Indigenous Education Quotes

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Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
Let’s get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I’m pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I’m also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.
Sherman Alexie
In indigenous ways of knowing, it is understood that each living being has a particular role to play. Every being is endowed with certain gifts, its own intelligence, its own spirit, its own story. Our stories tell us that the Creator gave these to us, as original instructions. The foundation of education is to discover that gift within us and learn to use it well.
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses)
An indigenous culture with sufficient territory, and bilingual and intercultural education, is in a better position to maintain and cultivate its mythology and shamanism. Conversely, the confiscation of their lands and imposition of foreign education, which turns their young people into amnesiacs, threatens the survival not only of these people, but of an entire way of knowing. It is as if one were burning down the oldest universities in the world and their libraries, one after another — thereby sacrificing the knowledge of the world's future generations.
Jeremy Narby (The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge)
In the United States the legacy of settler colonialism can be seen in the endless wars of aggression and occupations; the trillions spent on war machinery, military bases, and personnel instead of social services and quality public education; the gross profits of corporations, each of which has greater resources and funds than more than half the countries in the world yet pay minimal taxes and provide few jobs for US citizens; the repression of generation after generation of activists who seek to change the system; the incarceration of the poor, particularly descendants of enslaved Africans; the individualism, carefully inculcated, that on the one hand produces self-blame for personal failure and on the other exalts ruthless dog-eat-dog competition for possible success, even though it rarely results; and high rates of suicide, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual violence against women and children, homelessness, dropping out of school, and gun violence.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
If our best-educated citizens have no idea how to answer these basic questions, we will struggle to build a democracy that can solve the problems we face, whether they are what to do about climate change, the world’s poor, the problems of Australia’s Indigenous people, or the prospect of a future in which we can genetically modify our offspring. An education in the humanities is as valuable today as it was in Plato’s time.
Peter Singer (Ethics in the Real World: 86 Brief Essays on Things that Matter)
The native population of this continent deserves more notice taken than on Indigenous Peoples Day. But this day at least, please, let's learn more about the people whose land we stole (yes, even we whose forebearers came more recently, because we continue to benefit from the theft), and to sit in the complexity that is the building and continuation of our civilization.
Shellen Lubin
Indigenous children, children from the poorest of homes, can succeed to the highest of standards if we, the adults, are prepared to do everything necessary to get them a great education.
Julia Gillard (My Story)
As a white woman, part of my awakening has included a growing awareness of my privilege and an active education in dismantling the ways I contribute to the oppression of black, brown, and indigenous people. It’s the job of white women (and white men) to undo this discrimination, the same way it’s the job of men to undo toxic masculinity
Holly Whitaker (Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol)
...the multitudinous substitutes for indigenous culture cannot grow. Having no roots, they can only age and decay. Studious, sincere youth retires, defeated. American youth, capable of becoming serious competent artists, under such pressure as this on every side, confused, try not to give up--or "fall in line." This is the nature of about all that can be called American education in the arts and architecture at this time. As for religion true to the teaching of the great redeemer who said "The Kingdom of God is within you"--that religion is yet to come: the concept true not only for the new reality of building but for the faith we call democracy.
Frank Lloyd Wright (A Testament)
It is a common error to assume that the lack of a formal education means that shoemakers, weavers, peasants or indigenous peoples cannot be intellectuals. We may even find it difficult to believe that they could acquire a significant book collection, let alone be interested in or engage in philosophy or pass on proper knowledge, not just ‘culture’ or ‘traditions,’ to others. Such a misunderstanding excludes many people from history because it assumes they can have no impact on history, or even be affected by it. Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11, 1973
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera (Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup Against Salvador Allende, September 11, 1973)
When the indigenous and neoindigenous are silenced, they tend to respond to the denial of their voices by showcasing their culture in vivid, visceral, and transgressive ways. For
Christopher Emdin (For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy))
Who is speaking for the waters of the Earth?
Gregory Cajete (Look To The Mountain: An Ecology Of Indigenous Education)
There is no such thing as primitive in the way Western education has traditionally conditioned people to perceive it.
Gregory Cajete (Look To The Mountain: An Ecology Of Indigenous Education)
Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
What is today’s date? Who is the President? How great a danger do you pose, on a scale of one to ten? What does “people who live in glass houses” mean? Every symphony is a suicide postponed, true or false? Should each individual snowflake be held accountable for the avalanche? Name five rivers. What do you see yourself doing in ten minutes? How about some lovely soft Thorazine music? If you could have half an hour with your father, what would you say to him? What should you do if I fall asleep? Are you still following in his mastodon footsteps? What is the moral of “Mary Had a Little Lamb”? What about his Everest shadow? Would you compare your education to a disease so rare no one else has ever had it, or the deliberate extermination of indigenous populations? Which is more puzzling, the existence of suffering or its frequent absence? Should an odd number be sacrificed to the gods of the sky, and an even to those of the underworld, or vice versa? Would you visit a country where nobody talks? What would you have done differently? Why are you here?
