blueprints

30 | sherwin Bitsui
Of course, the reality is more complicated than any such stereotype. It
is true that in Native America, a significant number of students enrolled in
public schools will not graduate, and their nations suffer high unemployment
rates. The outside perception is that college success for Native people
is limited because of students’ failure to develop the necessary English and
reading skills that would make them more competitive in an academic
atmosphere. The more complicated truth is that Diné culture has survived
countless attempts at erasure because it is both dynamic and rooted in tradition.
It continues to adapt to change and finds new ways to bring in outside
influences and make them its own even while it draws strength from
the legacy of ancestors and from pride in culture and history. Though some
people have been subsumed by years of acculturation and assimilation into
the dominant culture around them, many remain on the high desert reservation
to raise families, stay connected to traditional lifestyles, maintain
clanships, and work to make their communities amiable places to live. Thus,
Native people are simultaneously trying to maintain a way of perceiving life
in some form that might have existed prior to the invasion of nonindigenous
ideologies while encountering and negotiating the newness of contemporary
culture as it is transported to their isolated communities through
popular media and technology. Contemporary culture continuously laps at
the shores of our way of life, rooting its consciousness to our own, thus
restructuring our contemporary identities alongside the accelerating language
shift from indigenous paradigms of communication to standard English.
All these tensions and conflicts affect Native children in a way that can
render the conventional Western curriculum irrelevant at best and damaging
at worst.
When I return to my community now, I can see, both around the community
and within the school setting, that the majority of the local children’s
first language is English. Because elderly grandparents within the
same household may not speak the same language as the child, traditional
information is lost and gaps in knowledge open. Bilingual poems by Navajo
poets such as Laura Tohe, Hershman John, Esther Belin, Orlando White,
Nia Francisco, Rex Lee Jim, Venaya Yazzie, and Luci Tapahonso attempt to
fill these gaps, inspiring youth to see firsthand the mixed languages of their
homes represented in poetic form. Such recognition and validation are
important to these kids because there are not many places beyond their
communities that share their story and native language, including their
classrooms.