. WASL test scores overall increased over 2004-2005 scores the following school year, although exact percentages are still unknown. Even when Native students were taking more challenging early college courses, grade point averages also rose after the program was implemented.

“We have seen Native students accruing anywhere from five to 40-some college credits during their high school years, which is a phenomenon that has not been observed before,” says Linda Campbell, a St. Regis Mohawk descendent who is the executive director of the CNE.

In 2004, Antioch received a $6.1 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to expand its refined “Early Colleges for Native Youth” model nationally, adding 10 sites throughout states such as California, Texas, New York, Alaska, North Carolina, Oregon and New Mexico. The process of developing these sites started this year and is expected to be complete by 2008.

Next year, the U.S. Department of the Interior will contribute $157.4 million to the construction and maintainence of tribal schools across the nation, and a portion of it will go towards a new K-12 tribal school on the Muckleshoot Reservation slated for construction in 2008. Early College High School program is supported by grants and the First Peoples’ programs receive no direct grants or funding.

Early college focus

Before the new wave of programs catered to Native American learners, the need for high school dropout intervention as well as post-secondary educational support was glaringly obvious. Nationally, Native American students have the highest dropout and lowest college completion rates of all ethnic groups. Researchers in a 2003 Manhattan Institute study found that only three in five Native American students graduate from high school. Of those who do go on to higher education after high school, less than 3 percent complete a four-year degree. In contrast, about 30 percent of Caucasian students who pursue bachelor’s degrees complete them, according to research by the National Center for Education Statistics for the same year.

The Early College High School Initiative Program caters to this specific and dual dilemma, which under the design model, exists as a partnership between tribal leaders, school districts and local colleges. The emphasis is culturally infused curriculum geared toward students who do not necessarily see themselves on the road to college, and many courses rely heavily on local tribal narrative and perspectives.

According to Susan Given-Seymour, who develops and runs special programs at Northwest Indian College on the Lummi Reservation, the early college sites across the state do not function like dual-credit systems such as the Running Start program. For starters, Running Start and Early College High School serve different needs.

“Running Start students are usually students that already think of themselves as college-bound, so they can just fit right into the existing college classes, whereas Early College is deemed for those students who don’t think of themselves as college-bound,” Given-Seymour explains. “And so the school district will start working with kids and learn to start identifying them as young as fourth or fifth grade, to start talking to them and try to get them to start seeing themselves as college material. They give them extra classes in the middle school years. And then by high school, the belief is that they’ll be ready to be taking some actual college courses.”

CNE school development specialist Dawn Stevens, who is a Steilacoom tribal member and a longtime educator and administrator in the Shelton school district, attributes the success of the early college model to all-inclusive curriculum and partnerships that balance the interests of tribal elders, the college and the high-school site. She especially commends tribal involvement in the classroom. “The (early college) learning process builds on community, builds on Native students having a guest speaker come in — someone from their own tribe — and having pride, or having an adult person from the tribe visit and walk across campus,” Stevens says.

At the end of the day, a strong sense of cultural identity and pride woven throughout lectures, coursework and extracurricular activities are the very cornerstones by which Native education programs succeed.

The Role of Cultural Identity in Education

Even before Northwest Indian College offered early college courses at Ferndale High School, Victor “Turtle” Johnson, 26, was taking extended-learning courses.

At the time, he attended an accredited summer program called NASA Seaquest, organized by Northwest Indian College. This was designed to help students catch up on high-school credit and gain job experience while engaging in their community. The hands-on summer course put special emphasis on environmental science and water quality.

Johnson’s father always encouraged higher education for his children. Before he died 12 years ago, his father suggested that Johnson look into NASA Seaquest. He took his father’s advice, but his desire to pursue higher education had not been fully realized.

During the majority of the school year at Ferndale High School, he “slipped through” his classes. “It didn’t really seem like I had an identity there,” says Johnson, who now attends Northwest Indian College and serves on the Lummi Indian Business Council in Natural Resources. “At any rate, I just kind of learned to blend in. I didn’t really make the best grades ever. I think I graduated (in 1999) with a 1.98 (GPA).”

He remembers very little about any mention of Native Americans in his history classes.

“It seemed like in history, we only learned about Europeans and the Industrial Revolution,” Johnson remembers. “It was like those were the two greatest things ever. (Native Americans) didn’t really have an identity there.”

Another “greatest thing ever” he remembers discussing in school was the California Gold Rush.

