Carrie Billy: "It did not occur to me that an Indian could be a teacher."

Like most children growing up 25 to 30 years ago in a small rural town, my brothers and I walked to school every day. We kicked cans, chased a few dogs, and lost our notebooks – typical kid stuff. But not really. Our walks were different. We were different, something less than the kids born with lighter hair and lighter skin in towns outside the reservation’s boundaries.

Other children kicked leaves. The cans we kicked bore the labels “Budweiser” and “Colt 45.” Other children planned to go off to college to become teachers, doctors, dentists. We chased dogs, abandoned, hungry, and dirty – generic “rez dogs.” Other children carried notebooks emblazoned with logos from the latest television shows. Our notebooks fluttered out of our hands as we ran from one of the people we knew as “regulars” along our daily route.

Many mornings, particularly when the weather was warm, we would pass one or two “regulars” on the way to school. Most days, we would skirt around them, afraid to waken the rough-looking man or woman who had sunk to the ground in a drunken stupor the night before. Sometimes, if we recognized the face or clothes in the dirt, we would poke the body a few times with a long stick, running off in peals of laughter as its arms waved wildly about. As we neared the school, the drunk would slump again, grabbing a few more hours of sleep in the dawning sun.

When we walked to the trading post after school, we didn’t even notice that the morning nappers had gone. We never wondered where they went or if they had food to eat. We knew someone would take care of them and that we would see them again, perhaps staggering along the side of the road in the evening, just slightly buzzed and swaying. Or maybe tomorrow, sleeping in the sun. Whenever, it was normal. Typical. Expected.

We heard it again and again in our minds: That’s what Indians do. They drink. They get drunk. They fall down beside the road. They do not do things that require an education. School is just a motion to go through for a few years. Until, as expected, the drinking begins.

The strong people broke the cycle. They went to work every day and scoffed at the drunks outside. They boxed ears and wiped noses. They were the positive American Indian role models–the teachers’ aides, the janitors, and the practical nurses at the Indian Health Service Hospital. Always quiet and proud but always, it seemed, subservient. They were not our teachers or our principals. Indians as teachers? Who ever heard of such a thing. Principals? Never. It did not occur to me that an Indian could be a teacher or a principal until many, many years later.

When I was young, Indian women became teacher’s aides or kitchen help, and Indian men became janitors or worked in the sawmill. If they were lucky. Most likely, we heard over and over, we would end up like our father, whose body froze one cold, drunk night on the sacred land of the Navajo Nation.

We saw our fate every day, lying by the side of the road as we walked to school.

We saw our fate in the faces of the people who lived off-reservation, in the white town, on their way to the big city. We saw our fate in the faces of the people who taught us how to read and add and memorize. They were just passing through for a few years, patting our heads and moving on. We were there to stay.

Lack of Indian teachers

Throughout my school years, I never had an American Indian teacher. Not one, unless you count Sunday school. Thirty years later, the situation is only slightly better. Of the 450 teachers on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana today, only five are American Indian. In fact, in elementary schools where 95 percent of the students are American Indian, less than 40 percent of the teachers are Indian. At public schools with high Indian enrollments, only 16 percent of the teachers call themselves American Indian. More than a third of all teachers on Indian reservations leave every year.

Is it any wonder that 44 percent of all American Indian students drop out of high school? Or that less than 20 percent of Indian high school graduates go on to college, compared to 62 percent nationally? Or that 90 percent of reservation-based Indians who enroll in mainstream colleges directly from high school drop out?

I am one of the lucky 10 percent. I made it through two mainstream universities, perhaps because I spent two years at an urban, off-reservation high school where students – all students – were expected to go to college and were treated accordingly. We should not be surprised at the high drop-out rate. The fate awaiting many of today’s Indian children is the same one that greeted my brothers and me every day at the schoolhouse door. Some will escape, but the majority may not. They have no role models to help guide them further down the path. The sense of lost pride – though unspoken – is real; and it is based on educational attainment.

The President, through the national dialogue on race, hoped to address the challenges we face and build “One America,” in which we can celebrate our diversity while strengthening our bonds as a unified people. I do not believe we can achieve this vital goal until we address the inequities that many of our children face every day in the classroom. Conceptually, it is simple: Every child in this country deserves a role model — someone just like him or her who dreamed boldly and achieved.

In actuality, it is a very difficult task. Where do we find these role models? For American Indians, tribal colleges and universities are leading the way. Beginning with one college on the Navajo reservation in 1968, tribal colleges were created by American Indians for American Indians for a simple reason: no other form of higher education was accessible to most American Indians.

In fact, state and federal efforts to include American Indians in their higher education systems have been almost non-existent in the past. State college and university systems felt no obligation to serve Indian lands because Indian reservations were federal property, not state property. The federal government felt little obligation to support American Indian higher education; and in fact, both the Department of the Interior and the Department of Education initially opposed enactment of the Tribally Controlled Community College Assistance Act of 1978.

The history is well documented. For example, over the 41-year period between 1935-1976, only 41 members of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes in Montana earned college degrees. In less than half as many years, however, 423 American Indians earned associate or bachelor degrees at Salish Kootenai College, a tribal college.

For several years, the Navajo Nation’s Diné College has teamed with the National Security Agency to try to establish a teacher preparation program, because the NSA realizes that it needs to help the college build the workforce of the future. Through a hard-won partnership with Arizona State University, Diné College has graduated 19 elementary teachers, all Navajo and all working in reservation schools. The University of New Mexico, which serves the state with the nation’s highest percentage of Indian residents, graduated 500 elementary education teachers in 1998. Of those, only one was American Indian.

Tribal colleges create role models

Today, the nation’s 31 tribal colleges serve about 26,000 students every year. The majority of their students are Indian (because they are located on isolated Indian reservations), but anyone can attend. These colleges focus upon preparing and nurturing role models who will contribute to the economic base of the reservation and help raise the next generation of leaders.

For the past three years, every graduate but one from Sinte Gleska University’s four-year elementary education program was offered a contract to teach in the local reservation school system before graduating. Oglala Lakota College’s teacher education program has increased the percentage of American Indian teachers to 50 percent at tribal contract schools on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota.

Without the tribal colleges, it is possible that these role models would still be in the classroom. But would they be the teachers, or, like memories from my childhood, would they be the teachers’ aides?

I believe that without the tribal colleges, the fate of American Indian people would never change. In a dialogue on race and equality, this issue is as implicit as it was decades ago when Crow Chief Plenty Coups said, “With education, we are the white man’s equal. Without it, we are his victim.”

Carrie Billy (Navajo) earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Arizona and her law degree cum laude from Georgetown University Law Center. She has worked for U.S. Sen. Jeff Bingaman and was federal relations counsel for the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. After this article appeared, she received a letter from President Bill Clinton saying he “was deeply moved. You truly are an inspiration to others and a positive role model in today’s society.”