Franz Wright (Wheeling Motel)
Some of his [Chester Bowles's] friends thought that his entire political career reflected his background, that he truly believed in the idea of the Republic, with an expanded town-hall concept of politics, of political leaders consulting with their constituency, hearing them out, reasoning with them, coming to terms with them, government old-fashioned and unmanipulative. Such governments truly had to reflect their constituencies. It was his view not just of America, but of the whole world. Bowles was fascinated by the political process in which people of various countries expressed themselves politically instead of following orders imposed by an imperious leadership. In a modern world where most politicians tended to see the world divided in a death struggle between Communism and free-world democracies, it was an old-fashioned view of politics; it meant that Bowles was less likely to judge a country on whether or not it was Communist, but on whether or not its government seemed to reflect genuine indigenous feeling. (If he was critical of the Soviet leadership, he was more sympathetic to Communist governments in the underdeveloped world.) He was less impressed by the form of a government than by his own impression of its sense of legitimacy. ... He did not particularly value money (indeed, he was ill at ease with it), he did not share the usual political ideas of the rich, and he was extremely aware of the hardships with which most Americans lived. Instead of hiring highly paid consultants and pollsters to conduct market research, Bowles did his own canvassing, going from door to door to hundreds of middle- and lower-class homes. That became a crucial part of his education; his theoretical liberalism became reinforced by what he learned about people’s lives during the Depression.
David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest)
It lit me up to see my name, "Jesse Thistle," alongside "University of Ottawa." I'd done something significant. I'd actually achieved something in my life. I didn't have a driver's license, ID, a proper high school education, a health card, nothing—but there was this completion certificate that had "university" with my name under it!
Jesse Thistle (From the Ashes: My Story of Being Indigenous, Homeless, and Finding My Way)
I make this point to stress that the brilliance of neoindigenous youth cannot be appreciated by educators who are conditioned to perceive anything outside their own ways of knowing and being as not having value. This is similar to white teachers at the Carlisle School who sought to ban the language and customs of their indigenous students and replace them with “American culture.” The University of Minnesota Human Rights Center describes this process as the silencing of voice and history that is part of the indigenous experience. I argue that enduring this silencing process is something that both the indigenous and neoindigenous have in common, and should be used as a way to connect them.
Christopher Emdin (For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy))
We are swapping band-aid education for brand new education, sealing the cracks – all the holes in the broken-down fences of Australian education policy for Indigenous peoples. Yes, they continued the better education, we know what is best rhetoric in their on-going war with the sceptic observer whom they continually accused was pass em this and not pass em that – always out to destroy Aboriginal people like a record still stuck in the same grove. Anyway. Whatever. Agree or not. This was the hammer, even in officially recognised Aboriginal Government, pulping confidence. The hammer that knocked away the small gains through any slip of vigilance. The faulty hammer that created weak ladders to heaven.
Alexis Wright (The Swan Book)
Ghost Dancers Rise: At the 500th anniversary of Columbus's landing, tribal leaders gathered in Washington, DC, for a ceremony in front of the Capitol. They could have dwelt on the catastrophes that were Columbus's legacy, but instead they closed the ceremony with these words: We stand young warriors In the circle At dawn all storm clouds disappear The future brings all hope and glory, Ghost dancers rise Five-hundred years.
Eldon Yellowhorn, Kathy Lowinger
A fundamental step in this challenging of structures is to think about new ways for all education stakeholders—particularly those who are not from the communities in which they teach—to engage with urban youth of color. What new lenses or frameworks can we use to bring white folks who teach in the hood to consider that urban education is more complex than saving students and being a hero? I suggest a way forward by making deep connections between the indigenous and urban youth of color.
Christopher Emdin (For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy))
Having been historically dispossessed and discriminated against, African American and Indigenous communities, continue to face higher rates of poverty and crime, and struggle disproportionately for access to quality education, healthy food, secure housing and affordable healthcare. The United States has the highest incarceration rates in the world. And even though five times as many white people use drugs as African Americans, African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites.
Rachel Held Evans (Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again)
For generations the official U.S. policy had been to support these regimes against any threat from their own citizens, who were branded automatically as Communists. When necessary, U.S. troops had been deployed in Latin America for decades to defend our military allies, many of whom were graduates of the U.S. Military Academy, spoke English, and sent their children to be educated in our country. They were often involved in lucrative trade agreements involving pineapples, bananas, bauxite, copper and iron ore, and other valuable commodities. When I became president, military juntas ruled in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. I decided to support peaceful moves toward freedom and democracy throughout the hemisphere. In addition, our government used its influence through public statements and our votes in financial institutions to put special pressure on the regimes that were most abusive to their own people, including Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. On visits to the region Rosalynn and I met with religious and other leaders who were seeking political change through peaceful means, and we refused requests from dictators to defend their regimes from armed revolutionaries, most of whom were poor, indigenous Indians or descendants of former African slaves. Within ten years all the Latin American countries I named here had become democracies, and The Carter Center had observed early elections in Panama, Nicaragua, Peru, Haiti, and Paraguay.