“In history (class), they don’t show that when the ’49-ers were coming into this area, they were killing everyone in sight that wasn’t a gold miner; they were killing Native Americans for target practice,” Johnson says. “They didn’t show that they were being kicked off their own lands. I wasn’t even shown anything like that up until now. That just gives me more fuel to try and find out who I am and what I need to do to stop making it feel like I don’t exist, like Native Americans don’t exist.”

The Seaquest program was another story.

“For me, I always had Northwest Indian College to fall back on,” Johnson remembers. “They always had a cool program where I learned all week Monday through Thursday and went on a field trip on Friday. To me, that was more interesting. It was more focused … You’re reading and learning about what’s going to happen on Friday. There was a goal at the end of the day. We’re closer to getting to know more about whales, and we’re learning about how to write about whales, and that sort of thing.”

His summer experience at NASA Seaquest got him a two-year internship at the 29 Palms Band of Mission Indians in California, where he learned Geographic Information Systems (GIS), water sampling and techniques in a state-certified laboratory.

When he came back to Lummi Reservation in 2001, he immediately came on board in the Natural Resources department of its business council, where he started out as a restoration technician. Meanwhile, his son Kamron Johnson, now 5, had just been born. After Johnson and Kamron’s mother split a year later, he went to court to be awarded partial custody of his son.

The long nights with his lawyer discussing child custody laws were over, Johnson says he “had nothing to fight for,” and nothing to keep him on his toes. So, he went to school. In fall 2005, Johnson relearned history and discovered unknown treasures in his community.

“Learning about plants and geology and having a lot of that here in our own backyard, you can’t get that in L.A.,” he laughs. “You can’t go in L.A. and see plants growing right next to someone’s house that was natural. Here, you can drive down to the beach and see where all of our ancestors lived. If you go to Portage Island, you can still see where some of the small houses, some of the structure floorboards or corners of the houses are still there. Going to high school in Ferndale High School, I didn’t even know that that was even there, and then when I came to Northwest Indian College, they kind of just said, ‘Stop closing your eyes to all of this. This is right here in your backyard. Why aren’t you looking?’”

Another perk was having local elders come speak in the classes. “Sometimes when we were learning about history and stuff, we had some of the living history come in like (longtime activist and elder) Billy Frank, who’s one of the main voices for fishing rights,” Johnson says. “When he came in to speak, everyone was in awe.”

Unlike Johnson, his classmate Charene Alexander, 25, didn’t get any encouragement to go on to higher education.

She always knew she was “book smart.” That’s what her peers told her growing up on the Lummi Reservation in Bellingham, Wash. She was an honor student until her freshman year at Ferndale High School, when she started drinking heavily.
“My grades kind of decreased and no one ever really paid attention to it,” Alexander recalls.

High school was a blur. She doesn’t remember much of it, being “preoccupied with partying and living it up,” she explains. Her parents, both alcoholics, had split when she was 13. By then, she was already an alcoholic herself.

While Alexander’s father was off the reservation attempting sobriety, her mother was frequently out drinking. Alexander spent much of her time staying with friends and for the most part, without parents. For the remainder of high school, she just “slid through,” graduating with a 1.88 GPA. Within the next few years, she started trafficking cocaine in her community. By the time she gave birth to her son Kainan in 2001, she had become notorious for her role in the OxyContin narcotic epidemic that made headlines regionally. By 2002, she was actively smuggling the prescription drugs from Canada. As Alexander relates it, she was a forerunner of “an entire empire” in the local drug ring.

But she hit a dead end. At the U.S.-Canadian border in 2002, she was finally caught smuggling. Washington state charged her with possession of a controlled substance, while the Lummi Reservation charged her with delivery of a controlled substance as it considered banishing her off the reservation.

At 22, Alexander was incarcerated. By February of 2004, she was out on probation by and in transitional living for 10 months. Kainan was back in her care and she wanted to provide for him. By then, he was 2, and barely spoke. At the transitional living center, Alexander realized that she had to identify her goals before she got out.

In 2005, she decided to try Northwest Indian College. “People at Northwest Indian College know where I come from,” she explains. “I’m a felon, I’m an alcoholic, I’m an addict and I’m a single parent.”

Reclaiming her roots at Northwest Indian College and learning who she is as a Lummi woman gave her the direction she always lacked in youth. “To be Native American is to know your identity, to know who you are and where you’re going,” she explains. “Without that, you’re just lost.”

