Volume 16 Summer 2005 Issue No. 4

In This Issue
International Indigenous Education

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While globalizing their movement, tribal colleges import ideas

by Marjane Ambler

Thirty-seven years ago, the Navajo people in Arizona created the first tribally-controlled college in the world. This birth fired the imagination of educators and community activists across the United States, who soon began creating their own colleges in the Northern Plains, Midwest, Northwest, and, most recently, in Oklahoma and the East.

It is commonly believed that education is a path out of poverty, but this is not necessarily true in places where education is controlled by the colonizer. In many parts of the world, schools are designed to perpetuate the power of the dominant culture.

In Peru, for example, few teachers understand the language of the indigenous Quechua people, and secondary education is not available in the rural areas where most Quechua live. It is difficult for the indigenous people to get into universities, and when they are accepted, their values are not reflected in the curriculum. So, as people around the world learned about the tribal college movement, they wanted to learn more.

Indian-controlled education is a revolutionary concept -- that Indian people could control their own education and build institutions that reflect their culture. As tribal college faculty and students travel to other countries and welcome foreign visitors to their campuses, they share the tribal college model. However, the visits are not one-sided. The tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) both teach and learn, giving their ideas and taking home new concepts.

They learn that indigenous people in many other places suffer from unbelievable poverty and oppression. At the same time, they become enriched by their exchanges, experiencing the vitality of diverse languages, spiritual ceremonies, and centuries-old traditions. They see education models that deserve emulation.

Dr. Wayne Stein (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) inspired this issue of the Tribal College Journal when he returned from a 5-week trip to Central and South America. “The trip made the reservations look like paradise,” Stein says.

Traveling sometimes with armed guards, American Indians visiting other countries realize viscerally that being indigenous can be dangerous in places such as Chiapas and Guatemala where hundreds of thousands of “peasants” (Indians) have been killed.

Tribal college faculty and students traveling to other countries always return with a broader understanding of what it means to be indigenous. Their experiences change lives, filling their minds with new dreams and their hearts with new friends. Not only are the travelers themselves affected but also their students and their extended families.

A Movement Expands

Although tribal colleges in the United States were the first in the world, there are many others today. Two post-secondary institutions were developed by First Nations (tribal governments) in western Canada in the early 1970s: Blue Quills First Nations College in 1971 and Old Sun Community College in 1972, and now there are more than 30 in the country.

In New Zealand, meanwhile, the Maori became alarmed that their language had nearly disappeared and the majority of their people were unemployed. They created their own post-secondary institutions known as wänanga beginning in 1982, and today hundreds of people speak the language, practice the culture, and play significant roles in the national economy.

In 1998, they won a major lawsuit, forcing the federal government in New Zealand to provide them financial support equivalent to that given to other schools. To study the Maori success, AIHEC has sent delegations to the South Pacific several times to meet with them.

The movement is reaching northern Mexico, too. In El Fuerte, Sinaloa, indigenous people and their advocates are developing a public university specifically for the indigenous groups and dedicated to a culturally-based curriculum, Universidad Autónoma Indígena de México (www.uaim.edu.mx/index.htm).

Through the years, indigenous educators have created consortiums to formalize their relationships with one another. A Canadian college, Red Crow Community College, joined the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC) in 1992. Five years later, the Canadian colleges imported the AIHEC model and created their own consortium, the First Nations Adult and Higher Education Consortium (FNAHEC) in western Canada. Later the regional organization helped create a nation-wide consortium, the National Association of Indigenous Institutes of Higher Learning (NAIIHL).

Most recently, educators from around the world met in Canada in 2002 and formed the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium (WINHEC).

The tribal colleges have much to learn from their sister institutions in other countries and from the exemplary K-12 indigenous education initiatives in Alaska and Hawaii (which will be explored in a subsequent issue of TCJ). The consortium in western Canada and the worldwide consortium, for example, have developed culturally-centered accreditation standards – a dream yet to be realized by AIHEC.

Witnessing the relatively well-financed wänanga of the Maori has made some tribal college presidents painfully aware that their institutions live in the basement of higher education in the United States. The TCUs must fight for their lives during every federal budget year in order to get only a fraction of what non-Indian institutions receive, but the knowledge that it could be different helps fuel their fight.

Travel to meet with one another can be prohibitively expensive, so the educators are devising other means for trading ideas. In 1987, AIHEC created a magazine, the Tribal College Journal. Now the Maori also publish their own journal, a research journal based at the University of Auckland, which is available online (www.maramatanga.ac.nz). WINHEC is starting an online publication, the first edition of which is expected to be available in June 2005.

Future Connections

The tribal colleges and universities have many significant partners who see the value of international dialogues. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of State have been especially helpful, sending researchers, students, teachers, and cultural ambassadors from tribal colleges to other countries and vice versa.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation has made it possible for the Maori and the tribal colleges to develop their relationship. Kellogg recently awarded a grant to AIHEC to send scholars to participate at the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education in New Zealand in November 2005.

The tribal colleges are collaborating with the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and a center at the University of Queensland in Australia to implement the NMAI founders’ vision for a fourth museum. Utilizing the Indigenous Knowledge Management System (IKMS, described elsewhere in this issue), people at isolated rural reservations will be able to visit museums around the world and see objects such as kachinas, fetishes, or headdresses taken from them generations ago. At the same time, the database will preserve their own songs, dances, and languages.

The problems faced by indigenous people around the globe can be daunting, but that has always been so. Today they have new tools for solving those problems and new partners. Global trade and the omnipresence of Western culture have increased the threats to indigenous cultures exponentially. But at the same time, global communications are making it easier for people around the world to trade ideas. Some of those ideas might make the difference between poverty and sustainability, between illiteracy and a relevant education, between death and life.

Marjane Ambler has been editor of Tribal College Journal since 1995. For more information on indigenous people’s struggles in other countries, see Cultural Survival Quarterly: World Report on the Rights, Voices, and Visions of Indigenous Peoples at www.cs.org).