Gifted Indian Children Find Answers at UCI
Overwhelmed by the endless books packing the stacks of UC Irvine’s library, Amy Locklear didn’t know where to begin. A teacher suggested that she look up her Native American tribe, the Lumbee. The 13-year-old North Carolina girl was doubtful, but agreed to check.
To her amazement--and teacher Jaymee Kjelland’s secret delight--Amy found three books on her little known tribe, which was not officially recognized by Congress until 1956. One book was even written by a Lumbee man who lives down the road from her family. Another had a 1920s-era photograph of a man also named Locklear, sending Amy to the telephone to ask her parents whether he could have been a relative.
“This girl was flying,” said Kjelland, a language arts specialist from Bakersfield. “I’ve never seen someone so excited to learn about her people and her culture.”
That excitement of discovery, the joy of learning is the essence of a special summer program for 160 gifted American Indian students at UC Irvine. The program aims to boost the academic skills and confidence of these children, to keep them challenged and prepared to succeed in college.
Even for gifted American Indian children, the odds of overcoming poverty, racism and inadequate education are grim, say education experts. More than 40% of American Indian students never finish high school, and nearly 20% drop out before completing eighth grade, according to researchers and U.S. Census statistics.
“These kids are all at risk,” said Kjelland, one of 15 “mentor” teachers who applied from across the country for UCI’s Native American Intertribal University Preparatory Summer Program.
“But if they can get through this six-week program, for the next four years of high school, they are going to be able to look back on this experience and say, ‘I handled that; I can do it,’ ” added teacher Janet Lawrence, a high school biology instructor from Oklahoma who is half Cherokee.
The summer program--one of a small, but growing number of special enrichment courses emerging around the nation for American Indians--was first launched with 50 Navajo seventh-graders in Sedona, Ariz., in June, 1988. It was the brainchild of Corona del Mar philanthropists Richard P. and Sharon Ettinger, leaders of the Navajo Nation and the Cushing Academy, a private college prep school in Sedona.
By June, 1989, the number of students had quadrupled, forcing them to move to larger quarters at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The following year, there were 300 children from nearly 30 tribes.
Over the years, the $700,000 program has been underwritten by grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Navajo Nation and others. But the primary source has been the Educational Foundation of America, a charitable trust established by Ettinger’s father, a founder of the Prentice-Hall publishing firm, and the Ettinger Family Foundation.
When the Cushing Academy couldn’t continue its participation for financial reasons, the Ettingers approached UCI, which has ties to the Sherman Indian School in Riverside and offers programs such as the Cherokee Language and Culture Institute and a computer science summer institute for Navajo community college students.
The UCI summer school covers the full range of basic academic skills and is tailored to gifted junior high school children. And whether it is in a science class, or mathematics, language arts or even computer training, the environment and American Indian culture are twin threads woven throughout the curriculum.
Some of the teachers initially questioned the heavy focus on American Indian cultures. Wouldn’t it be better, they asked, to concentrate class time on what the children have to do to succeed in school, in college and in mainstream society?
Mentor science teacher Janet Lawrence’s view is this: “Every person here needs to make these kids understand how worthy they are as Native Americans.”
Richard Ettinger concurs.
“We want to better prepare them to walk in both worlds,” said the 69-year-old former publisher, who hopes to found a year-round college preparatory school for American Indians in the Southwest by 1994.
Ettinger has devoted himself to improving the lot of American Indians ever since he read the book, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” a chronicle of white man’s treatment of American Indians.
If junior high school age students are inherently curious, so too are they easily bored. The challenge facing all the summer program teachers, but especially those teaching science and mathematics, was to make the subject matter come alive.
One way was to have the students build an authentic American Indian shelter and a reed canoe, such as those used by the Chumash Indians of coastal Southern and Central California.
Which is the reason Jaime Paul and Bonnie Lano were standing in the shadow of towering reeds and trees at the edge of UCI’s marsh one recent morning trying vainly to scrape the bark off a long willow sapling to use as rope.
“We should be using our teeth, but we’re cheating,” said Jaime, a 13-year-old Navajo girl from Shiprock, N.M.
“Well I have braces so I can’t use my teeth,” retorted Bonnie, a 13-year-old Navajo from Ganado, Ariz. “They said a family of five could make one of these shelters in a day, but I don’t believe it!”
In a nearby clearing, others fastened bundles of dried reeds around the willow frame of a narrow canoe under the watchful eye of mentor science teacher Gary Hurd, an archeologist and curator of anthropology for the Natural History Museum of Orange County.
“The boats only lasted one season for the Chumash,” Hurd explained to his students.
The construction projects became a vehicle for teaching the kids about marsh life, the difference between invertebrate and vertebrate creatures, as well as how inventive American Indians were in using natural resources to survive.
