This Week in Native American News (11/8/19): Encouraging Education and Learning History
November 8, 2019 - November is Native Heritage Month!
How one Navajo Nation high school is trying to help students see a future that includes college
Chinle High senior Cooper Burbank shooting hoops with his younger brother. Burbank hopes to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering. Photo courtesy of Caitlin O’Hara
Nachae Nez is a basketball star at the largest high school on the Navajo Nation, 17.5 million acres sprawling across parts of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. He lives in a trailer next to his two grandmothers and earns grades good enough for a four-year college.
Yet on the morning of the SAT college admissions exam, Nachae drives to the testing site from his home near Chinle, Arizona, looks around – and drives away. “I couldn’t see my future off the reservation,” he tells Michael Powell, author of the new book “Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation,” due out from Blue Rider Press this month.
Powell’s intimate portrayal of students, teachers and an inspirational coach at Chinle High School is an important contribution to the literature on an education crisis that’s affecting native youth.
The book follows the Wildcat team through one dramatic basketball season on the largest Indian nation in the U.S., which Powell describes as an isolated world of “sacred peaks, spirits and clans” where homelessness, alcoholism and unemployment are as rampant as books and libraries are scarce. Chinle High and its athletic center become a place for showers and meals for its many homeless students, he writes, “and with luck an adult who might put a hand on the rudder in rough waters.”
The push and pull of reservation life with its ancestral force, spiritual traditions and many contradictions consumes the team as they hunt for an elusive state championship.
Read the Full Story Here
In Similar News…
Chief Ivan Blunka School in New Stuyahok, AK. Photo Credit: Emily Hendricks
Closing the Opportunity Gap in Rural Alaska
Chief Ivan Blunka School is a preK–12 school located in the Alaska bush community of New Stuyahok. In New Stuyahok, hunting, fishing, and subsisting off the land aren’t hobbies but a necessity for survival due to the lack of traditional economic opportunities. Our community is only accessible by air or boat, and even then only when the weather cooperates. Everything we need to run our school, from toilet paper to textbooks, is flown in via single-engine aircraft.
The biggest challenge our students face is gaining exposure to all of the college and career choices that are available to them. Our students do not encounter the casual exposure to these opportunities that students in more urban settings experience.
I never want students to feel like they are missing out on something because of where they are from.
An Extensive History Lesson in Honor of Native Heritage Month
12 Untold Stories of Native American Heroes
These 12 Native American heroes achieved epic greatness as warriors, writers, artists, and scientists. Here are little-known stories of vast achievements and epic courage across American history.
How Native Americans Came to Fight Southwestern Fires
The recent rash of wildfires across California has reminded us how vulnerable the driest parts of the country are in the face of climate change. As growing fire disasters strike the west, many of those coming to the rescue are members of the Apache, Hopi, Zuni, and other Native nations. In a 2000 paper, the historian Andrew H. Fisher explained the longstanding involvement of Native Americans in southwestern firefighting.
When Native Americans Briefly Won Back Their Land
They came from near and far: Native American chiefs and representatives of various tribes bearing gifts for a historic meeting. Their destination was Fort Niagara in New York, where dozens of Nations would meet to negotiate a new alliance with the British.
Months earlier, in 1763, George III had announced that the colonies would no longer seize Native lands or purchase it without treaties. For the first time, Native Americans’ rights to their own tribal lands had been recognized in the laws of one of North America’s colonial conquerors.
The 1950's plan to erase Indian Country
In the summer of 1964, Charlotte and Clyde Day and six of their children boarded a train in northern Minnesota bound for Cleveland. Except for Clyde, none of them had been on a train before. They'd never been to a big city, either.
They wore their nicest clothes, and carried everything they owned in a few suitcases. They might have looked like they were going on vacation, but they were moving for good, leaving behind the place their family had lived for generations.
The Days were among around 100,000 Native Americans to experience one of the most recent and little-known traumas inflicted on Native peoples by the U.S. government, what the BIA called the Voluntary Relocation Program. Between 1952 and 1972, it provided one-way transportation and a couple hundred dollars to Native Americans willing to move to a city.
Mormons Tried to Stop Native Child Slavery in Utah. They Ended Up Encouraging It
When Brigham Young and his band of Mormon settlers marched into Utah in 1847, they saw a vast expanse of land they envisioned as a sanctuary. Salt Lake City would soon become the bustling center of life in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But that life would rest in part on the backs of people who were not Mormon—and who weren’t even voluntarily in Salt Lake.
They were Native and black slaves, and their story is an often forgotten part of the Mormon settlement of Utah.
And, History in the Making: This is the First Piece of Native American History in Space
In 2002, NASA Astronaut John Herrington became the first Native American in space. In celebration of Native American Heritage Month, NASA shared the personal items he brought with him on the historic trip.
Read These: 9 Books for Native American Heritage Month
It’s hard to fit all the news in a little space.
To read all of this week's news, visit the LIM Magazine.
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