The New Trail of Tears

by Naomi Schaefer Riley

  This obligation of young people to stay home to care for others comes up frequently in my interviews. The Ruth Danley and William Enoch Moore Fund was launched by a teacher who received a bequest from a relative. Bruce Bickel, who helps administer the $16 million fund,17 travels around the country looking for ways both large and small – such as paying for school buses, school kitchens, teacher bonuses, and scholarships – to improve Indian education. But Bickel is concerned about the other factors keeping kids from graduating. In some cases, he says, boys will leave school at 16 to go to work fighting forest fires. Girls will drop out to take care of their older relatives or their younger siblings.

  Curran realizes that for many families there’s a delicate balance going on here. And TFA can’t just come in and tell all the students that they’re going to go to college. But he’s definitely irritated by community leaders who say that encouraging kids to go to college is antithetical to the tribe’s goals. In the name of “tribal self-determination,” he says, they’ll “decide in seventh grade if it’s right for a kid to be going to college or not.”

  He says it’s teachers’ responsibility to make sure that kids “can determine what they want to do, and they should have the same options that any kid from the South Bronx or the suburbs of Minneapolis has, and that means they have to be prepared.” So TFA has settled on both of those things – college readiness and tribal self-determination. The latter will allow kids to “make decisions aligned with their own values and their own culture.”

  In general, he says that parents complain more about the schools’ underperformance than about their children being taught by people with a “savior” mentality. “People are frustrated with expectations not being high enough or that their kid is not being pushed enough.”

  But they also don’t understand what’s possible for their kids. Which is why TFA sponsored a trip for a dozen or so community leaders and parents in January 2014 to visit some high-performing charter schools in Denver. “If you haven’t had the experience of seeing a school that takes low-income kids actually outperforming white kids in suburbs,” then you don’t realize the possibilities for your own children.

  There was “a lot of emotion” on the trip, says Curran – “a lot of tears, a lot of frustration.” “If this could happen for first- or second-generation Latino kids in Denver, why can’t it happen for kids within the bounds of a sovereign nation?”

  Dan Nelson was one of the people invited to Denver. A facilities manager at one of the schools on Pine Ridge, Dan has a lot of interest in education. His sister works in a Montessori program. His son runs a Head Start program on the reservation, and his daughter teaches Lakota language at a local school. “The system that we have been using is tired. The teachers are helpless to control their work environments. They just do what they have to rather than being active in changing things. It’s just that we are in need of a change.”

  Nelson actually spent part of his childhood in Denver and was amazed at how much things had changed. When he was growing up, a desegregation plan was put in place and kids were bused to different neighborhoods. “One thing that surprised me in Denver now is the freedom, the choice of schools they have.” As a child, he experienced “a turbulent time.” But on his trip, he saw “peacefulness and calm of it, the kids getting to go to whatever school they wanted to.”

  At the charter schools he visited, including a KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) academy, he says, “the kids have a light in their eyes. That’s what impressed me.” The kids at Pine Ridge, he says, might have that light too, but “it’s dulled by our schools.” There are plenty of “factions” on the reservation that are opposed to change, particularly people who work for the tribal government and the school system, according to Nelson. But “the only way for us to succeed is to start from scratch and build the school system the way we want it.”

  South Dakota is one of three states that don’t allow charter schools. If the Indians of South Dakota were to support a charter law, it would probably pass. Nelson says he’s not sure that charters are the solution, but “how do we know unless we get the opportunity? Why don’t we have the freedom to choose where we send our kids?” Nelson is a father and a grandfather, and he tells me that he’s speaking in that capacity, not as a professional in the school system.

  He realizes that what he’s saying is pretty radical on the reservation. And he’s committed to spreading the message about the schools he saw. “All I can tell them is it’s beautiful. It works. The best thing people can do is witness it for themselves. I want to take everyone there for five hours.” The question is how many planeloads of people would he need to take there before the parents of Pine Ridge really started a revolution?

  People like Nelson who want to see reform are up against some serious opposition from their own leadership. “We don’t discuss charter schools,” Fire Thunder tells me pointedly. “We have local control. We have school boards.” She tells me that the tribe doesn’t need a different structure for schools or the education system. “What we need is money to be creative to do what we need to do. The concepts are already here.”

  As for whether it might be useful to separate the running of schools from the school boards, Fire Thunder insists, “We keep politics separate from school operations. We are sophisticated enough not to let politics interfere.”

  Whatever Stacy Phelps thinks about Teach for America, he knows that’s not true. In both his current role at the American Indian Institute for Innovation and his previous roles – including starting a math and science summer program for Native kids in Rapid City called GEAR UP – he realizes that the farther you can get from reservation politics, the better off you are. “God bless Cecilia [Fire Thunder]. She’s working hard. She has all the major connections. [But s]he’s not an educator.”

