Caring for Our People Training (COPT) Philosophy on Teaching: A Dakota View Erich Longie

My philosophy on education changes every time I write it down, but there are some beliefs that never change and those are;

• It is a great honor to teach, therefore teaching comes with great responsibility.
• A teacher must never get angry with students, instead teachers must exhibit patience and understanding even under the most adverse of situations.
• A teacher must never judge, or condemn a student, that is left to other professions. For once a teacher becomes judgmental toward a student, the ability to effectively teach that student is greatly diminished.
• Teachers spend considerable length of time with students and have tremendous influence of student and as a result teach character without realizing it. Therefore, a teacher’s character must be above reproach, both professionally and personally.
  

I believe in using analogies in my teaching to explain the relevance of the concept. I teach critical thinking by describing how different their lives will be if they get an education. Because our student are not familiar, or do not have enough background information regarding the subject matter, I spend a considerable about of time covering background material. Finally, I motivate the adult students by vividly explaining how they are ultimately responsibly for the well being of their children. If they really love their children then they would want their children to have the opportunities other children have. In order for that to happen they better obtain their GED to get a good paying job.

Canassatego, an Onondaga leader, whose people were members of the Iroquois League, expressed criticisms of the College of William and Mary when the college attempted to educate young men from his tribe. Canassatego said "Young people who were formerly brought up at the Colleges, when they came back to us, were ignorant of every means of living in the woods" and "were totally good for nothing" and they "spoke our Language imperfectly" (de Larios, 2003). The insistence by the tribes to retain their languages and their dissatisfaction with the result of education continues to this day. However, this does not mean that Indian people rejected education totally. While they viewed it with suspicion, or as a necessary evil, most agreed they needed education if their lives and their children’s lives were going to improve.

Personal Experiences
Most Native Americans my age remember parents who regretted never getting an education, so they really pushed their children to finish high school; going to college wasn’t even considered at that time. My mother, who was nine years old before she had the chance to learn and understand English, raised me. She did finish grade school and had completed only a year or two of high school, yet she was always admonishing me when I wanted to stay home from school. "Hobo Joe, you are going to finish high school and get a job, you are not going to be like these other lazy no-good Indian men around here." While she encouraged me to get an education, she had no idea of what an education was, or what an educated person was. Indeed, her only understanding of education was that it would help you get a job, therefore not becoming a "big Indian".

This ignorance of higher education was passed down to me. While attending high school, I did not have a clue of what a college education was. In my mind it was a vague, extremely difficult version of high school, which was difficult enough, that I would never be able to attend, much less be successful at. My friend Dr. Carol Davis, who is Vice-President of Turtle Mountain Community College, has a similar story regarding her parents©&Mac246; attitude toward education. "The Turtle Mountain Reservation got their first high school in the mid-1940's. That is why so many of our children attended the boarding school at Fort Totten. My dad attended the government boarding school there up to grade 10. My mother attended Little Flower Mission (St. Michael's) in grade school." Carol’s mother dropped out of school in the 10th grade. Her dad later went to Flandreau Indian School, a boarding school for Indian high school students, for one year. Neither of her parents received a high school diploma.

Carol goes on to say that each time her parents talked about school, they would regret not finishing high school. So, they pushed her and her siblings to finished school. There were six children in her family along with three foster children. All the children finished high school (one stepbrother got a General Equivalency Diploma) and went on to trade school for additional training. "However," Carol says, "There wasn't a lot of thought given to what we would do with that education. There weren't any jobs on the reservation." To be honest, she says, "I was sure at one time that I would become an alcoholic and I didn't even care. I saw my friends accepting this as a way of life, so I didn't give it much thought one way or another."

Carol, like most Native Americans at that time went to boarding school says, "There was absolutely no connection to jobs there." While most Indians went away to boarding school, a few others like myself went to non-Indian boarding schools. Regardless of where we went to school, we were isolated from mainstream society and lived in a world of our own. In regard to attending boarding school, Carol says, "We could have been on the moon and no one would have known the difference. The only connection to the outside world was through sports. The boys played basketball and all girls wanted to become cheerleaders."

Carol’s, and other Native Americans, myself included, stories are so similar that I will write the rest of the personal experiences as one: Our recollection of education was that it was designed to prepare us for life away from the reservation. But the reservation was all that we knew. Most of our parents were unemployed. Some made a living trapping muskrats and mink, chopping wood, helping farmers with their chores, selling June berries in the summer, and picking potatoes and beets in the fall. These occupations were not in our textbooks. They were survival jobs. Our parents wanted nice things, and those who had a few luxuries worked hard for them.

The majority of our parents didn’t work until we were teenagers. I remember my mother and her sisters sitting around our kitchen table talking in Dakota, singing, and laughing --which didn't fit into the picture that education was preparing us for. Most of our parents played cards, sewed, and cooked (when we had food) for recreation. Alcoholism was so prevalent on the reservation that even those of us whose parents didn’t drink were affected. So we were all witness to a lot of dysfunction while we were growing up.

It was hard to concentrate on your assignments when you didn't relate to them and the instructors. We could not relate to factories, stores, and companies we studied about in textbooks. There weren't any of these jobs at home. As a result, the few of us who finished high school did so with a "D" average. Yet, some of us now have four-year degrees, Masters degrees and Doctor degrees. Who would have thought that when we were in high school? Not us and certainly not our teachers.

How do you relate to the white man's education when you are living in a completely separate world? We could look into the white world, but we couldn't relate to it. We didn't have enough experience with their world to know what we were looking at. They could look into our world, but we had no idea of what their world consisted of. This disconnect still exists at some level today. We still are wondering right now why we are killing ourselves trying to learn from the white man's perspective.

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