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This article examines how economic pressures and political forces act to constrict First Nations educational self-determination. It is a broad discussion exploring some recent history of how the ideology associated with economic development frames the language of educational possibility in tribal settings. As First Nations continue to create programs that celebrate and promote language and identity, they must negotiate cultural outcomes with agencies and institutions that control funding and accreditation. Proposing cross-border comparative studies and emphasizing a research focus on the recent past, this article examines how local cultural responsiveness was resisted by White institutional hegemony. It narrates the development of a teacher education program at a tribal college with implications for future qualitative studies.
There have been some changes in the writing about First Nations education in the past few years. There seems to be a tendency to describe settings and programs in a way that isolates their discussion from larger economic, cultural, and political concerns. At the same time, I find much of the research lacks the intimate description of real people and places that some ethnographic studies from the 1970s and 1980s contained. The result is that studies of educational considerations in First Nations communities are beginning to sound like either promotional brochures for attracting endowments and grants or thin reports on approaches to integrating Indigenous knowledge. How these economic realities and political forces act to constrict the language of educational possibility for tribal communities is often brought up only as a passing comment or as a caveat about underlying challenges to creating culturally responsive structures and programs. There is a missing analysis, which could tell us more about how cross-cultural negotiations in communities operate.
This article is an attempt to describe aspects of the clash zone that animates cultural values and economic attitudes in First Nations collaborations and compromises with dominant institutions. It is by necessity a broad discussion of how economic issues frame the context for imagining cultural outcomes from the education process. It concludes with a narrative of my experiences developing a teacher education program at a tribal college.
A number of factors contribute to the shift in how First Nations community education has been written about recently. First, a vanguard of Aboriginal researchers have voiced some...