“Something I especially wanted to do was disprove this notion that Native Americans didn’t work very hard,” Hurd said.
“These kids can see that, in fact, living is always a lot of work for everybody and that long-term planning was important even in prehistoric times,” said Hurd, squinting under the brim of his ‘Indiana Jones’ hat.
They’ve also studied the chemical properties of the water as San Diego Creek progresses through a hunt club’s duck ponds, through UCI’s marsh, Upper Newport Bay and out to sea. “It turns out that aquatic animals and plants do a terrific job of cleansing the water. And these kids were able to make the connection. . . . Some got so turned on they wanted to do water chemistry tests on the tap water at their dorm and the rain puddles on campus.”
The last major science project will be to make clay pots and analyze the chemicals in the clay, itself, at UCI’s low-level nuclear reactor on campus.
Most classes are small, ranging from 12 to 16 or so students, so that teachers can work individually with their charges and in small groups.
The course curriculum was devised by the teachers, and some of it was forged in debates late into the night on how best to shape the lessons.
“We started from scratch and wrote our own textbook,” Lawrence said.
Kjelland’s task in her Language Arts class is to teach the youngsters how to express themselves through the written and spoken word. The first step in the writing process is “brainstorming,” she told her 12 students on a recent afternoon. “It’s like you turn on the switch in the brain and let go.”
She encourages “messy, messy, messy” rough drafts as a sign of “major brainstorming.”
Next, Kjelland sent the youngsters outside to find an object that “spoke” to them, bring it back and tell the class where it had been and where it was going.
“Can we make it up?” asked one girl. Which was, of course, the point--to let their imaginations range as free and high as possible.
Ten minutes later, they trooped back in their shorts and high-tops, with “object” in hand. One carried a daisy, another a clover leaf, another a rock. Still another had a seed pod.
Brandon Paukgana, who is part Hopi and Pima Indian from Phoenix, held up a chunk of gray granite he had grabbed outside the UCI Social Science building. It was “born,” he told his classmates, in the Rocky Mountains, but was rejected by its family because of its small size.
The rock’s brothers and parents all moved away. But the Indians used him as an ax head “about 40 million years ago” and “eventually, he was traded until he ended up here,” said 13-year-old Brandon, who hopes to become a lawyer “so I can get equal justice for minorities.”
Raven Brianne Commanda-Alcoze had only been in the summer program three weeks, but her father already noticed a change in his 13-year-old part-Cherokee, part-Ojibway daughter.
“She has matured and developed a confidence in her own worth and an identity as a native woman,” marveled Thom Alcoze, a biologist and director of Northern Arizona State University’s division of native education who has worked with similar enrichment programs elsewhere in the country.
“I was there on Parents’ Day, and I have to say that they have one of the most incredibly professional staffs I have ever seen--and I’ve worked on these programs for 20 years,” Alcoze said from his Flagstaff office.
The children, themselves, can be teachers of culture.
Aspiring medicine man Dwight Francisco, 16, a Tohono O’odham from Sells, Ariz., performed a ceremonial sage blessing at sunset on a recent outing to the Newport Dunes. He wore a special seashell necklace and sprinkled cornmeal as a gift to the ocean, which he was seeing for the first time.
“I blessed the four directions of the wind and I asked them for strength,” said Dwight, whose other ambition is to become a state legislator. “I love politics, and I want to represent my people.”
Amy Locklear is still poring through her books on the Lumbee between homework assignments, time on the computers and arts and craft activities that keep the students busy from early in the morning until lights out at 10 p.m.
“I was pretty impressed (to find the books) because nobody here had really heard of my tribe,” said Amy, 13, a straight-A student from Fairmont, N.C., who plans to become either a pediatrician or an obstetrician. “I couldn’t even imagine it--I saw people from my own county in those books.”
This summer school was proving tougher than the one she attended last year at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. “We didn’t have to work this hard,” she confided.
Still, she has mixed feelings about graduation ceremonies coming up Aug. 8.
“I’m having a lot of fun,” she said, giggling. “I don’t want to go home.”
American Indians Fall Behind
According to the 1990 Census, there are 1,959,234 American Indians and Alaskan natives in the United States. About 950,000 live on or near federal Indian reservations.
About 24% of of such families live in poverty, compared to 10% of the general U.S. population. The unemployment rate is about 80% among American Indians living on reservations in the Southwest.
Other data shows:
* In 74% of American Indian homes, English is the second language spoken.
* In 17% of the homes, no English is spoken.
* Fewer than 60% of American Indian high school students graduate.
* Of those who do graduate high school, fewer than 40% attend college.
* Only 3% of American Indian college students earn a degree.
Source s : UC Irvine, Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University Los Angeles Times
