Sitting around a table of professors and administrators at Chief Dull Knife one afternoon, it was easy for me to see their compassion, their love of tradition, and their dedication to the students. Once a week, they eat a traditional meal together and speak only the Cheyenne language – they kindly translated for me as they went. They recalled childhoods of simultaneous deprivation and happiness, of large extended families banding together for strength and warmth – for example, when snowstorms left them cut off from neighbors for days, with horses as the only means of transportation.
These elders had high hopes that tribal colleges would provide young people with the best of that extended family life while also preparing them for jobs in the 21st century. As Littlebear explains, the tribal colleges were intended to make students more comfortable, “to be more reflective of what was going on at home, on the reservations.” “One of the big impediments for going on to school,” he says, “is that some of the students here, because of housing shortages and other factors, don’t have a place to study.” But this atmosphere created by the college, acknowledges Littlebear, “is a problem . . . students keep coming back here because it is a safe haven.” These schools have created another kind of dysfunctional relationship – they’re like parents who won’t push their kids to leave the nest.
Right now the most educated people on the Indian territories in upstate New York, as elsewhere across the country, work for the tribal government. And often those people moved off the territory to get an education and then were lured back by the tribe’s coffers. This model also seems unsustainable, though. Although some Senecas do come back and settle in Buffalo, few middle-class professionals want to actually raise their children on the territories.
It’s not only the crime and drugs and poverty. It’s also the schools. Most Seneca kids attend one of four public schools run by the state of New York just off the territories – Silver Creek, Gowanda, Lake Shore, or Salamanca – or a Catholic school called Saint Joseph’s, which looks as if it’ll be closing soon. The public schools are paid per pupil by the state to educate the Native American population. The school districts all score below the state average on standardized tests. And many parents seem to feel that their students aren’t being treated well.
Richard Nephew, a member of the tribal council, tells me that he’s particularly upset by the way Seneca kids “are labeled failures even before they can get their feet underneath them.” He believes that discrimination is at least in part to blame for the problems. But when I ask whether the tribe has considered increasing its investment in education, Jeffrey Gill, another tribal council member, is somewhat dismissive. He tells me that only a fraction of the kids who leave the reservation actually come back, so it’s not clear whether education is a particularly good investment for the tribe.
Gill has two sons, now in their 20s, who attended the Gowanda schools growing up, which is also where Gill went as a kid. He reminisces about their time there, especially their athletic participation. He liked the fact that the principal would come into the locker room after football games. “Both of my sons were presidents of their class . . . I don’t have a bad thing to say about it. I really don’t. To this day, I enjoyed my education and the leadership roles that both of my sons took when they were there. They played their sports; they played their instruments.”
Christina Jimerson, another member of the tribal leadership, whose sons are still in school, is more worried. She tells me that when the local schools’ budgets were cut, the Seneca government volunteered to help fund extra “school resource officers” to ensure students’ safety. She thinks things “might be getting worse. There is always trouble with [drug use and violence] in any society, but I feel like when I was growing up it was beer and marijuana and now we have kids who are becoming addicted to pills and heroin.”
In addition to the security officers, Seneca schools have hired guidance counselors. Seneca students, according to tribal council members, were often getting to their junior or senior year in high school without knowing what courses they’d need to take in order to be college-ready. Jimerson says that the schools were encouraging kids to take easier classes, “not really encouraging them to think about the long term.” The guidance counselors are supposed to get involved early on in helping kids pick their classes and ensuring that they’re doing their work.
Many Seneca parents also worry that their children aren’t getting the help or the professional services they need in school. “It can be intimidating for any parent,” says Jimerson. “I felt that way myself going into a meeting about my son. . . . You have to be their advocate.” Jimerson doesn’t blame the teachers either, many of whom will tell parents that their kids need more help, even when the school district wants to cut back on services for kids.
What’s interesting, though, is that Seneca parents have a choice about where to send their kids. Not only can they, at least for now, make use of the Catholic school in Salamanca, the tribe heavily subsidizes members who send their kids to other private schools. Families typically don’t have to pay more than $1,000 per year for private school tuition. Although the best schools in the area are typically in Buffalo or its suburbs – which can be more than an hour’s commute for some students – it’s interesting that more parents don’t take advantage of this option.
Alexis Penhollow, who used to be the education director for the Seneca tribe and now works as the preschool director, believes that the school systems are trying to work with these kids. “I think a lot of what hinders children from taking that next step is that parental involvement piece.” Penhollow is working on a doctoral thesis about the question of “why at the higher grade levels parents have a tendency to drop off their involvement in education.” She says, “I’ve looked under the hood and all over the place to try to find an answer, but everybody’s reasons are different.”
