In Their Element

Cerise Palmanteer cranes over a periodic table of the elements. Joe Ball leans in, just over her shoulder.

"Davy Jones's Locker," Ball repeats. "Tough one." He searches for a hint. "It's like when a ship sinks it goes to Davy Jones's Locker. So, who is the ruler of the sea?"

Every day after school, Ball helps Cerise with her homework. Cerise wears tennis shoes, jeans, and a baggy sweatshirt. She has a warm, round face. She likes to write poetry, and her teachers say she has real promise. She hopes to go to college after high school, but hasn't made up her mind. For now, she just wants to get through chemistry. A high school junior, she is as typical a teen as any other.

And Joe Ball, age 33—he's slender and soft-spoken. Short cropped hair, just starting to show flecks of silver. He sits quietly beside Cerise at a small circular table. Sometimes he offers hints, but mostly he listens. He is an unassuming and empathetic after-school tutor.

But Cerise and Joe share something more than homework; they also share a common heritage. They're both Native American— or more descriptively, they are both "urban Indians." And the place they meet after school—the Native American Youth Association—is not your average after-school program, either. It's an integrated social service provider for youth and families, run by and for urban Indians. And even the city—Portland, Oregon—the second-largest urban center of the Pacific Northwest, is more than just a city—it's a former endpoint for Indians following the government-sponsored Indian Relocation Act. It is the weave of these factors, more than any single thread, which makes the urban Indian experience at NAYA so unique, and so effective.

The Dropout Rate

When it comes to Indian education, "effective" is often synonymous with a single word: "graduation." The dropout rate for Native American/Alaska Native students is not just high, it's the highest of any minority group in the school system. Nationally, more than three of every 10 Native students drop out. Here in Portland, a study of 408 Native high school students from 1998 to 2001 revealed that only 40 graduated.

This fall, NAYA received a $1.2 million, three-year federal grant to help Native teens meet benchmark standards in math and science, keep them in school through graduation, and point them toward college. Ball, now in his second week working at NAYA as one of four after-school tutors, has been hired to help.

Today's homework is a crossword puzzle where the answers are one of the elements on the periodic table. The hints, to say the least, are corny. Example: "What do you do if CPR fails?" The answer: barium.

The next hint: a six-letter word for Apache. Ball groans. Cerise rolls her eyes. Another Indian reference and they dread finding the answer. The stereotypes come easily to mind: chief, red man, squaw—

"We better get this one," says Ball. "Wouldn't it be embarrassing if the only Indian in class got the only Indian question wrong?"

Lost in the Fray

Native students are a minority even among minorities. Statewide, they represent about 2 percent of public school students, but in the Portland metropolitan area, the 2,700 or so identified Native students are scattered among slightly less than a quarter of a million students in 28 different school districts and constitute, basically, about 1 percent.

"You know how a lot of high schoolers will say they feel alone?" says Ball. "Well, the Native kids really are."

By extension, so are their parents and guardians. Once, when Portland's Roosevelt High School held a parent-teacher night, they divided guests by race—Asian, Latino, black. In the designated room, a Native American grandmother, who had come on behalf of her granddaughter, sat alone.

"We are so often the invisible minority," says Nichole Maher, the executive director of NAYA. She's Tlingit, but you might not guess it. Though she has raven dark hair, her eyes are blue as a glacier. "So often we are mistaken for other minorities, thrown into the mix of the mainstream, or lost in the fray."

NAYA gathers them together. Modoc, Umatilla, Warm Springs, Siletz, Nez Perce, Yakama, Wasco, Colville, Klickitat, Klamath, and Tlingit: At least 300 other tribal backgrounds are represented in Portland, and they are all welcome here.

For the past few years, NAYA received county funds to serve 41 Native youth; the recent federal grant extends that to 200 students. The actual numbers in the door come closer to 450. "With enough funding, staff, and resources, we could be serving 2,000 kids, easily," says Maher.

Unlike the Indian education support offered at public schools under Title VII (which requires that either the student, parent, or grandparent be an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe), NAYA serves any student, parent, or community member "self-identified" as Native. It's a particularly significant point in an urban center like Portland.

When asked how she self-identifies, Cerise will say with a soft chuckle, "I'm an urban Indian." She has never been to her tribe's reservation in northern Washington. And Ball, a Klamath, didn't even have a reservation when he was growing up.

"In order to understand what these kids are going through, you have to understand what their parents went through," says Nora Farwell, the high school program manager. She recounts that her mother, like so many of her generation, was taken from her reservation, away from family and cultural connections, and placed in a federal boarding school. For more than a century, the boarding schools assembled a medley of children from many nations, changed their clothes and hair to fit Euro-American styles, enforced a strict English-only policy, and offered vocational training. Chilling "before and after" photographs document the "success" of the boarding schools. The actual effects were harder to record. Many students drifted back to their reservations, but found they no longer fit in; many scattered to nearby cities, notably Portland.

In 1954, the Termination Act disbanded more than 100 tribes nationally, including several in the Northwest. Two years later, the Relocation Act began a federal program to ship hundreds of Natives from reservations to selected urban centers, like Portland, and provide them job training on the condition of a signed agreement that those Natives would remain in the cities and not return to the reservations. The result was a Native diaspora—a one-way bus ticket to the city, both metaphorically and literally. By the mid-1970s, more Natives lived in cities than on reservations.

As a result, a first generation of "urban Indians" was born in the cities. Like Joe Ball. His family moved to Portland after termination of the Klamath tribe in southern Oregon. Ball grew up in North Portland and learned what other urban Indians learn: If you don't stand out, you can get by. No one knew if he was Middle Eastern, Mexican, Italian, or Native. If he kept quiet, no one asked. "And that's what kids learn," he says. "If you're quiet, they leave you alone."

