“Wherever you find Natives in rural or urban Alaska, you’ll see high school drop out syndrome. In spite of all the efforts of Alaska’s school districts to advocate greater cross-cultural understanding in the classroom, Native youth still have a high, if not the highest, drop-out rate in the state.
No wonder, school district curriculum emphasizes non-Native values and concepts. Even though these are not incompatible with Native values, the failure to incorporate Native values and concepts dismisses them. Today’s curricula often reinforces the local school board and administration’s needs, not the needs of the community’s Native students.
Even with well-intentioned curricula developed toward cultural sensitivity, they’re just that – well-intentioned. Present certification requirements, being as strict as they are, bar Native elders and cultural resource persons from regular teaching jobs. They may be hired to teach an occasional class, but they aren’t enough classes and follow-up work to pass on to students valuable Native activities and concepts.
Some school districts are making headway in areas of Native language and history, which is good. But this instruction does not offer the hands-on involvement Native students need to learn Native traditions.
Natives are mostly taught to view history from a Western point of view. They are led to believe that Western society has had a ‘mutual relationship’ with the Natives for more than 200 years. In reality, depending upon which geographic area of Alaska we talk about, Native people have dealt with Western society for only a short span of three or four family generations.
Native families didn’t begin having this ‘mutual relationship’ until family members
(grandparents) began sustaining their family income by trading or by working in the market economy. Around the same time, Native villages for the first time in their history sent their children to school, where they were taught Western doctrine.The Native elders who began this relationship with the Western society are priceless sources of ‘living history’ to their descendants. Soon they’ll be gone and it’s unfortunate some Native youth will end up having to learn about their history from whatever bits of information they can muster from culturally impoverished school curricula.
My grandfather, Lewis Tungwenuk, was among the first generations of Natives to enter into this ‘relationship’ with the Western society. He died before I was born, so I didn’t get to know him, but according to custom I was given his Inupiaq name to pass on his spirit in this life. This makes me the third generation in my lineage to be involved in this ‘relationship’ with Western society.
Before high school I was convinced like others I knew, that I was going to drop out of school. In my freshman year, I was isolated from people a lot and ended up in a class for slow learners. Later that same year, I was transferred to Mount Edgecumbe High School in Sitka at my mother’s request. While there, I got into a lot of trouble and eventually tried to get myself kicked out. Had they decided to kick me out, I might have never discovered the Native Youth Olympics (NYO) and graduated. Of that, I am certain.
What I discovered in the NYO was a sense of pride that I had felt being around my grandmother when I was four years old. I guess in that way too, I felt her spirit being pleased with me for participating in my heritage.
Ever since graduating I have advocated the virtues of Native games. Given an opportunity these games will enhance most every student’s outlook on themselves and their education. So effective are these games that they Fairbanks Native Association created a two-year pilot NYO curriculum with the Fairbanks Borough School District.
The NYO now entering its 22nd year is open to all students, Native and non-Native. For ten consecutive years, an average of 25 schools and over 250 students has participated in the NYO. With a track record like this, what’s it take to for all the school districts to recognize that these games are truly a unique, cross-cultural medium?
The value of Native sports has been recognized by the Arctic Winter Games, a bi-annual event competition hosted between Alaska and Canada since 1970, with 16 different sporting events. The events range from A to V - Arctic Sports (traditional Native games), badminton, ice curling, hockey, speed skating, cross-country skiing, the snow-shoe biathlon and volleyball, to name a few. When will school districts in embrace Native games for their athletic and cultural merit?
While Native drop-out syndrome continues to haunt us and schools scurry around with budgets, only time will tell if the NYO will become the saving grace we’ve been looking for. We shouldn’t have to wait for another generation to find out."
Newspaper bio: Greg (Tungwenuk) Nothstine, 30, is chair of the Alaska Native Blue Ribbon Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse and serves on the boards of Arctic Winter Games and for Spirit Days.
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