It might have something to do with the fact that the kids who do succeed in high school and go off to college aren’t likely to come back. But Penhollow says that’s such a tiny segment of the population that she’s not sure it’s the real cause. It’s much more common for a high-school graduate to go to college and come back after a year.
Penhollow saw this happen a number of times with kids who needed to fill out financial aid forms for college. The tribe would offer to help, she says, but “parents were not always forthcoming with information regarding their salaries, so it left the kids in limbo. Having to deal with that is very stressful.” And a lot of students didn’t want the hassle.
From a cultural perspective, she says, “we also have a tendency to coddle. We are a small community, and everybody knows each other. We’re just a big family.” And because most of the parents haven’t been to college themselves, they don’t know how to prepare students emotionally for the experience. They don’t understand what their kids need to do in order to succeed.
It’s also true, though, that many of the students are academically unprepared. There have been several attempts to improve the educational prospects for the K–12 students here.
In June 2012, for example, several members of the Seneca Nation submitted a letter of intent to the state of New York saying that they were going to apply to open a charter school on the territory. Using the newly adopted Common Core standards, the Seneca Allegany Charter School, according to the letter, would “provide students with a rigorous education that will uniquely prepare them for success whether they select to pursue a traditional college career or avail themselves of opportunities in advanced technical fields.”8 The proposed chair of the board of trustees was a former president of the nation, with a law degree from Harvard.
According to Penhollow, this was the second time the Seneca applied for a charter. The first was in the 1990s, and she’s not sure what happened, but there didn’t seem to be enough interest in pursuing it. The application submitted two years ago, she says, was denied because there was no actual facility in which to house the school. This is a problem for many cha
rter schools, which, albeit public schools, are often required to pay for their buildings themselves. In principle, of course, this shouldn’t have been a problem for Senecas, who are flush with cash and could presumably have used some of the government-owned land for the purpose.
This was only the latest in a series of failed education ventures, according to Penhollow, who notes that years ago the nation talked about starting its own college. “We’ve had all these ideas for years. I think it’s just implementing them and getting the numbers in order to do this.” If it were “the right kind of school,” she insists, parents would get behind it. But what would that look like?
A few years ago, there was a proposal to launch a private school on Seneca territory modeled after the Nichols School in Buffalo, probably the best private school in the region. According to Penhollow, the headmaster of the school came to the territory to talk to parents and some of the nation’s leaders about the possibility of forming a kind of partnership. The school was going to have a heavy focus on teaching math and science.
But Penhollow says the parents had “concerns.” They thought it was “too preppy” or just that it would’ve been “too much” – that is, too academically rigorous for the students. Parents also worried that it wasn’t grounded enough in Native culture and language. Penhollow holds out hope, though, that the Seneca people can start to have “higher expectations” for their kids’ education.
But that’ll require a change in cultural attitudes toward education.
Lucille Brooks, the SNIEDC administrator for the Seneca tribe, is actually a member of the Mohawk tribe. Shortly after she was born, her mother decided to leave the Mohawk reservation (on the border between Canada and New York) and move to Georgia. Brooks grew up in Georgia and western New York, but always off-territory. Her mother didn’t have a high-school education, and she wasn’t looking for Brooks to be more educated. But she was looking to remove some of the harmful influences that Brooks might face. “I really believe if I had grown up on the reservation, I probably would have fallen into a lot of the same kinds of trends. There was a lot of drugs and alcohol.”
Brooks tells me that her mother thought “what is important is that you’re close to Creator, the traditional native way of thinking.” Brooks’s family had a strong connection to the Mohawk Nation and a strong Native identity. As a child, her grandmother had been sent to a Catholic boarding school against her will and threatened with physical abuse if she used her native language. Hearing about that experience shaped not only Brooks’s mother’s view of “white people” but also her view of education.
Thus when Brooks told her mother she wanted to go to college, her mother said, “Well, why do you want to do that?” Brooks was fortunate, she says, to have other role models in her life. “At one point in my life, there was a CPA in Georgia I met, and from what I’d seen there was a lot more I could achieve if I became a professional.” The woman Brooks met had worked with the governor of Georgia at one point. She “had a beautiful home and everything.” And Brooks wanted to be just like her. She went to a community college in North Carolina and then finished her bachelor’s degree at Fredonia State in New York.
Her first job was not on a reservation, and she says she was treated poorly there because she was Native. So she got a job working for the Seneca casinos. “I always wanted to come back, because my friends are here and it’s like your family.”
But being around her friends and family hasn’t been easy either. “There are a lot of struggles on territory because of politics here. It’s like you’re not valued.” She says that the things that are important to her, “like keeping a good clean life,” aren’t valued here. Everything, she says, “depends on who is in politics at the time.”