Jimmy Carter (A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety)
to understand the stories of the seven lost students who are the subjects of this book, the seven "fallen feathers," you must understand thunder bay's past, how the seeds of division, of acrimony and distaste, of a lack of cultural awareness and understanding, were planted in those early days, and how they were watered and nourished with misunderstanding and ambivalence. and you must understand how the government of canada has historically underfunded education and health services for indigenous children, providing consistently lower levels of support than for non-indigenous kids, and how it continues to do so to this day.
Tanya Talaga (Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City)
That process rightfully starts by honoring the treaties the United States made with Indigenous nations, by restoring all sacred sites, starting with the Black Hills and including most federally held parks and land and all stolen sacred items and body parts, and by payment of sufficient reparations for the reconstruction and expansion of Native nations. In the process, the continent will be radically reconfigured, physically and psychologically. For the future to be realized, it will require extensive educational programs and the full support and active participation of the descendants of settlers, enslaved Africans, and colonized Mexicans, as well as immigrant populations.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States (ReVisioning American History, #3))
In North Korea, the state built an education system to inculcate propaganda, but was unable to prevent famine. In colonial Latin America, the state focused on coercing indigenous peoples. In neither type of society was there a level playing field or an unbiased legal system. In North Korea, the legal system is an arm of the ruling Communist Party, and in Latin America it was a tool of discrimination against the mass of people. We call such institutions, which have opposite properties to those we call inclusive, extractive economic institutions—extractive because such institutions are designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty)
When Dr Sarabhai gave shape to a vision to develop rockets in India, he was questioned, along with the political leadership, on the relevance of such a programme when a vast majority in the country was battling the demons of hunger and poverty. Yet, he was in agreement with Jawaharlal Nehru that India could only play a meaningful role in the affairs of the world if the country was self-reliant in every manner, and should be able to apply advanced technologies to alleviate real-life problems. Thus our space programme was never simply a desire to be one among an elite group of nations, neither was it a matter of playing catch-up with other countries. Rather, it was an expression of the need for developing indigenous capabilities in telecommunications, meteorology and education.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
Cultural artifacts like clothing, music, or speech are aspects of indigenous culture that are generally not considered by teachers to be related to education, but are one of the first things a teacher identifies when interacting with neoindigenous students. The wrong clothing or speech will get neoindigenous students labeled as unwilling to learn and directly impact their academic lives much in the way that it affects the indigenous. For example, if one were to ask the average person in the United States, Australia, or New Zealand to describe the indigenous peoples in their respective countries, the responses would probably be very similar, and include exoticized references to scanty clothing, “odd” living arrangements, “strange” speech, “weird” customs, and “primitive” art and music.
Christopher Emdin (For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy))
Although they are ridiculous when said out loud, racist stereotypes fester internally as subtle, dangerous, and logical-seeming reasons that explain why racism is justified. Though you would never say or consciously believe these stereotypes out loud, they do live inside you. And when coupled with power you hold as someone with white privilege, these prejudices give you the ability to enforce white supremacy. If subconsciously, you believe that Indigenous people are primitive, or Arabs are terrorists, or Latinx people are drug dealers, then at some level, it makes sense to you when you see it reflected back to you though media messages. And therefore, at some level, it makes sense to you that they face the kind of treatment they face by the educational system, the employment sector, and so on. Uncovering your racist stereotypes will help you to see how you actively contribute to white supremacy by believing white supremacy's lies about the inferiority of those who do not look like you.
Layla F. Saad (Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor)
Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.
