In conversations about educating Native youth, one of the names often mentioned as an educator and mentor who has impacted the lives of many people working in education today, is Roger Buffalohead. Despite his early days as a dropout in the first grade, Roger has forged a career over several decades that has helped shape the direction of American Indian education in Minnesota and throughout the country. By combining his traditional Ponca upbringing with a mainstream education, Roger provides a model for both students and teachers to follow in developing creative solutions to the challenges facing Native students.
Drawing from his experience and education, Roger said there are two basic approaches to Indian education that have evolved over the years. One is to work within the public education school system to change it to better meet the needs of Native students. The other approach insists that the mainstream system is flawed and the only way to reach Native students is through alternative schools. While both approaches have resulted in some interesting programs, neither has managed to significantly alter the poor graduation and attendance rates for Native students.
Before you can make a significant change, Roger said, you have to understand that Native people have suffered terrible experiences in the educational system that have influenced their attitudes towards educating their children. Roger was raised in a traditional Ponca family in Oklahoma. His name, Insta dupa, means Four Eyes, and refers to the people at the head of the buffalo ceremony. His father, Mark Buffalohead, a Native speaker, had strong feelings against whites after nearly a quarter of the tribe died from disease following their removal from their original homeland in Nebraska. He had been raised in a boarding school and didn’t want his kids to go there because he said they were mean to Indians, forcing them to dress in white men’s clothes and speak English rather than Ponca.
When Roger asked his parents if he could drop out in first grade because he didn’t care for school, they agreed. Eventually he returned to school in second grade and discovered that learning came easy to him. But he still remembers the prejudice some teachers demonstrated towards Native students. One second-grade teacher set up a washbowl and cloth for the Indian kids to use before they could sit with the other students. “What was that telling you as a second grader?” Roger asked. “That you were dirty and not clean enough to sit with the other kids. We managed somehow to survive all that and finish school.”
After excelling in high school, his mother’s employer took an interest in Roger. He helped him obtain a government loan to attend Oklahoma State University where Roger became interested in history. He became very active in Indian affairs in the early 1960s. He continued to do well in his studies, eventually winning a Woodrow Wilson scholarship to attend the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in their Masters and Ph.D. program. His early interest in history deepened into a passion for what would become part of his lifework: writing history from an internal, Native perspective rather than from the viewpoint of Indian-White relations as so many non-Native historians were writing. Even with his advanced degrees, however, Roger continued to battle the perception in academia that a Native scholar could not be fair and objective in writing history.
After teaching at both the University of Cincinnati in Ohio and at UCLA, Roger accepted a position as faculty at the University of Minnesota to help develop the first Department of American Indian Studies in the country. When the new Chair was forced to resign at the last-minute for health reasons, Roger was asked to serve as the acting Chair. Over the next five years he helped create a major program that included both Dakota and Ojibwe language studies, and influenced the lives of many Native students.
Over the years that followed, Roger’s teaching career would take him to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, back to the American Indian Learning and Resource Center at the University of MN, and finally to work for several smaller, community colleges in Minneapolis. Roger has helped create training programs for Native people at the college level, worked with public school programs, and also spent several years working at Migizi Communications as part of a government-funded program to get Native kids interested in radio and television.
Throughout his career, Roger has found ways to combine his Native heritage and education. And that, Roger said, is what he hopes is beginning to happen for Native students. “For example, when I went to college in 1959, I learned through research that there were only 400 Indian college students nationwide at that time. If you look now at the number of Native college students, it’s well over 125,000 in all colleges across the country.”
Yet significant challenges remain for Native people, including the perception that a mainstream education is not important for their children. After years of assimilation policies that included boarding schools, Native cultures are showing signs of disintegration, with Native languages on the verge of extinction and families struggling with issues of cultural identity. Not surprisingly, all of these issues make it much harder for Native children to navigate the educational system.
“When I was going through school and when I first started working in Indian affairs, I thought that if you used your education effectively, that you could really change everything and make things better for Native people,” Roger said. “I didn’t understand, like I do now, that it’s a matter of power.” One of the benefits of the casino movement has been its ability to provide Native people with the means to influence the dominant culture.
More encouraging to Roger, however, is to see young people beginning to regard their traditions as an important part of their heritage as Native people. “I really think that Native people need to pay more attention to their cultural traditions than they have in the past,” Roger said. “I think they have moved too far away from them in many instances.” Part of the reason for that, Roger explained, is that prior to the 1960s Native people pretty much accepted what white society had to say. Thanks to the American Indian Movement, Native people have regained a sense of cultural pride that has been decimated by decades of punitive assimilation policies. As part of this shift, healing has begun on many fronts.
