‘Stereotypes Are at the Center’: a White House Official on Why Native Students Often Struggle

When the newly minted Secretary of Education John B. King Jr. visited the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in May to talk to students there, he was struck by the “hopelessness” that many of the students expressed.

The secretary spoke with students who had lost friends to suicide and substance abuse. He heard about the reservation’s high high-school dropout rate and low employment rate. And he saw the extreme poverty in which many of the students lived.

“You could see the scope of the challenges the kids faced,” he said.

William Mendoza, executive director of the White House’s Initiative on American Indian and Alaska Native Education, has experienced those challenges firsthand — first as a child growing up on the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Sioux reservations, later as a teacher and principal to Native American students.

In an interview, he talked about his circuitous route to a college degree and what the White House is doing to try to close the achievement gap between Native students and their peers. The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Q. What barriers do Native American students face when it comes to graduating high school and college? What hurdles did you face?

A. I actually attended three tribal colleges and two mainstream institutions — so the journey for me was five institutions and eight years to secure the four-year degree, about double the time.

Coming out of school, I faced two stark realities. One was that I was not prepared to navigate higher education. The other was that I lacked the respect for education. I valued it at a surface level, having come from a family with expectations to go to college, and knowing that it would contribute to my mobility. But sports were what really drove me to perform at the minimum level.

It was a tough time for me at Idaho State University [Mr. Mendoza’s first stop]. At that time I entered an auditorium of 300 or so students, and there was just the overwhelming sense of everything — the content, structure, timelines — being so foreign to me, very intense, and not relevant to the communities I came from.

That is what many of our Native youth deal with — being thrust into an environment that they are not adequately prepared to navigate, and that does not relate to who they are.

I was at Idaho State for a year before I transferred. For all intents and purposes, I majored in open-gym basketball. My religion was basketball, in the face of not being able to find myself through a connection to Idaho State. For me, it was an experience of isolation and falling short. My first semester was an exercise in probation. The second semester didn’t amount to much more, and then I was suspended.

Q. What happened next?

A. I worked for a few years after that in Denver, in every odd job I could think of. Then I hit that other glass ceiling, of being a person of color without a degree. I knew I needed to go back to school. There weren’t any other institutions that would take me, apart from tribal colleges, because of my financial-aid liabilities. So I enrolled in Haskell Indian Nations University.

There I discovered the diversity of tribal nations, and was able to think about how different tribal nations are, thinking about the notion of self-determination. It was an opportunity to attend school with students from around the country, and it blew my mind — not only the shared experiences, but the diversity of experiences. As I learned more about other tribes, education became key. It is upstream to all the issues we face: economic development, justice, health care. All of those are symptoms of a lack of a strong education system. It became a catalyzing moment for me to become a teacher.

Q. You studied at several tribal colleges. What sets them apart from mainstream institutions?

A. Tribal colleges have played an important role in supplementing the shortcomings of our schools in providing a cultural foundation.

It was the right kind of environment for me to exercise who I was. As I travel the country talking to Native youth, I hear similar anxieties, similar stories. The pathways back to those [mainstream] institutions often tend to be tribal colleges, whose explicit mission is to provide students with a well-rounded education, and to equip them to navigate mainstream institutions.

I want to borrow from an African-American student I met who talked about the differences between mainstream colleges and HBCUs. Going to a mainstream college, he said, you theorize about what it means to be African-American, and what African-American communities need. In an HBCU, you live that.

I would say the same is true for tribal colleges. These students see themselves as a close-knit family. In a tribal college, you’re side by side with Native students; the curriculum is designed for you. Every aspect of the institution lives and breathes nation-building. Its mission is to provide a life-building experience about what it means to be of tribal descent.

Then there’s just the place. Tribal colleges are in the heart of Indian country, so they’re working right in the midst of tribal nations. That’s important to the populations they serve.

Q. What — and who — is to blame for the achievement gap between Native students and their peers?

A. One of the key things is stereotypes. Seemingly innocuous stereotypes account for one of the biggest barriers for our students in navigating institutions that are not tribally controlled. What we are seeing is gaps of information about Native Americans, misinformation that confuses students, and in many instances harmful information — information that stops in the 18th century, and never speaks to anything other than resistance and activism. That is certainly part of our history, but not all of it.

This leaves the population nearly invisible. It manifests in teacher and peer behavior, in terms of discipline and bullying. School discipline and bullying are a tremendous concern. Stereotypes are at the center.

If there is stereotyping in resources and content, so is there in imagery and symbolism — in dehumanizing mascots and logos. Research tells us that this has an effect on all learners and a compounding effect on Native students. These harmful images and symbols speak for our youth, for our tribal nations, long before they get an opportunity to speak for themselves. They render individuals incapable of recognizing that we are still here, that we have a vibrant, living society that is not stuck in an 18th-century existence.

Q. What have you been doing at the White House to help close the achievement gap?

A. Our efforts have been working to address not only resource challenges, but also the systems that bear the burden of responsibility for replicating practices.

We’re building tribal capacity — working with tribal leaders to give them a more meaningful role in local and state education, through STEP grants and Sovereignty in Indian Education grants. We provided the largest increase in Title VII dollars since its inception.

Our next work will be calling upon decision-makers to listen to Native youth. The conversations change when we can create a safe and welcoming environment for youth to express their challenges. We cannot public-comment our way to understanding what they’re dealing with. They are so protective of their communities, even if they’re falling short. They have been so focused on survival that we need to take a unique approach to understanding students.

We set out a framework for engaging with Native youth. They were difficult conversations. We had to have elders encourage youth to share their stories, to trust us. We had to get rid of the panel format and get down to their level. We had a conversation on their terms.

The key thing I heard was stereotypes. Imagery and symbolism matters. It’s limiting their opportunities. It’s on their teachers that they’re the savages, the redskins, the squaws. That relates to their invisibility in general, and they face real retaliation when they raise these issues.

Kelly Field is a senior reporter covering federal higher-education policy. Contact her at kelly.field@chronicle.com. Or follow her on Twitter @kfieldCHE.