  When I bring up Fire Thunder’s idea of the tribe developing its own academic standards, Phelps says he doesn’t oppose that measure, but he notes, “We have the same obligation as white educators to get our kids reading at a proficient level.” Phelps says that he and his colleagues “want the kids to be successful. We know they’ve got to leave their reservation. We don’t have a successful tribal college. They’ve got to come off the reservation to go to a university.” He doesn’t want to understate the importance of Indian identity, but he does say that “being a Lakota means we have to walk in two different worlds.”

  Indeed, Stacy Phelps and his colleague Walt Swan tell me that they see the state standards for educating children as the “minimum.” “What you put on top of that is the genuine mark, and that is our language and our culture.” All of those things together “will make us better citizens, and that will give us more identity to be proud of who we are.”

  But the bureaucracy and the politics involved in Indian education – whether the schools are run by the tribe, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or the state of South Dakota – seem insurmountable at times. How Indians can build a strong academic program with a strong cultural identity remains to be seen.

  At Red Cloud, the boarding program officially ended in 1980, and the school has transformed its former dorms into housing for teachers and a Heritage Center. Red Cloud actually consists of three schools – two elementary schools and a high school. The facilities aren’t posh by any stretch of the imagination, but some of the older buildings have a distinguished look, and the newer parts of campus are sleek and filled with light. There’s an art gallery with paintings, sculptures, and artifacts of the local culture. And the school has launched the most extensive program anywhere to teach the Lakota language to children. Staff members work with nearby universities to preserve the language in both its written and its oral form.

  Red Cloud is undertaking the most advanced educational experiments in Pine Ridge, and there seems to be universal agreement that Red Cloud High School is the best on the reservation. Over 95 percent of its graduates go on to pursue higher education or postsecondary training.18 Its graduates score about average for the
state of South Dakota, which is hardly a high standard, but it’s much better than for Indian students generally. Red Cloud has a significant advantage, though, which its critics are quick to point out: students are required to pass an entrance exam. (Interestingly, one elementary school I visited measures its progress over time by how many of its students pass the Red Cloud exam each year.)

  But even given this standard, Clay Leonard, who has taught math at Red Cloud for 27 years, tells me that many incoming freshmen perform at a sixth- or seventh-grade level. “It is tough on the teachers, but the skill level is not up there, so your goal is to catch them up the best you can.”

  Some of Red Cloud’s students have achieved tremendous success. In 1989, the Gates Millennium Scholarship, which covers the whole cost of college education, was awarded to a Red Cloud student. Today, a higher percentage of Red Cloud students have received the Gates Millennium Scholarship than at any other school in the country.19 In part, at least, the teachers and administrators attribute this success to the school’s religious identity. Which isn’t to say it pushes the Catholic faith on its students. Most of the students identify as Christian, but relatively few of them are practicing Catholics. And Leonard believes there’s very little tension over the fact that Red Cloud is a Catholic school. “The culture of the Lakota is so extensively integrated into our program. It’s not that we want you to be Catholic. It’s like we want you to improve your spirituality, and everybody has that.” Using its Lakota and Catholic values, the school tries to provide students with a safe place – away from the chaos of their families and communities – as well as a sense of purpose and direction for their lives.

  In the 1980s, the campus church was destroyed in a fire. The new Church of the Holy Rosary is a modern affair with lots of light streaming in, but the most interesting parts of it involve the melding of Lakota and Catholic tradition. The shape of a medicine wheel was incorporated into the design, and if you look closely at the Stations of the Cross around the chapel, you’ll see that it’s the U.S. cavalry rather than the Romans who are pursuing Jesus.

  No one pays more than $100 a semester to attend Red Cloud. The school is funded almost entirely by donations from individuals and foundations. It runs a massive direct-mail campaign every year. People across the country send small donations. Some donate because it’s a Catholic school. Some donate because they want to help Indians. Robert Brave Heart, who became the school’s first lay Lakota superintendent in 2003, tells me that they run about 17 or 18 campaigns a year, and a lot of the checks that come in are for only $25. But sometimes they get lucky and someone leaves the school a more significant amount in a will or estate: “There was one for a million dollars that really put us in a good position a few years ago.” Brave Heart notes that the appeals to donors used to be more about the terrible conditions on the reservations, but now they try to focus more on Red Cloud’s educational successes.

  “We can’t pity the children. We can’t feel sorry for them. We need to offer them opportunity for hope to be able to build a better life for themselves.”

  Despite Red Cloud’s successes, the school has continued to incur the ire of many local residents. Aside from its boarding-school history, Brave Heart says the school had another break with the community in the early 2000s. It used to be run in consultation with a school board made up of some Jesuits and Franciscan nuns as well as some local lay-people. Brave Heart says that “it started to become political,” so the administration decided to dissolve the board. That didn’t go over well in the community.

  A few years ago, as Fire Thunder tells me, the tribal council passed a law that would require that 2 percent of teachers’ salaries go toward sustaining the tribal education department. Red Cloud hasn’t paid, and Fire Thunder accuses school administrators of not respecting tribal laws. “They have excluded themselves. Red Cloud is not accountable to the tribe.” Ultimately, despite the fact that Red Cloud is run by Lakotas, despite the fact that it’s helping Lakota students gain high-school diplomas and in some cases go on to great success in higher education, and despite the fact that it’s preserving Lakota history through its heritage center and language program to an extent that no one else on the reservation is, many in tribal leadership still consider the school a pariah.