Adrienne Maree Brown (Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds)
We need not sow thistles and brambles; they come up naturally enough, because they are indigenous to earth: and so, we need not teach men to complain; they complain fast enough without any education.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (MORNING AND EVENING: DAILY READINGS)
February 16 MORNING “I have learned, in whatever state I am, therewith to be content.” — Philippians 4:11 THESE words show us that contentment is not a natural propensity of man. “Ill weeds grow apace.” Covetousness, discontent, and murmuring are as natural to man as thorns are to the soil. We need not sow thistles and brambles; they come up naturally enough, because they are indigenous to earth: and so, we need not teach men to complain; they complain fast enough without any education. But the precious things of the earth must be cultivated. If we would have wheat, we must plough and sow; if we want flowers, there must be the garden, and all the gardener’s care. Now, contentment is one of the flowers of heaven, and if we would have it, it must be cultivated; it will not grow in us by nature; it is the new nature alone that can produce it, and even then we must be specially careful and watchful that we maintain and cultivate the grace which God has sown in us. Paul says, “I have learned . . . to be content;” as much as to say, he did not know how at one time. It cost him some pains to attain to the mystery of that great truth. No doubt he sometimes thought he had learned, and then broke down. And when at last he had attained unto it, and could say, “I have learned in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content,” he was an old, grey-headed man, upon the borders of the grave — a poor prisoner shut up in Nero’s dungeon at Rome. We might well be willing to endure Paul’s infirmities, and share the cold dungeon with him, if we too might by any means attain unto his good degree. Do not indulge the notion that you can be contented with learning, or learn without discipline. It is not a power that may be exercised naturally, but a science to be acquired gradually. We know this from experience. Brother, hush that murmur, natural though it be, and continue a diligent pupil in the College of Content.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Morning and Evening—Classic KJV Edition: A Devotional Classic for Daily Encouragement)
In 1821, Sequoyah (also known as George Gist) developed a writing system for the Cherokee language. Using a system of 86 symbols, each with a phonetic value, Sequoyah assigned syllabic values to each symbol that represented all the sounds used while speaking the Cherokee language. Because the system was relatively simple and easy to learn, the vast majority of Cherokee people became literate in their native tongue within a few years. Furthermore, The Phoenix, a Cherokee language newspaper, began publication in February 1828. Due to these early efforts to assimilate into U.S. society and adopt practices, the Cherokee remain one of the most highly educated Native American tribes and maintain one of the highest standards of living among indigenous peoples.
Charles River Editors (The Trail of Tears: The Forced Removal of the Five Civilized Tribes)
colorblindness is such a bad idea, though, why have people across the political spectrum become so attached to it? For conservatives, the ideal of colorblindness is linked to a commitment to individualism. In their view, society should be concerned with individuals, not groups. Gross racial disparities in health, wealth, education, and opportunity should be of no interest to our government, and racial identity should be a private matter, something best kept to ourselves. For liberals, the ideal of colorblindness is linked to the dream of racial equality. The hope is that one day we will no longer see race because race will lose all of its significance. In this fantasy, eventually race will no longer be a factor in mortality rates, the spread of disease, educational or economic opportunity, or the distribution of wealth. Race will correlate with nothing; it will mean nothing; we won’t even notice it anymore. Those who are less idealistic embrace colorblindness simply because they find it difficult to imagine a society in which we see race and racial differences yet consistently act in a positive, constructive way. It is easier to imagine a world in which we tolerate racial differences by being blind to them. The uncomfortable truth, however, is that racial differences will always exist among us. Even if the legacies of slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration were completely overcome, we would remain a nation of immigrants (and indigenous people) in a larger world divided by race and ethnicity. It is a world in which there is extraordinary racial and ethnic inequality, and our nation has porous boundaries. For the foreseeable future, racial and ethnic inequality will be a feature of American life. This reality is not cause for despair. The idea that we may never reach a state of perfect racial equality—a perfect racial equilibrium—is not cause for alarm. What is concerning is the real possibility that we, as a society, will choose not to care. We will choose to be blind to injustice and the suffering of others. We will look the other way and deny our public agencies the resources, data, and tools they need to solve problems. We will refuse to celebrate what is beautiful about our distinct cultures and histories, even as we blend and evolve. That is cause for despair. Seeing race is not the problem. Refusing to care for the people we see is the problem.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
Approaching Indigenous culture with the goal of getting Native peoples in the pews isn’t an answer—it is merely an extension of colonization. Perhaps the church should consider that Indigenous peoples have more to teach the church than the church has to teach Indigenous peoples. Perhaps that would change how the relationship works. The important aspect of this relationship is that it is a partnership, a space in which listening really happens, a space in which Indigenous people are paid for their time and resources by the church itself, if asked. As I said earlier, Indigenous people shouldn’t have to spend our days educating non-Native people, but when we are willing to partner with institutions like the church for a better future, we should be heard.
Kaitlin B. Curtice (Native: Identity, Belonging, and Rediscovering God)
Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) and AP classes composed solely of White and Asian students Special education classrooms where Black students are overrepresented School orchestras with no Black, Brown, or Indigenous students Suspension and expulsion data showing that a disproportionate number of Black, Brown, and Indigenous students are suspended or expelled Remedial classrooms with high proportions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous students Honors classes with low proportions of Black, Brown, and Indigenous students
Glenn E. Singleton (Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools)
The colonial regime has been surprisingly, and some might say suspiciously, responsive to Indian politicians demands to the right to govern their people. To that end, the regime has transferred the responsibility to administer many programs to Indian bands, programs that the regime’s bureaucrats once administered, such as education and social welfare. Thus, rather than granting Indian people the right to self-determination, the colonial regime has merely devolved the responsibility for administering pre-existing programs. Worse yet, the regime expects Indian governments to deliver these programs with little or no infrastructure, no training, and with smaller budgets than its Indian affairs bureaucracy itself has received to deliver the same services. Thus, the colonial bureaucrats have set the stage for Indian governments to fail.