Brooks is optimistic that things will change, however. She tells me that her uncle was once a medicine man. “Back then, it was that knowledge that was so valuable and what carried us through.” Now, she says, “it’s getting to the point where the transition has to happen for education. Now it’s got to be based on facts. When I present to boards [of directors] – in my previous jobs I’ve presented to doctors, attorneys, and other professionals in the field – it’s based on facts.”
With the right education and the right role models, though, she feels confident that this transition can occur.
Whenever there’s poverty and dysfunction in a community, outsiders want to know whether something inherent in the culture prevents the people in it from getting good jobs, from living clean lives and being productive members of society.
For the most part, the answer is no. Plenty of members of the Seneca Nation have left the territory and gone on to great personal and professional success. The nation now has at its disposal the resources to change some of the facts on the ground. They can lobby and sue federal agencies to get better treatment than they have in the past. There’s also a greater social safety net for tribe members who are sick or destitute.
On the other hand, Senecas seem to be learning the hard way that there are limits to what money can buy. By sending out annuity checks, the tribal leadership may be sapping the nation’s entrepreneurial spirit. And by adopting the kind of moneymaking strategies that take advantage of various legal loopholes, they encourage the Seneca people to hold fast to a narrative of victimhood. No doubt this was an accurate narrative in the past. But once a tribe makes a billion dollars and then its members find that they don’t receive as many preferences in hiring for federal contracts as they used to, it’s hard to say this is the same kind of victimhood.
But those payments from casino revenues have encouraged a culture of dependency. This isn’t something that’s part of Seneca tradition, or any other set of Native beliefs for that matter. But Senecas have responded to economic incentives and disincentives the same way that any other group would.
If direct payments to members of the nation don’t seem to be encouraging them in large numbers to save for college or start businesses, what can the money be used for? Education, for one thing. The Seneca people have amassed enough money that they needn’t depend on the second-rate public schools in surrounding towns. Although there’s general agreement that Seneca students don’t do well in these environments – whether because of discrimination or simply because the schools fail to understand their needs – the tribal leadership could do a lot more than just send extra security officers to these districts.
The blame, at least according to Penhollow, lies almost entirely with the parents in the community. It was the parents who didn’t push harder for a charter school and rejected a private school alternative when a viable one was offered to them. It’s the parents who aren’t doing more to get their kids into college and to ensure that they don’t return home after a few months. But it’s also true that many of the parents don’t know just what a successful school can do for their children.
Of all the goals listed on the extensive Seneca Allegany Charter School application, two seem most important: “to raise student achievement first to the level of State average achievement and immediately to a higher level comparable to the highest performing school districts in the region” and “to reverse decades of failure in educating the Native American population, as well as its gross overrepresentation in special education programs,” by means of “effective pedagogy that treats culture as a positive influence on learning.”9
In principle, there’s no reason why Seneca culture can’t be a positive influence on learning. But the culture that exists on the territory today is holding the nation back.
Ronald Hammonds, of the Lumbee, went to segregated schools as a child and was among those who sued to bring about a single school system in Robeson County. He served on the local school board. “You think you’re in pretty good shape until you go visit some of the other schools [in the state]. You realize you need to do better.” Even the buildings for the Indian schools were falling apart – “there were still the same leaks there as when I was in school. When it started to rain, you
had to move the seats.”
Although money might help make things more equitable, he says, “You can’t solve the problems in the public schools by increasing the budget every year.” He’s not sure that charter schools can fix everything, but he believes Ben Chavis “can think outside the box. I support his attitudes about charter schools wholeheartedly.”
Hammonds himself never got a college degree. “I attended six universities. I’ll put it like that.” When he realized college was not for him, he came home to work on cattle farms. Not everyone has to be college educated, but everyone needs to get a job, he tells me. And the primary and secondary schools aren’t preparing students for any kind of job.
Today, he says, schools have more problems to contend with than just money or segregation. “The problem we have today that we didn’t have 30 years ago is that you can’t let a child run around wild for five years and then expect the school system to do wonders with him. It goes back to the parents and the family. The family unit is eroding, disappearing.” A girl at his church recently became pregnant at the age of 12, he tells me. “The parents are supposed to be Christians and all in church. But there’s no shame. Our problem really starts at home, and I fault the government for that.”
Some Lumbees suggest that this pattern is the inevitable result of a changing economy. Lucy Lowry, the CPA who teaches at nearby Bladen Community College, tells me that just as is true everywhere in the country, “the skills that are required for entry-level positions are now much more refined than they were 25 to 30 years ago, and they are rapidly getting more refined.”
When I first sit down with Lowry at one of the picnic tables a few yards from where cattle graze on Chavis’s farm, she’s insistent that Robeson County’s problems are the same as those everywhere. “We aren’t unique. This is what’s happening all over. This is what’s happening in Detroit. It’s what’s happening in Los Angeles.”
The New Trail of Tears Page 11
