A system that places 40 percent of its Native American students in special education classes can only be described as a system that is perpetuating cruel stereotypes and gratuitous labeling and working against the interests of its students. The tendency of American schools, in Cortez and elsewhere, to categorize Natives as deficient or inept is simply a continuance of a long-standing tradition of political labeling.

To the first colonists, we were “savage Indians.” As whites spread across the continent and expropriated our lands, this appellation gave way to “drunken Indians” and “crazy Indians,” whose simplicity and barbarism necessitated that we be made wards of the government – a status typically applied only to orphan children and the mentally challenged. This practice surely eased the consciences of the colonizers and served to justify, in their minds, centuries of wars, removal, fraudulent treaties, forced assimilation, forced surgical sterilization and genocide.

The tendency of the educational system to label our kids as “special needs” students instills a negative self-image and prepares them for lives of inferior education, inadequate housing, deficient health care, and menial jobs. It is, moreover, a lazy shirking of pedagogical responsibility. A nobler system would acknowledge the intergenerational culture shock that inevitably results from colonization and the loss of languages, cultures, and traditions that evolved for millenia and distinctively adapted to North America, and would seek to address these issues, which are unique to Native students, rather than simply applying gratuitous labels.

Traditional Native educational systems stressed extensive interaction with adults, play with other children, experience in the natural world, and continuous practical application of acquired skills in real-life situations. Sitting stiffly at a desk with 30 other children while being indoctrinated with the mythology of one’s colonizer and preparing for superfluous tests can’t be good for indigenous students anywhere. Perhaps an acknowledgement of the value of traditional Native education would ensure a superior education and forestall the practice of labeling students as having “special needs.”

Dave Stephenson

Cortez