Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities

Preface

xi Preface This project began in ignorance, and it was driven by unanswered questions. While reading about the American Indian Movement years ago, I came across a brief mention of two “survival schools” that AIM members had founded in Minneapolis and St. Paul in the early 1970s. Given what I thought I knew about AIM, this was so unexpected that I did a mental double take: “They did what??” When I looked for additional information about the schools, I found little, either in the scholarship on AIM or in general histories of Indian activism. I became determined to find out more. In my research I sought answers to the questions that interested me as a historian: What might have motivated a group of Indian people to create their own independent schools in the heart of the Twin Cities? Who led this bold action, and what were their personal histories? What kind of education did they provide, and how did they do it? What were their most signi ficant successes, challenges, and shortcomings, and how did the schools change over time? What have they meant to the people who created, attended , worked in, and were influenced by them? And how do they help us better understand AIM and its place in Native American history? The first answers I found only fueled my curiosity, leading me to dig deeper into the layers of the schools’ history. Learning what had motivated people to found the schools made me examine the relationship between their personal experiences, the conditions of postwar urban Indian life, and Indian people’s collective history in the upper Midwest. Hearing the schools’origin stories made me ask why the Twin Cities public schools were PREFACE xii failing Indian students so spectacularly in the 1960s and 1970s and why so many Indian families were losing their children to the child welfare system. Analyzing the schools’ structure and philosophy made me wonder what educational models they might have drawn from. Considering the circumstances around the schools’ closure made me examine their long-term challenges for the roots of later problems. Listening to people talk about what the schools meant to them made me question how we determine the purpose of schooling in this country and reconsider how we might measure educational success. Above all, exploring the survival schools’ history forced me to ask, What is the place of Native people in American society? How can we make more room for them,and how might we help their children thrive? I could not have answered any of my initial research questions without talking to the people who were closest to the survival schools. The oral history interviews that I conducted with school founders, parents, administrators , teachers, and students provide this book’s methodological backbone, as well as its narrative heart. I have brought my own analysis to the process, and I have drawn my own conclusions. But I also allowed the interviews to shape the questions that I asked, how I answered them, and what parts of the story I emphasized. As I spoke with survival school people—those who imagined, created, and maintained the schools, those who volunteered and worked in them, and those who attended them—though I asked about the past, they persistently pulled our conversations into the present tense. They also pushed the discussion further back in time than I had anticipated . The interviews thus reminded me that the schools’ story is ongoing, and they revealed the powerful place that historical experience still holds in modern Indian people’s lives.1 The people who talked to me in oral history interviews provided otherwise inaccessible information about the schools’ founding, development, and outcomes. Because I am interested not just in what happened, but also in how people experienced it and what it has meant to them, using oral history methodology was essential to this project. Its very subjectivity became its strength, as it grounds the schools’ story in a more humanized, intimate understanding of the past. Oral history is a particularly powerful tool for documenting the experiences of people who remain on the margins of the historical record. It becomes especially important when considering those whose cultural traditions privilege oral rather than written expression.2 As Ojibwe language and culture teacher Dennis Jones insists, “Oral history is not only a valid tool for understanding Indian peoples; it is an essential P REFA CE xiii tool. Everything does not...