Crossing the Border: Indigenous education is alive and growing

Early each morning, a caravan of large yellow buses arrived at the elegant Hotel Westin Camino Real in Guatemala City to deliver Mayan Indians, who quickly exited and fanned-out through the hotel.  They came for the First Hemispheric Conference on Indigenous Education July 25-27, 2001.  The unpretentious Maya seemed incongruous with the sumptuous hotel surroundings, their colorful traditional clothing contrasting with the business and leisure hotel guests.  Their access to this well-appointed venue was unusual, given the sharp class divisions along race lines in Guatemala.  Yet they were what the conference was all about.

Shirley DeFoe and I accepted invitations to present at the conference. She directs the International Exchange Program at Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, and I represented the American Indian Higher Education Consortium (AIHEC). DeFoe and I share longstanding interests in indigenous peoples of other countries and want to inform others of the tribal college experience.  In addition, DeFoe hopes to recruit students from around the world to attend Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College.

Sponsors of the conference included U.S.-based World Learning, a nonprofit provider of international education, and the Guatemalan Ministry of Education. The agenda focused on bilingual and intercultural education in the Americas, initiating a dialogue about the pedagogy, methodology, and policy of indigenous education in the hemisphere.  Making the conference truly international in scope, indigenous presenters came from virtually every country in South, Central, and North America. Approximately 1,000 people attended, including a dozen or so, mainly presenters, from the United States.

To kick-off our conference experience, DeFoe and I participated in an early morning radio talk show on the first day of the conference.  The English language broadcast is the most popular daytime radio program in Guatemala City.  The topic for that segment was bilingual education, primarily in Guatemala but also elsewhere.  We explained our purpose in attending the conference, talked about tribal colleges, and contributed to the discussion of language issues facing indigenous peoples.  We received many inquiries about tribal colleges and language issues of American Indians during the radio call-in show.

Later in the day, our conference presentations, which were translated into Spanish, inspired a lively question and answer exchange.  I provided an overview of tribal colleges and AIHEC’s role in the movement for Indian control of higher education. DeFoe talked about the establishment and development of Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College in Cloquet, MN, and its significance to the tribal community. Following our presentations, participants expressed keen interest in the tribal college concept and, in particular, Fond du Lac.  They asked about the types of academic programs offered, cultural programming, accreditation, affordability, quality, and the colleges’ credibility in the general education community. As a result of contacts made at the conference, DeFoe likely will go to Ecuador and Peru to pursue her international interests and desire to bring students from all over the world to her college.

Mayan women display their weaving at the weaving cooperative in Tecpán, Guatemala.

At one point, the discussion took a more controversial turn when an unidentified European woman pointedly critiqued our presentation. She missed our introductory remarks and apparently thought we were proposing that the tribal college concept be adopted in Guatemala.

Her challenge, however, presented an opportunity to clarify our purpose in presenting. We simply wanted to tell our story about the struggle for indigenous control of higher education in the United States.  Our purpose was not to suggest that indigenous peoples elsewhere take up our movement for themselves.  We sought to share the story of our struggle for indigenous control, self-determination, and cultural and linguistic preservation, and we wanted to hear their experiences regarding education and cultural survival of their peoples.

It is plausible that such ideas may, in fact, hold danger for Mayans in a still unsettled post-civil war Guatemala and perhaps in other countries.  Moreover, Mayans and other indigenous peoples must decide for themselves what is best, just as indigenous peoples in the United States did.  This is the central point—indigenous people deciding for themselves.  The unanticipated dialogue resulted in a welcome deeper examination of issues.

Listening to the formal and informal discussions over the three-day conference, it became apparent that significant differences exist between education in Latin America and the United States. For example, bilingual education is a hot topic in Guatemala.  It somewhat parallels the debate in the United States and elsewhere but is distinctly Guatemalan in nature.

The contexts are vastly different.  Mayans comprise over half of Guatemala’s approximately 12 million population.  They speak 21 Mayan languages of which K’iche’, Kaqchikel, Q’eqchi’, and Mam are the principal languages.  For many Mayans, their indigenous language may be the primary language, and Spanish, if spoken at all, is secondary.  In comparison, American Indian languages are becoming extinct at an alarming rate. Only an estimated 360,000 American Indians out of a total population of 2 million speak one of the remaining 154 indigenous languages, according to a recent article in Cultural Survival by Jon Reyhner. This is about half of the number of languages spoken in 1492.

My impression after visiting the exhibit area is that bilingual education has made great strides in Guatemala. Booth after booth displayed educational materials for teaching in Mayan languages.  Not all languages were equally represented, which perhaps suggested that progress in curriculum development across the languages is uneven. It made me wonder what level of political support and financial resources are available to support the effort in the far reaches of the country.

I left the First Hemispheric Conference on Indigenous Education convinced that it had fostered understanding and promoted collaboration. It demonstrated the universality of indigenous issues—such as preservation of language and culture, the central importance of spirituality, and indigenous control and self-determination. We American Indians at the conference learned about indigenous education in other cultural contexts and shared tribal college successes with others.  This resulting exchange helped establish a dialogue that hopefully can continue long into the future and possibly lead to viable collaborations.  Indeed, several tribal colleges have well-established connections to Latin America and longstanding interests in indigenous issues worldwide.

For me personally, the presence of multitudes of traditional Mayans as active participants left the most enduring impression.  The Guatemalan bilingual and intercultural education movement is an attempt to adapt traditional Mayan ways to a changing world.  Beginning with their dramatic arrival each morning, they vividly demonstrated the idea of cultural survival that indigenous peoples of the world struggle to uphold.

For more information about the First Hemispheric Conference on Indigenous Education, see <www.worldlearning.org/pidt/guatemala/hemispheric.html> or <www.enjoyguatemala.com/feria/index2.html>.

Jeffrey Hamley, Ed.D., (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is director of Policy Analysis and Research at AIHEC.  He first traveled to Guatemala as part of a cultural exchange for Northwest Indian College students and since has made four trips to Guatemala, including this recent trip.  In 2000, as a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, he participated in a six-week study tour, “Maya World: Cultural Traditions in Continuity and Change,” which combined field and academic study in Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico.