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Friday, April 6, 2001
1:30-3:00
Kilian Room--500 HL
Reception Immediately Following
ABSTRACT: The history of American Indian education is a dismal one at best. Intimately intertwined with the larger project of American colonization--of both land and its Native inhabitants--American Indian education during the past century has been the site of numerous, well-documented atrocities committed in the names of "civilization," "assimilation," and "learning." The very mission of Indian education has been, for the most part, genocidal; to coin a popular phrase from the nineteenth century, the educational project of schools was to "kill the Indian and save the man." Today Indian tribes find themselves in a new era, with new power, and questions about the state and mission of Indian education today are frequently asked. What kinds of schools and colleges do we want for our people? What will be taught there? How will we teach? Most importantly, how will education affect us as Native people in the future?
These kinds of questions are creating spaces for new and exciting discussions and practices of Indian education. Many educators and schools are bringing traditional knowledges into modern classrooms; others are focusing on strengthening indigenous language use; still others are explicitly making and teaching new, hybridized forms of knowledge. Many of these developments are contentious, so this presentation will examine both new innovations and the struggles which surround them against a larger backdrop of history, culture, and politics. In particular, the educational question of literacy will be addressed through an autoethnographic reflection on its arrival to the Leech Lake Ojibwe reservation in Minnesota during the nineteenth century, how it changed people, the problems it has posed (and continues to pose) to traditional Ojibwe culture, and its pedagogical instruction today at a tribal college. Overall, we will learn that today's struggles over Indian education are, at the root, both a response to history and a larger process of self-determination.
Scott Lyons (Ojibwe) hails from Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, where he still maintains a residence. Scott has taught writing and literature at such varied institutions as the University of North Dakota, Miami University (Ohio), and Leech Lake Tribal College, and he has also worked for several Indian youth programs in Minnesota and North Dakota. His scholarly interests include rhetoric and composition, critical theory, and American Indian studies, and he recently completed a Ph.D. dissertation, "Rhetorical Sovereignty: American Indian Writing as Self-Determination," for Miami University. A concerned parent of two daughters, Nina (11) and Equay (8), Scott has also worked as an activist on environmental, labor-related, and other political issues in Indian country and beyond. Currently living in Fargo, Scott now teaches composition and American Indian literature at Concordia College-Moorhead.