When Alexander started classes in 2005, she gained exposure to a part of her culture that had always been lost in her adolescence. “I know that tribal schools really work on that: teaching students their ancestors, their language, the types of food we used to live off of,” she elaborates. “All those important things were just drowned out for me and my family, by alcohol. There were just generations and generations of depression. It was hard to break that cycle. It still is today.”

Reflecting back on her high-school education, she saw that part of what was holding her back from “breaking the cycle” and investing in education was how she viewed herself and her people.

“There were always so many stereotypes that I felt were going on,” she says. “I remember points in my life where I was ashamed of living on the reservation and sometimes ashamed of being Native American because all of the things that were stated in the stereotypes: ‘(They’re) nothing but drunks,’ ‘they’re dumb Indians,’ ‘they’re weak.’ That’s what I saw…Right now, I’m just really learning to identify who I am and to be proud to be Native American and to learn how to walk in a way that’s going to bring pride to, not only myself and my family, but to all my people.”

Alexander is pursuing a human services degree at the college, and hopes to apply it towards vocational counseling within her Lummi community.

First Peoples’ Program

Operating under Antioch’s wide umbrella and about 110 miles south of Northwest Indian College, many education degrees are being pursued. The First Peoples’ students make their learning homes at Muckleshoot Tribal College, a cedar-sided building located on the reservation.

There, students earning bachelor’s and graduate teaching degrees can grow and learn in the same classroom and graduate at the same time, a cohort model that emphasizes community-driven learning.

Sherri Foreman, 39, and a mother of two, has been teaching technology courses for eight years at the tribal college, and now teaches sixth grade at the K-12 Muckleshoot Tribal School nearby. As a part of First Peoples’ first graduating cohort where she acquired her K-8 teacher certification for her bachelor’s in elementary-school preparation, she understands that learning should not be driven by competition. In her sixth-grade classroom, she applies the principles of diversity and acceptance.

“We should have expectations for our kids to do things, but the reality is, each student is different,” Foreman explains.

She likes to acknowledge those differences to build community in her classroom by saying to her students: “Right now, you’re at about this level. You read at this level, because that’s who you are…Your level of knowledge you have and what you know how to do will help your neighbor.”

“We don’t need to think that we all will test the same, that I’m not as good as you, because I didn’t get this grade,” she says. “They need to feel successful wherever they’re at and whatever they’re doing. When you individualize the learning, you’re asking them to improve themselves. You’re not asking them to be better than or to compete with their neighbor… but it’s: ‘Let’s look at where you’re at.’ ”

Sison, too, prefers the cohort system for the same reasons Foreman does: a more collectivistic approach in teaching. Sison, 43, graduated from First Peoples’ bachelor’s teaching program in June and recently started on her Master’s Program for Experienced Educators. She says that community-building is essential.

“(Cohort two) started together, and we ended together, and by the end of it – I mean, not even by the end of it – we were family,” Sison explains.

Before she started the program, Sison had never graduated from anything before, she says. During an education issues course she took focusing on the boarding school experience, Sison was able to personally identify with what she was learning about. The course shed light on her alcoholic mother’s troubled and hidden past, which she always wondered about growing up in White Swan, Wash.

“She lived up on the Colville Indian Reservation, and she went to St. Mary’s Mission School (now a tribal school), a Catholic boarding school,” says Sison. “And she ran from that school. She spoke our language and she left it there at boarding school because they don’t let you do that. It really scarred her.”

Sison’s mother would continue her “running away” act for the rest of her life, leaving a family behind. “She would leave us and we never knew why,” Sison remembers.

In light of her childhood experiences, Sison made the connection, however.

“She had a loving mom that she was taken from. There’s a lot of coercion in it. If you didn’t send your children (to boarding school), you didn’t get your food rations,” she explains. “And the land that my tribe was on was desert, not land that you can farm. So it was really a dire situation.

If you didn’t send your kids, none of them ate… That’s one of the main things that angers me and saddens me. There wasn’t that family connection – that loss of learning how to be a mom. Sure they taught them how to sew, they taught them how to cook, they taught them how to build wagons or whatever, and work on farms… they were teaching them to live like white farmers and white settlers. But those kids didn’t learn how to be a parent.”

The reading and films documenting boarding school abuse and unjust education policy had a profound effect on everyone in her cohort, so much that it inspired Sison to leave a box of tissues in the classroom for the next cohort.

