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Edited by Jon Reyhner, Joseph Martin, and Louise Lockard
Northern Arizona University (2024)
129 pages
Review by Barbara P. Mink
As Indigenous people around the world work to make their languages and cultures a central part of educational systems, the book Honoring Our Indigenous Languages and Cultures presents some of the opportunities and challenges facing these efforts. Edited by three faculty members at Northern Arizona University (NAU), the book is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Evangeline Parsons Yazzie (1952-2022), an esteemed educator and author. Dr. Yazzie obtained her doctoral degree from NAU and was a major contributor to the university’s Stabilizing Indigenous Language symposiums.
Honoring Our Indigenous Languages and Cultures is divided into two sections: “Language Revitalization” and “Providing Culturally Appropriate Education.” The editors note that the chapters “reflect Dr. Yazzie’s passion for her Diné language and improving education of Indigenous and other children.” The book includes papers presented at a 2023 conference held at NAU. Some chapters addressed to educational practitioners are focused and quite detailed on “how to” approaches to implement educational innovations, while others present research studies. I found the “how to” chapters to be personal and very informational, while some of the research chapters would have benefited from more detail as to the nature and scope of the research.
Some chapters, such as “They Want to Speak to Us: Teaching Nehiyawewin to Youth Through Experimental Leaning,” detail an educational intervention. This particular chapter describes the structure and content of intensive summer camps. Other chapters describe theories and teaching methods that the authors found useful and successful and are focused on providing practicing educators the specific tools so they may have similar experiences. In these practitioner chapters, the authors/educators employ a personal and inviting tone and provide descriptions concerning how the methods were designed. Chapters such as these would be very useful to classroom teachers wanting hands-on information on how to design the instructional interventions described.
The research-focused chapter, “Promoting Data Literacy to Increase Culturally Responsive Pedagogy,” discusses data collection and analysis. As a former graduate professor, I was looking forward to carefully reviewing all the scholarly studies in this volume since the research focused on important language and culture issues. In the more research-focused chapters, however, I found generalization without the authors detailing the level of significance. For example, there were comments such as “all groups agreed” without information on the groups or what “agreement” meant. There were some minor reporting errors, such as noting an incorrect response rate. Also, some of the important charts in the research-focused chapters were not labeled and/or were very difficult to read. This might have been due to the smaller print font used by the book publisher throughout the book.
I would recommend this book to educational practitioners who are interested in specific instructional designs to help them infuse Indigenous language and culture into their work. The chapters that focus on reporting research address important issues and I hope that these issues will be further studied and presented in more detail for scholars interested in Indigenous research. Another strength of this volume is that the chapters describe research and practices in various areas in the continental United States and Hawaii, as well as in Canada and Mexico. I am hoping that educators and researchers across the globe can utilize the information in this volume to design more initiatives to honor Indigenous knowledge and values.
Barbara P. Mink, EdD, is co-editor of The Future of Navajo Education.