“It is encouraging to see examples of how healing is beginning to occur,” Roger said. “Healing of the culture, healing of the children, healing of the elders, people are recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. All of these things are very, very promising to me.”
One of the areas influenced by this resurgence of cultural pride is in educating Native youth. Successful Indian education programs always include a cultural component, whether it’s language based or reintroducing other aspects of the culture. Yet, Roger cautioned that it’s necessary to be careful when introducing Native religion as part of the curriculum. “It’s something that can have a profound impact on a person’s life,” Roger explained. “If they can’t live up to it, it makes them feel bad, just like everything else does that they can’t live up to.”
Kids get confused, for example, if you present too many things that they can’t deal with at one time. “If you say that a fundamental value of Native people is sharing, then what does that mean to a 13-year-old kid,” Roger asked. “You need to look at Native philosophy to determine how does it work in real life, how does it work on a day-to-day basis. If you can show by example that you care more about people than things then you have shared a lesson that is very Native.”
It’s essential to find creative ways to integrate these teachings into the lives of Native students in ways that make sense to them, Roger said. “I think too many times we’ve got people who want to force those kids to do too many things. You’ve got to speak the Native language. Well, why? Why do you have to speak Native language? Is it a practical thing? Does it work on Twitter?” If you can tie the lesson to their lives, then it may become something they’ll be interested in doing. If you can’t, then you lose them anyways.
One of the consequences of colonization has been an increase in rigid thinking when it comes to teaching Native culture, emphasizing rules and taboos as if traditions can only be learned and practiced in very restricted manner. “The more you know about Native culture, in my view, the more flexible it is,” Roger explained. “The less you know about the culture, the more rigid you are in your approach to it. There are no rule books, it’s all oral. It’s been passed down for generations. There’s all these generational differences that work their way through these things.”
One example of a creative approach that infuses Native thinking into contemporary curriculum comes from New Mexico. Native kids from different pueblos go online and help each other solve math problems, an approach that reinforces the concept of sharing by providing everybody with a way to learn how to solve math problems. It’s a very Native approach yet not overly obtrusive into the students’ lives. As Roger explained, this is an example of a culture-based curriculum even though it’s not taught in a Native language because it reinforces Native-based ideology.
Another example came from Osseo Schools where a group of kids were learning to become singers and drummers after school. Tribal drum groups typically do not include women so they were unsure what to do when a girl asked to join. The kids were advised to meet with the elders to discuss it. The elders told them that if the kids decided that they wanted to have the girl there, it was okay. By emphasizing a process that reinforced another facet of Native ideology—respect for elders and community-based problem solving—the situation became an opportunity for learning more about their culture.
After telling the story of a young Cherokee student who was involved in a car accident in which her best friend was killed, Roger pointed out that staff was careful to help her understand that what she did was wrong, while still providing the support she needed to get through the experience. Roger’s dad and grandfather used to say that no medicine person in the Ponca tribe ever practiced medicine without being touched by spirit or Xubé. They had to experience something in their own life that took them right to the edge, to the brink, before they could become medicine people. One of the great strengths in Native culture, Roger said, was this view of human nature, which provides ways of rectifying mistakes without regarding people as evil.
“When you know Indian people, you know the culture had to be inventive,” Roger said. “Culture doesn’t exist unless it changes. It has to be alive. That’s what’s missing in a lot of cultural instruction. It’s got to the point where somebody has said this is the one and only way to do this.” And that, Roger insists, is actually very un-Indian. At the heart of Native culture is a willingness to accept change as not only inevitable but also essential for growth, for life itself to continue.
Rather than viewing Native culture as a static entity that has to be preserved in its historical form, Roger explained, “Many of the things that you’re taught really are not rigid at all. It’s kind of like a ‘becoming.’ You’re always in the process of becoming. Even your dreams were interpreted in a way that allowed you to overcome barriers. For example, if a woman foresaw herself as a warrior, she could actually become a warrior….To me, that’s a kind of respect for intelligence that’s not in Western culture. What strikes me as most interesting about Native culture is not that there’s a certain way of doing things but that there’s a process in place that allows things to happen, allows a lot of things to become new and grow and become much more than what they anticipated they could become. The process is more important than the end product.” The challenge for teachers, of course, is in applying this understanding to developing curriculum that is grounded in Native ideology and process.
If Roger were given an opportunity to change anything about education, it would be the system of educating teachers. Far too often new teachers have little experience with more experienced mentors before being thrown into classrooms. “The system is set up so that new teachers are bound to fail, most of them, and they have no idea how to manage a classroom,” Roger said. “All of that could be built into the training program that’s provided to teachers and over a longer period of time and with greater incentives for teachers in terms of salaries.”