Tracy Rector, 35, attended in the same cohort as Sison. An active storyteller herself and an award-winning filmmaker through the Seattle-based Native Lens/Longhouse Media, Rector says that the cohort model, more than other models, is designed as a support system for those who may not be inclined toward education.

“If you look at the First Peoples’ program, we don’t sit in rows, we sit in a circle so we can all face each other,” says Rector. “Everybody gets a chance to speak, everybody knows to listen, so if someone has something to say, we all listen, we don’t interrupt. If there’s an issue that comes up in a cohort, oftentimes we’ll have a talking circle, so we’ll all sit together, we’ll pass the feather along and everyone has a chance to speak. In that classroom, as a cohort, I think we’re close-knit because we took time to recognize each others’ stories. And I don’t think that’s always encouraged in traditional classrooms. (Here) everybody’s individual story contributes to the group’s success. And for our cohort, that’s how we made it through.”

Shared experience was also a connecting point between the cohort students.

“A large percentage of us never imagined themselves either in school or getting their master’s, so a lot of us started off really nervous and we came through it,” she explains. “If we’re in any other educational setting where it’s your standard classroom, you’re in rows, not everybody has a voice, not everybody knows that your auntie just passed or your child’s sick – what’s the incentive of putting yourself through something so rigorous as a master’s education in the middle of working full-time, raising kids, serving your community, and dealing with your own personal issues? … So for us, we’re able to make it through because we supported each other. We were that network that said, ‘Nope, you gotta keep going on. Nope, you’re doing this. It’s not just for you, it’s for your kids, it’s for your people.’”

Teaching — Not just a day job

For Will Bill Jr., involvement in Native education is in his blood. His father, Will Bill Sr., was the former director of education for the state, and the first certified teacher in the Auburn School District from the Muckleshoot Tribe.

Bill Jr. is also evidence of the historic gains of Native Americans in education. If it were not for the Indian Education Act of 1972, for example, Bill Jr. would not have money solidified for his position as the program director of the Huchoosedah Indian Education Program, funded by Seattle Public Schools.

Known for his hard-hitting and in-your-face curricula as an instructor with First Peoples’ (he tackles the boarding school experience in one of his education courses), Bill Jr. knows that teaching is all-encompassing, and a lot of it should happen outside of the classroom.

His work with the Huchoosedah Indian Education Program — which includes summer work/education courses for high school students, WASL prep classes, summer camp and free preschool — also includes seeing his students on the weekends on a canoe trip or something else equally culturally relevant.

Before students are ready to dive into difficult benchmark tests such as the WASL, they must culturally identify with and trust their teachers, Bill Jr. says. “I think students relate with me,” he says. “I use quite a bit of disclosure about who I am and where I’m from.”

A down-to-earth educator, Bill Jr. decided to pursue education at Antioch University Seattle, where he received his teacher’s certification in 1997. He says that being a distinguished professor who touts his accolades and research credentials is not going to yield respect and trust from Native youth. “In our community, that doesn’t impress people. That just turns them off,” he explains.

Gaining trust outside of the classroom is essential to student success, he says. (Teaching) is something that I live and practice,” he says. “It’s not just a day job for us (teachers)…I see my students on the weekends.”

Empowering the Next Generation

For Tracy Rector, a First Peoples’ graduate student and executive director of Native Lens/Longhouse Media, environmental justice and education are intertwined.

“We are rooted in this environment more than any other race of people,” says Rector, who is also a Native naturalist and education specialist at Seattle Art Museum. “Native American people came from this land, and I think that’s our first teacher. And so Native education — respecting one another, honoring community, recognizing diversity — these are all teachings from the tree people and the plant people. I always refer back to the teachings of the environment.”

In a modern world where youth are constantly on MySpace, listening to iPods and watching TV, Rector utilizes technology and filmmaking as a storytelling device to help empower youth and take back their media.

“Are there a lot of positive Native images out there in media? No, so let’s change that,” she tells them. “If you have a kid that watches TV six hours a day, we tell them, ‘You know what? You are an expert. You watch TV. You know what the shots are. You know how to tell a story. How do you tell your own story and reach out to the broader public? You know what needs to be said.’ So we use that experience of being connected in technology and encourage them to shape it in their own way to tell their own story from a cultural perspective, and encourage them to take back those images and stereotypical presentations of what being Native American is or what being Indian is, and put their own images out there…We’ve figured out a way to infuse modern technology with cultural tradition.”