Jo-Ann Episkenew (Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing)
There are now a number of demands being made on teachers which challenge both your courage to be flexible and your courage to remain faithful to ideals which are good. I will try to deal with just two of these demands. The first one demands flexibility. It asks you to recognize that Negro children in this society—and white children also—are being taught biased, edited, and ultimately racist versions of American history and culture. It is not enough to pay lip service to the idea of racial harmony and equality. We must refuse any longer to accept the distorted view of our roots and our past in this country. As taught in our textbooks, this history reinforces in white children the notion that they are superior and the only creators of this country, and it reinforces in black children the notion that they are inferior and made no contributions. It may be true that most blacks came here as slaves, but the first of them were here as free men, and gave their lives in the struggle to win independence for this nation. They fought as well as any one else during the civil war; they played their part in the opening of the American West; they helped plan and lay out some of our major American cities; they developed the only indigenous form of American music; they made notable contributions to scientific research; they are to be found in the growth and development of the American musical and dramatic stage; and the best of their writing ranks with the best that has been done in America. This is by no means all, but then I am by no means an historian. In any case, the question is not whether they should have done more. The miracle is that in the circumstances of their history here they could have done so much. It is because of racism, it is because the dominant value judgments in this society are white, and it is because a consistently poor estimate has been placed on the quality and extent of Negro effort—it is for all these reasons that the true story of the Negro in America is not told in our history books. And it is for all these reasons that historians continue to tell lies, continue to avert their eyes, and continue to retard the progress of civility, decency, and human dignity in our society. It is time, then, to give up that old rigid stance. For, however comforting it may be to some, it is a delusion, and it is a violation of the right of all young minds to know the truth and to be free. Organized teachers can play a major role in the effort to liberate American history books. They can join those who are making an effort to bring truth into the schools through a total revision of the textbooks. Where good texts are not in existence, teachers must bring in supplementary material to the classes. And they themselves can make studies of Negro history and culture.
Bayard Rustin (Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin)
Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct. But it is a powerful construct because it calls out to a deeply internalized sense of superiority and entitlement and the sense that any advancement for people of color is an encroachment on this entitlement. The past was great for white people (and white men in particular) because their positions went largely unchallenged.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
Mattering has always been the job of Black, Brown, and Indigenous folx since the "human hierarchy" was invented to benefit Whites by rationalizing racist ideas of biological inferiority to "those Americans who believe that they are White." Being a person of color is a civic project because your relationship to America, sadly, is a fight in order to matter, to survive, and one day thrive.
Bettina L. Love (We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom)
This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later.
Petina Gappah (The Book of Memory)
As a white person, I can openly and unabashedly reminisce about “the good old days.” Romanticized recollections of the past and calls for a return to former ways are a function of white privilege, which manifests itself in the ability to remain oblivious to our racial history. Claiming that the past was socially better than the present is also a hallmark of white supremacy. Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
The Superior College Lahore is known for its ever-evolving, unique, and quality education initiatives for educational facilities, fastest expansion, and focuses on innovation for student success. Advertisement This continued legacy of excellence has led Superior College Lahore to achieve “University Status” granted by a gazette notification. The amendment bill of university status for the chartered institute ‘Superior College Lahore’ was presented in the Punjab Assembly on March 09, 2021, which was approved by the Governor Punjab, Chaudhry Muhammad Sarwar on July 23, 2021, while the approved amendment status notification was handed over to the Chairman Superior Group, Prof. Dr. Ch. Abdul Rehman by the Speaker Punjab Assembly, Chaudhry Parvez Elahi on July 26, 2021. Superior University is now Pakistan’s leading university with its core focus on promoting entrepreneurship, Research & innovation ensuring student success to contribute economically Superior Pakistan. The unique program for entrepreneurship development among the youngsters “Entrepreneurship Teaching & Training Development” (ETTP) at Superior University has made a significant difference in students’ career orientation. Focus on developing future job creators instead of job seekers through the power of entrepreneurship has earned great success for the university. The market-ready graduates are prepared through the “3U1M Program” where they spend three years of education in university and one year in the market to seek practical exposure to professional careers. Three indigenous streams for specialization in the final year of the 3U1M Program offer ideal options of Startup, Scaleup, and Design Thinking which ensures 100% job placement. Chairman Superior Group, Prof. Dr. Ch. Abdul Rehman and Rector Superior University, Dr. Sumaira Rehman also share the vision of promoting education in the country and prepare students equipped with attributes of the 21st century. Superior University is taking part in improving the literacy rate to create a socio-economic impact in the country by increasing access to quality education even in all the farfetched areas.
