Heritage Institute seeks to connect education to Native experience

The Associated Press

Published: February 4th, 2005
Last Modified: February 4th, 2005 at 11:06 PM

JUNEAU (AP) - When Amelia Rivera attended high school, she didn't hear much about her Native heritage from her teachers.

"It's something that I never studied. To be honest, it was something that I was taught to be ashamed of," she said. "It was just a little while ago that I started learning about my culture."

Now Rivera is a student teacher, trying to bring more cultural knowledge to her students at Yaakoosge Daakahidi alternative high school. The school name is Tlingit for "house of knowledge."

Her efforts, and those of similarly minded teachers throughout Southeast Alaska, will soon be aided by a new program being developed by the Sealaska Heritage Institute.

The Juneau-based nonprofit organization is using a three-year, $850,000 U.S. Department of Education grant to develop lesson plans and materials for a Native-theme high school curriculum.

Former high school teacher Barbara Cadiente-Nelson, who is in charge of the project, said the curriculum will make classes more relevant to Tlingit and other Southeast Native students, whose dropout rates hit 60 percent in some schools.

"What we're looking to do is to meet the needs of our students overall and help them to have the learning outcomes that will assist them in excelling in those particular areas, and also providing them the foundation to move on to higher education," she said.

Cadiente-Nelson said the high school curriculum is being developed this school year, with plans for pilot runs next year in Juneau, Sitka and Ketchikan.

The project will create lesson plans with DVDs, maps and hands-on materials for use in the study of math, history, English and science.

Cadiente-Nelson said math will have a historical focus. She said even if traditional Tlingits didn't have calculators, slide rules or a written language, they had a strong knowledge of the principles involved.

"They had to understand the dynamics of that domain in order to survive," she said. "To build camp, to build hunting tools, to build homes and the structures of their seagoing vessel. Math is just an absolute. It's an absolute understanding of the world as it is."

Cadiente-Nelson said the curriculum will try to convey traditional tribal values such as respect for self and environment, and how to listen and speak with care.

Sealaska Heritage Institute President Rosita Worl said one of the challenges is creating a curriculum that helps connect Native students to their education, while preparing for standardized tests.

"The difficulty comes in dealing with the standards that are set by the No Child Left Behind initiative," Worl said. "So we're working very hard with the school districts to make sure our culturally based curriculum meshes with the needs the schools have in terms of the exams they'll have to give."

Worl said research shows culturally based programs succeed in helping Native students achieve more in school.

"Not only our own work, but other studies as well, show that when Native children are able to learn from their own history and culture, it also improves their academic achievement," she said.

The curriculum will encourage involvement by elders, who can impart traditional knowledge firsthand.

Rivera already uses that approach. She brings her grandmother, Tlingit poet and language expert Nora Marks Dauenhauer, into the classroom to talk about Glacier Bay history and other topics.

One student paying close attention is Tatianna Sinnhuber, who is Inupiat, originally from Barrow.

She said she would like to see more Native themes in her schoolwork, especially when she's learning the history of the state.

"They call it Alaska studies and we learn about how Alaska was bought by the Russians and all the settlements they made here," she said. "But we really don't get to learn about the culture and about how precious that is."

If all goes well, the Native studies high school curriculum will go into full operation in the fall of 2006, said Cadiente-Nelson.

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On the Net:

www.sealaskaheritage.org