  Ultimately, Keith Moore says, what’s killing Indian education is politics. Whether it’s Teach for America or charter schools, he notes that if tribal education directors see outsiders gaining too much influence, “they pull on the reins.” Policies are changed at the drop of a hat. In fact, many people don’t want to become school administrators on the reservation because if you make “one decision” people disagree with, you’re “on the chopping block.”

  Moore is not despondent, however. One reason he left Washington was that he felt as if he wasn’t making much of a difference there. But back home in South Dakota, he’s still helping with GEAR UP, the math and science summer academy he started with Stacy Phelps a few years ago. Housed at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology (in Rapid City), GEAR UP has helped prepare thousands of students for postsecondary education. Every alumnus of the program has graduated from high school, 87 percent have gone on to postsecondary education, and 9 percent have entered the military. Two-thirds of those who completed the program have graduated from college or are still enrolled.

  Despite all the politics in Washington, in South Dakota, and especially on the reservation, Moore is hopeful about GEAR UP, about Teach for America, about the potential for charter schools, and about Red Cloud’s success. In the fall of 2015, though, it was revealed that the company managing GEAR UP, the Mid-Central Educational Cooperative, had been under financial scrutiny by the Department of Education. State officials revoked its contract, and a criminal investigation was launched when the group’s business manager killed his wife and four children before shooting himself and setting fire to their home.

  Moore is unsure of what the future holds for reforming Indian education. “Do people have the tools to understand the necessity of a quality education system?” he asks me. And then he offers the real question that’s eating at him: “How much longer can we educate students this poorly and make it as a people?”

  PART THREE

  Who Will Stand Up for Civil Rights?

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Equal Protection

  The Tribe vs. the Individual

  IN THE EARLY 1990s, Elizabeth Morris remembers reading about a case in which a 5-year-old boy who had been adopted as a baby was removed from his home by an Indian tribe in South Dakota. Morris and her late husband, Roland, who was a member of the Minnesota Chippewa Nation, were horrified to realize that if anything ever happened to them, their young children could be taken by her husband’s tribe and raised on a reservation – all because of something called the Indian Child Welfare Act. As Morris told me: “His reservation is a dangerous place. It’s not safe for children. He made a decision as a U.S. citizen not to raise his children there.” The idea that a federal law could undermine that decision gives Morris nightmares, and she has made it her life’s work to change it.

  Her dealings with her husband’s extended family and other people on the reservation have been difficult, to say the least. Morris has attended the funeral of a 2-year-old beaten to death there. She has fought off a drunken man trying to sexually assault a 10-year-old. She has raised four Indian foster children with fetal alcohol syndrome and two more born with crack in their bloodstream. Now she runs the Christian Alliance for Indian Child Welfare. Morris knows enough about the problems on some reservations to know that for too many children the best option is to be raised somewhere else.

  But according to the provisions of ICWA, passed in 1978, tribal governments have a say over where children with the slightest trace of Indian blood are placed if there’s ever a dispute over custody. In practice, this has meant that if parents voluntarily put such a child up for adoption, tribal governments can block that child’s placement with a non-Indian family. Even i
f that child has never set foot on a reservation. Even if the biological mother thinks a non-Indian family might provide a better home. Even if the Indian family has no particular connection to Indian culture or heritage. And even if a non-Indian family off the reservation promises that they will expose the child to Indian culture.

  Just as Morris and her husband were at one time, most Americans are largely unaware of ICWA. The law did gain a higher profile in 2013 with the Supreme Court ruling in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl,1 which became known as the “Baby Veronica” case. The details of the case were so heartbreaking they became the stuff of television specials.

  In 2009, a child was born to a Hispanic mother and a father who was an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. The two were engaged to be married, but she broke it off and gave him the option of paying child support or relinquishing his parental rights. He chose the latter. She put the child up for adoption through a private agency; a couple in South Carolina adopted the baby. Although the Cherokee Nation was supposed to be informed about the adoption, the father’s name was misspelled in the paperwork, so the Cherokees didn’t think he was a member. After learning that the mother had given up the child, the father had second thoughts about his decision and tried to get custody. If he hadn’t been Indian, he wouldn’t have had a legal leg to stand on. But because of his race, he could invoke ICWA.

  The case worked its way up to the South Carolina Supreme Court, which ruled 3–2 in favor of the father. (If the paperwork had been done correctly, the child would have been with him the whole time. There would’ve been no question about ICWA’s relevance.) As a result, the child was removed from the home where she had lived with her adoptive parents from birth to age two and a half and sent to Oklahoma to live with people she had never met. The adoptive parents appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which reversed the lower court’s decision and determined that the Indian Child Welfare Act didn’t apply in cases where the biological parents had never been the child’s custodial parents.