Mehak Arshad
Princeton Tries to Explain a Drop in Jewish Enrollment; or "What is Communism?" by Yggdrasil The sine-qua-non of inner party power is a multi-cultural elite alienated from its tribal and racial kinsmen. It is the native elites - the indigenous leaders who might resist the inner party's drive for power that are always the target. ... For the reform version of communism developed by the Frankfurt School that now dominates the ‘liberal democracies" and the NWO, the masses of the nations are important as consumers ... What remains relevant to the inner party are the inner party's potential competitors, the native national elites with community ties to their brethren. In the Soviet Union, the inner party elites (using Lenin and Stalin as their cover) resorted to murder and forced resettlement to remove the native national elites, a fast, direct and brutal form of decapitation. In the "liberal democracies" the inner party uses a slower and less visibly brutal method of decapitation. Thus, in the liberal democracies of today we have "affirmative action" - a set of laws that places tremendous pressure on private businesses to displace native elites at the top with minorities who will be less plausible targets of discrimination lawsuits. These laws exist everywhere in the European world, and with the exception of the U.S. were enacted long before any significant minority constituencies (other than the inner party itself) existed to lobby for their passage. The entire program of displacement and decapitation within the liberal democracies was carefully drawn up and explained in "The Authoritarian Personality" by Theodor Adorno, et. al.(1947). It is a prescription for identifying any person who displays any bond of obligation to his own kind and the will to resist those who threaten the interests of his kind. Such "authoritarian personalities" are to be denied university admission and consigned to low status occupations, which is precisely what the laws of affirmative action and social rules of political correctness accomplish. Indeed, as I read the tables from the 1939 Soviet census published in Sanning's work [The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by Walter N. Sanning] I recalled my own research showing that the inner party, representing 2.4% of the U.S. population comprises 28% of the student body at Harvard, while the descendants of European Christendom comprising 70% of the population supply only 18% of the students. The American Majority has been effectively displaced at Harvard. Relative to their share of the Population, they have 2.4 times fewer students than do the inner party's Afro-American coalition partners. ... The United States Department of Labor has maintained a tracking study of 12,000 young people who were between the ages of 14 and 22 in 1979 known as the National Longitudinal study of Youth ("NLSY"). The CD Roms with all the data can be purchased from Ohio State University. These data show that at each given level of IQ (all participants were tested) the income and educational attainment of the descendants of European Christendom is much lower than for Blacks, Hispanics and Inner party members of the same IQ. In what will surely be a surprise to most middle and upper middle-income Euro-Americans, the effects are most pronounced at the highest IQ levels. In other words, it is the majority elite that suffers the widest disparity in income and education when compared with Blacks, Hispanics and Inner Party members within the same IQ range. When the effects are broken down by sex, we find that among males the disparity is most pronounced in the highest IQ ranges and disappears entirely by the time you descend to the 50% mark. The widest disparity exists among the top 2% of the population (those with IQs above 130).
Yggdrasil
In non-Western societies two opposing trends appear to be underway. On the one hand, English is increasingly used at the university level to equip graduates to function effectively in the global competition for capital and customers. On the other hand, social and political pressures increasingly lead to the more general use of indigenous languages, Arabic displacing French in North Africa, Urdu supplanting English as the language of government and education in Pakistan, and indigenous language media replacing English media in India.
Samuel P. Huntington (The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order)
Part 1 - The reason behind my unstoppable anger has very and highly complicated reasons. 1) There are certain people that takes life as easiest way - for example Norway, Iceland and Scandinavian people, but they also have problems in life yet they prefer to be happy whatever happens and their life style and law made in order to keep them happy. 2) There are people with high diplomacy and prestige - UK people - They are not good but they are very intelligent enough to keep their traditions protected. 3) There are people that are good by heart but bad by attitude - Hitler, even Putin too, 4) There are people that do not even have proper static law but only dynamic law only intention of protecting their own country alone - USA, 5) There are people that were affected by geopolitics and turned against it because of lack of education and morality - Whomever does terrorism 6) There are people that are deeply hurt because of ignorance and untouchability in ancient times ( They adopted unique food and life style - because of evolutionary, pandemic and many other ecological and spiritual reasons) 0 - Asiatic 7) There are people that were only been slaves for heavy work, slaves for sex, slaves for all dirty and isolated works (African black people and all remaining indigenous people) 8) And finally Bharat (India) with lots of hopes, lots of colors, lots of history, lots of memory, India is a land of discrimination yes - But if you have good qualities - even if you are poor, you will be respected here, so even if you are so called Dalit or Scheduled groups you need not worry much about it, you have all your rights to live in your way but if you choose good path, you will be respected else not and even you can be punished easily. All religions are given equal importance here but due to this is the time to strengthen indias cultural values, it is important to protect the factors that represents India.