Longhouse Media’s most recent project is a documentary led by three teenage boys from the Swinomish tribe near La Conner. Assigned by the Environment Protection Agency and National Geographic to foster youth advocacy in preserving the environment, the film “March Point” investigates oil refineries on reservations. The film focuses on biotoxins from the refineries that seep into salmon and shellfish, traditional coastal foods that are now destroyed cultural resources for Native communities.

By interviewing elders in the Swinomish community, the three boys uncover the crucial connection points between resource degradation, cultural disintegration and poor health in Native communities, says Rector.

“The kids are making the link that that pollution is also part of cultural degradation: ‘So people can no longer eat traditional foods and their bodies react negatively to junk food. Why is that? Well, it’s because First People in the Puget Sound, you know, Coast Salish people, never ate hamburgers and Big Macs and French fries. They ate salmon and clams and oysters.’” Rector explains. “And so (the kids) saw the direct link to help diabetes, to depression, and from that depression link, they saw people not being able to have traditional jobs because the salmon is so depleted, and then that linked to drugs and alcoholism, for instance. When there’s drugs and alcoholism, who’s there to support the youth and what are those role models telling the youth? And so the youth start doing that. And so the youth are making that direct link.”

In June, Rector taught an intertribal and intercultural digital filmmaking workshop in partnership with Seattle International Film Festival, where 36 youth received college credit from Northwest Indian College. They only had 36 hours to film the resulting “Fly Filmmaking.”

Rector, who has worked with youth in film since January of 2005, believes that self-empowerment and education start with higher expectations and raising the bar for Native youth, as demonstrated in the workshop.

“We set the bar really high, and that’s something I learned in my education program,” she says. “If you dumb down the education process, who does that serve? If you set the bar really high and offer a ton of support for the student or participant to reach that level, they’re going to make it.

And it’s just like proving that with Native kids. They’re natural storytellers, they’re natural observers. It’s like they totally get this stuff quickly, and it’s really powerful for them. Even the fly filmmaking festival at SIFF, I think the adults got something like 10 days to make their films and our kids got 36 hours. So we totally treated them like adults. We set that bar high. We told them what was expected of them. It was scary how smoothly it went… but the thing was, they said that they felt respected because we knew that they could do it, and we gave them something that was challenging.”

The youth she has been working with, says Rector, are already challenging stereotypical images of Native Americans in film and TV just by being behind the lens.

“A great majority of people feel that Native Americans are antiquated figures of the past like the dinosaurs or the wagon trains,” she says. “Oftentimes, it always deals with stereotypes: ‘Native Americans were here. Native Americans did this.’ Native Americans always wear huge feather headdress regalia, always have war paint on, are always on a horse. All of them live in tipis … A lot of stories that we tell are traditional stories, yeah, because that’s important and that’s part of cultural reclamation. But we also tell stories that say, ‘Yeah, we’re here, we’re a thriving culture, we have cultural ways that reflect tradition, but we also live in homes that have electricity.” … So our stories show that our youth are smart, are active, are creative, are dealing with issues that many other kids deal with, and also are culturally engaged in their communities.”

Not only are they culturally engaged and dealing with contemporary issues, Rector also believes that the generation of youth she works with is moving past the addictions and historical grievances of their parents and grandparents.

“Sherman Alexie speaks really well to this. Every time you get a call in the middle of the night, someone’s died. And it’s been part of reservation experience in the last few decades. There’s lots of deaths that occurred and it’s due to the trauma, and I feel it’s due to the trauma of the boarding school experience, so our kids are speaking to this,” she observes. “They’re speaking to the fact that no 10-year-old kid should have already been through treatment, no 10-year-old kid should have already been to 50 funerals in their lifetime. So our kids really address that in their films and this (represents) their experiences…This is the first generation of students who are working out of that cycle.”

Stepping Forward

In providing culturally specific programs for indigenous communities, and helping to close the access and achievement gap for many Native students, educators also give students a strong cultural identity and the resources to stand tall.

As the younger generation rises up to reclaim their land and history, they also redefine what it means to be a contemporary Native American. New words are birthed: Achievement, pride and progress.

Not that the haunting images of abuse and boarding school scandals are gone. But they’re beginning to be overcome.

*This article appeared in the September 2006 edition of ColorsNW magazine, and is reprinted here by permission of ColorsNW. Visit the ColorsNW website at www.colorsnw.com.

Read more about the First Peoples' program here. Read more about the Center for Native Education here.

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