The racism runs deep, he explains, and often manifests subtly. He recalls his high school history textbook, a massive volume with the first 200 pages devoted to pre-European settlement. "And guess what page we started on?" asks Joe. "Page 201."

Another big obstacle for Native students is attendance. Many Native families move around and sometimes children are transferred between relatives. On rural reservations, there may be only one school and nearby relatives to help support the student. In the city, however, each move may mean a transfer of schools and even school districts. Credits can be lost. Assignments missed. And the student has to start over, both academically and socially, with new teachers and new peers. In addition, with parents often working one or more jobs in the city, child care that might have been picked up by a grandmother or aunt on a reservation, often falls to the older siblings, namely the middle and high schoolers. Families may also leave a city early in the spring, before school's out, or return late in the fall after it's in session, often for seasonal work, powwows, or return trips to reservations for funerals. "We're not just talking an afternoon service," says Shirod Younker, NAYA's event coordinator, who recently returned to the Warm Springs reservation in Central Oregon to attend a funeral with his wife. "We're talking a full week of ceremonies, all day, all night."

"Teachers only see the absences," he says, "not the reasons behind them. All they can do is hand over a stack of past-due homework, and hope the student can catch up."

A Home Away From Home

After school, students arrive one at a time, or in twos and threes, but when the big white van pulls up, they pour out en masse. The middle schoolers skip upstairs to the computer lab; the high schoolers saunter downstairs to the mostly remodeled basement. Some shove into the kitchen and get fruit and snacks.

NAYA turns 30 this year, but has only recently come into its own. It started humbly, in a subbasement of Portland State University, with borrowed computers. Tawna Sanchez, who was with NAYA in the formative years, describes it mostly as a night school to help Natives get their GEDs. The first years were lean, and they bounced between locations, before landing grants to develop an after-school tutoring program and a domestic violence program, which Sanchez directs.

The domestic violence program is one way NAYA not only addresses academic symptoms, but also the social roots underlying them. The Girls' Talking Circle encourages Native teens to openly discuss dating, relationships, and domestic violence. Native girls are twice as likely as their white or black classmates to experience some type of abuse. Studies also show that teaching girls to address these issues will greatly reduce the risk. NAYA also offers crisis intervention for families, assistance in getting into shelters and, in some cases, emergency food and clothing.

Upstairs Sarah Gellman, education retention coordinator, is on the phone, explaining to a student how to write her résumé. "Yes, put down taking care of your brothers and sisters," she says. "Put child care. That shows responsibility." There's Jayme Hamann, a high school advocate, organizing a coaches' meeting for the basketball program, and Dustin Harmon, a tutor, in the kitchen, getting food for the kids. Most have been here since 9 a.m., and most will stay until nine at night.

While addressing the ills of the urban Indian community, NAYA emphasizes the strengths. It offers culture classes, such as crafts and regalia making. "I made my first choker here at NAYA, I learned to bead," Cerise says proudly. "I hope to learn to dance here, too."

Rebecca Payne, NAYA's receptionist, teaches traditional dancing, but with a distinctly urban twist. When teaching jingle dress dance, she sometimes has her students bring in hip-hop music. Just imagine: A room full of Native youth, some in street clothes, some wrapped in elaborately beaded shawls, following footstep patterns old as human memory to the beat and lyrics of rappers like Eminem. That's urban Indian.

"The teachers who are able to adapt to change are the ones who reach our students," says Ball. He knows that his after-school hours at NAYA cannot solve the problem alone. He points out that teachers share a large responsibility in helping Native students succeed. "There's no way to sugarcoat this," he states. "Adjusting curriculum and creating a safe environment for students to succeed will take work."

The advice Ball offers teachers is simple and straightforward: "Always expect the same of a Native student as any other. Low expectations don't allow room for a student to rise. They're individuals and, after all, they're kids. Tell them you believe in them, and let them surprise you."

A Newfound Family

"Remember my math test I told you I was going to fail?" Cerise sighs. "Well, I must be psychic."

Ball is quiet for a while, then says gently, "How big of a dent did it put in your grade?"

From her office, Nora Farwell overhears and joins the conversation. "I remember your grandma," she says, pulling up a chair beside Cerise and Ball. "She'd always tell stories about Chief Joseph, about Celilo." The talk around the table doesn't skip a beat.

"Oh yeah," says Cerise, "I'd come in, Grandma would be making coffee, I'd sit down, she'd start telling me a story. When her coffee was ready, she'd get up, fetch her coffee, come back, and tell me the same story from the beginning."

"Indian humor," Farwell describes. But it's hard to explain. The joke about a grandmother repeating a story is not about a senior's forgetfulness (or maybe it is a little), but more a form of repetition in itself. Telling the story with apparently no beginning, no end—just a moment—reaffirms a much older form of learning through oral tradition. But more, Cerise's grandmother passed away about a month ago, and telling stories is a form of dealing with loss, remembering, and honoring.

For all the problems on the reservation—and Farwell knows them well—at least, she says, you are all together, with family, united by clan and custom. In the city, you're adrift and you're alone. At NAYA, Farwell has found a sense of community in the city, and for today it is enough to be among other urban Indians, to share a story and a laugh, without having to explain a thing.

Attention returns to the periodic table crossword puzzle. A six-letter word for Apache.

Ball and Cerise scan the names of elements one by one—palladium, silver, cadmium—then they both pause and groan. "Oh, indium."

Urban youth find more than just tutoring in an after-school program

The Dropout Rate

Lost in the Fray

A Home Away From Home

A Newfound Family