William Demmert on Culturally Based Education (Native Voices) | Native Students

Many of us who have been successful academically, economically, and socially have been brought up in an environment that supports or has positive attitudes about being Native American. In our assessment of why schools fail, we generally see a school that does not take into account the influence of culture on one's view of the world, the learning preferences an individual might have developed, or the impact of environment on a person's cognitive development.

From the colonial period in America, educators told us that being Indian is not good, that knowing the language and participating in and or practicing the culture is not good. The long cycle of poverty that followed reinforced that idea. Now we have entered a period that says "wait a minute—learning more than one language is good, even if it is a Native language, and we might be smarter because of that second language." And there is a greater recognition outside the Native American community that the environment you grow up in and the experiences you have not only define who you are, but also significantly influence what you learn and how you learn.

In the southeast Alaska Tlingit community where he grew up, many of William Demmert's extended family members made their living as fisher-educators, fishing commercially in the summer and teaching school in the winter. The family's tradition of teaching dates back to 1926, when his aunt became one of the first Alaska Natives to earn a teaching certificate. Today, Demmert, who holds an Ed.D. from Harvard University, is a leading researcher on Native education. A professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham, he co-authored the 1995 report Indian Nations at Risk: An Educational Strategy for Action and heads up the Native American Research Coalition.