Ganapathy K Siddharth Vijayaraghavan
Use the act of breathing to shape air into sounds that take on the context of language that lifts and transports those who hear it, takes them beyond what they think and how they feel and empowers them to think and know even more. We’re all storytellers, really. That’s what we do. That is our power as human beings. Not to tell people how to think and feel and therefore know - but through stories allow them to discover questions within themselves. Turn off your TV and your devices and talk to each other. Share stories. Be joined, transported and transformed.
Richard Wagamese (Embers: One Ojibway's Meditations)
Today, we may once again ensure that our children walk in this world with a sense of knowing who they are and how they can contribute, preventing them from feeling lost or hopeless. This requires a shift toward ancestral parenting and educational methods, in which mentorship, gentle guidance, and doing are utilized instead of harsh discipline, shame, and telling.
Chelsey Luger (The Seven Circles: Indigenous Teachings for Living Well)
History belongs to those who write it.
J. Stanion (My Place Among Them)
My whole education was to make sure I didn't believe things like that. I dismissed all sorts of things that were indigenous in my family -- superstition and discredited information, and that discredited way of knowing that discredited people always have. But when I began to write, that was the place where I had to go. That's where the information was.
Toni Morrison
Western education precludes us from writing or speaking from a ‘real’ and authentic indigenous position
Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples)
Indian boarding schools began in 1860, with the first school being established on the Yakima Indian Reservation in Washington State. These schools were designed to take Native American youths and mold them into members of "civilized society"; to make them White. The schools taught the basics of education, such as arithmetic, but also taught the students to practice Christianity and that the political structures of the United States were ideal for everyone. The actual goal was to eradicate every ounce of Native cultures.
Leah Myers (Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity)
So I lived in their midst, always on the fringes, insignificant, and they spoke freely in my presence. I saw how little regard they had for us, how much they held us in low esteem. They did not know us, and were not really interested in knowing us either. By virtue of their faith, their mission, and their biases, they did not have to: they knew better than us, both what we needed and how we should live. I cannot discount the unparalleled work they did in education and healthcare. I would not have had a formal education had it not been part of their plan. The free dispensary was always full, rolling back childhood diseases in the region. I saw them clean the most putrid wounds with a straight face. Yet, their mission required locals to forfeit ancestral practices, including our indigenous languages, which we were forbidden from using in their presence. The essence of our being in the world, its core tenet, ingrained in us across generations, was being violently questioned. Their work demanded allegiance, utter surrender, from us. I did not realise this then, but these demands threw us off balance, divided us, made us doubt ourselves and weakened us. They birthed a cruel conflict in us, putting our loyalty to the test. We were inhabited by this childish and conflicting desire to please and resist them all at the same time. Our people claimed neither detachment from the world nor dominion over it. We did not have the universe and its mysteries, meant to be conquered, subjugated on one side, and humankind, the mighty owner of it all, on the other. We were the world and the world was us: water, wind, sand, the past, the future, the living, the dead... we were all woven into the fabric of the world. They, however, had appropriated it, simplified it to make it intelligible and malleable. They had invented words and concepts that dismissed our more complex and comprehensive intuitive understanding of reality. There is no denying that, seen through their eyes, conceptualised in their terms, the world was unmistakeably coherent, logical. For those of us who embraced the mysteries of the world, the encounter was a matter of course, and a tragedy. I doubt we will ever fully grasp the exact extent of our distress. Today, I believe Western knowledge is both simple and despotic. There is only one God and he is present in church. Education is found only in textbooks. Art is separate from spirituality, confined to specific spaces. The law applies equally to everyone and all values have a price. The sole measure of success is material. Our paths in life are already charted, marked out, and you can choose to follow... the path assigned to you. A promise of comfort, a ready-made life so enticing it warrants universalisation; a dream no human should be denied. Masters, gurus travel the world to guide lost peoples towards this path of salvation, readily resorting to violence to crush every resistance, driven by the firm conviction that their philosophy is the philosophy and their religion the religion. Perhaps it spread so far and wide due to the active proselytism inherent to the Western vision of the world, or maybe it was so easy to replicate because it was the most simplistic doctrine ever developed by humans—it did a better job of dismissing our diversity and disregarding the complexity of our being. Our material realities would become more bearable, that was the promise. It mattered not that this would devastate nature and leave our inner beings shuddering with anxiety.
