The Importance of Native Education

Yet educational studies, research and documentation on Native Education is wasting away hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is money that could be used to solve the problem instead of surveying it decade after decade, with no real results or actual funding to correct the issue. 

The system is geared to continually taking funding intended for Native education and earmarking it for other intentions, stealing away the future of children of all Nations. There are many excuses to why this has happened in the past, and continues happening. There are even some suggestions as to what needs to be done to correct the problem. But there is little to no accountability regarding those who make the decisions or implement them. No accountability as our youth continue to drop out of underfunded schools, then turn to gangs, substance abuse and by far the worst, the epidemic of Native youth suicide. Youth suicide that should be, could be, and can be prevented with an outlook for a better future, a single hope for change. 

Don't our children deserve to have hopes, dreams, and a chance at a better future? Do Native children have the right to feel like they belong? To feel like they are worth the value of a human being?

If so, then I ask one last question. Why isn't funding being handled in a balanced and accountable structure when dealing with the educational needs of all children equally? 

If the response is that it is a difficult challenge to address, then may I make a suggestion? Remove ineffective leadership and place qualified, educated Native scholars in positions responsible for the administration of funds aimed at ‘equality applied equally’ when dealing with our distinctive educational needs. Remove the thinking that the solutions are too difficult, for they can never be of any good in solving the large division that has been created by educational failure, within our governments.

It is not difficult to administer in an equitable manner.

Ask any parent or grandparent who has to cook for 6 children in a home with black mold, inadequate insulation, no heat, dirt floors, or running water. Even the uneducated, by society’s standards, can figure it out. 

The tool to our children's success, all children's success, is a complete education so they become the leaders that move us into the future. Education is key to furthering our "skill." Education is our foundation of hope, and it is the tool of survival for our Native communities.

As important as it is to listen to our Elders, to the stories of where we are from, it is equally important to listen to our youth as to where we are headed in the future. We need to educate our children and instill within them the importance of coming back into their communities and begin to move us into the future. Such foundations can be established with creating Youth Councils today. In doing so we begin to teach our future leaders that their role is a ‘call to duty’ and not a step up in power. We must take seriously our responsibility to teach them their tribal responsibility to all living things.

Instead, we are burying our youth, trying to keep them out of gangs, trying to keep them off drugs, and away from alcohol. We are trying to stop government agencies from stealing our children because of an induced poverty as they profit from the adoptions of once again stolen Native children.

We must rise above what a Native has to endure everyday, living in a deteriorating existence. We must then fight like nothing else matters when we fight for the education of our children.

Our Nations prior to colonization won wars by skill, not by mass murder or genocide. We simply ‘out skilled’ and left with that honor. We must look at education as the lesson to that skill and demand our children have a chance to further their skill sets in the future, as every other ethnicity will, all the while knowing we are not any more or any less important than the next human being.

We as a people need to stand up and be heard, use our voices and take back our individualism that makes our image collectively profitable for so many other people, other than the very people it is intended for.

Woliwon.

 Images from Website Tonight Image Library

Banner Graphic: www.firstpeople.us