Hemley Boum (Days Come and Go)
Consider any period in the past from the perspective of people of color: 246 years of brutal enslavement; the rape of black women for the pleasure of white men and to produce more enslaved workers; the selling off of black children; the attempted genocide of Indigenous people, Indian removal acts, and reservations; indentured servitude, lynching, and mob violence; sharecropping; Chinese exclusion laws; Japanese American internment; Jim Crow laws of mandatory segregation; black codes; bans on black jury service; bans on voting; imprisoning people for unpaid work; medical sterilization and experimentation; employment discrimination; educational discrimination; inferior schools; biased laws and policing practices; redlining and subprime mortgages; mass incarceration; racist media representations; cultural erasures, attacks, and mockery; and untold and perverted historical accounts, and you can see how a romanticized past is strictly a white construct.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
Katherine Watkins, teacher at Cedar Park Middle School, Beaverton School District, Oregon: I'm going to say something that's not nice, and not sweet, but it's true. If you're not evolving into an anti-racist educator, you're making yourself obsolete in this field or profession. Our district is only getting browner and browner with our children and so if... you know, obviously you can't change your melanin, but you can change your mind so that you can actually function in a district that is full of BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, People of Color] children. So if you're being resistant, I understand that, but your going to have to eventually come to the light, because if your going to keep up those old views of colonialism it's going to lead to being fired because you are going to be doing damage to our children, trauma. And so as we fire the teachers who sexually abuse our children we will be firing the teachers who do racists things to our children to traumatize them. And while our district might not be completely on there, OEA [Oregon Education Association] is working on it, NEA [National Education Association] is working on it, and so it's just a matter of time. So it's like you either evolve or dissolve.
Watkins, Katherine
This is our work, to discover what we can give. Isn’t this the purpose of education, to learn the nature of your own gifts and how to use them for good in the world?
Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants)
Wilhelm Meya - An American Social Entrepreneur Wilhelm Meya is an American social entrepreneur and international nonprofit leader. He is renowned for his work preserving and protecting endangered indigenous languages. As Founder & CEO of The Language Conservancy (TLC), he has grown a network of over a dozen related organizations that work to support endangered languages and build linguistic capacity & infrastructure. Mr. Meya has worked hard to forge numerous alliances between his organization and governmental agencies as well as educational institutions.
Wilhelm Meya
If prisons, police, and the military are the caretakers of violence and agents of death, then educators, healthcare workers, counselors, water protectors, and land defenders are caretakers of peace and agents of life.
The Red Nation (The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth)
American schools in Guam, both before 1941 and after 1945, were established to eradicate the Chamoru, tongue and person. To educate the old Chamoru out of the new American. The native out of the patriot...But the nastier lesson their schools taught was that their dreams were ours. That indigenous knowledge had no place in the new world...As vehicles for our assimilation, American schools have attached to our longings alien aspirations for material wealth, money and power. How much of our creativity and our vision has already been laid to waste for the sake of these?
Julian Aguon (The Fire This Time: Essays on Life Under U.S. Occupation)
Zero tolerance imagines that kids are at risk of being victimized (violence, drugs, general hooliganism), but it also imagines kids as risks to the school and other students. The APA’s research found that zero-tolerance school policing “affected the delicate balance between the educational and juvenile justice systems, in particular, increasing schools’ use of and reliance on strategies such as security technology, security personnel, and profiling, especially in high-minority, high-poverty school districts.” 34 Children—black, indigenous, and Latinx children in particular—are overpoliced, especially within schools (more on this later). When it comes to children’s life chances, zero tolerance is a self-fulfilling prophecy: School authorities warn students that any deviant behavior on a child’s part is irresponsible because it could have severe and long-lasting consequences for their future, and then they enforce unreasonably harsh disciplinary standards that have severe and long-lasting consequences for the child’s future. That’s not a warning, it’s a promise.
Malcolm Harris (Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials)
Located at 6° 17′ 57″ N, 10° 47′ 41″ W, on the Atlantic coast near Cape Mesurado, The city and outlying districts are administered by the Monrovia City Corporation. Monrovia is Liberia’s capitol city and has a population of over a million people. According to the 2008 census Monrovia had a population of 1,010,970. A total of 29% of the total population of Liberia lives in Monrovia, making it the country's most populous city. In mid-1950, when President Tubman’s administration governed the country, it had 250,000 people or an estimated quarter of that number. At that earlier time the minority group of Afro-Americans controlled Liberia but the indigenous tribes having the he majority of the population had very little say in the running of the country. More recently, because of interracial marriages between ethnic Liberians and Lebanese nationals a significant mixed-race population has developed. Because most of these people are merchants they primarily lived in Monrovia. During the civil wars and the ensuing unrest, most American Liberians fled to the United States and other countries. After the restructuring of the Liberian government very few returned to Liberia creating an educational deficit or brain-drain. More recently some are returning to Liberia but not without problems. The primary fear is that they will bring back money earned overseas and will be in a position to recapture economic power and eventually the government.
Hank Bracker
My life is an extended agony. I feel like I've lived a hundred lifetimes in prison already. And maybe I have. But I'm prepared to live thousands more on behalf of my people. If my imprisonment does nothing more than educate an unknowing and uncaring public about the terrible conditions Native Americans and all indigenous people around the world continue to endure, then my suffering has had — and continues to have — a purpose. My people's struggle to survive inspires my own struggle to survive. Each of us must be a survivor.
Leonard Peltier (Prison Writings: My Life Is My Sun Dance)