Finding Success in Indian Country
A small eastern Montana town with a high Native population overcomes the odds to keep students in school and on track to graduate.
HARLEM, Montana—I once overheard an American Indian administrator say to a colleague while leaving a Title I conference, “Where’s the Jonathan Kozol of the Indians?”
Despite the heroic effort of many educators, parents, and activists across the country, the plight of American Indian students has never caused the kind of public outcry that Kozol’s award-winning books about the black, urban poor have brought. With enrollment rates, nationally, American Indian students are the minority of minorities, the forgotten subgroup.
This situation persists despite the fact that in every major category—standardized test scores, graduation rates, dropout rates—American Indian students consistently show up at the bottom of the chart, below both African American and Latino students. One recent study, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and published in Education Week, calculated the national graduation rate for American Indian/Alaska Native students at 47.4 percent, nearly 30 points below their white peers. It’s reasonable to doubt that another racial or ethnic group in the country could see more than half its students fail to graduate on time without it causing public outrage.
According to a report published in 2006 by the Council of Chief State School Officers, the low national enrollment rate for American Indian students masks the significance of the problem in many states, especially those west of the Mississippi. “While Native Americans constitute a small percentage of student enrollment nationally (1.3 percent),” the study says, “they represent a considerable portion of the student enrollment in almost a third of all 50 states. For example, 10.6 percent of student enrollment is Native American in South Dakota, 17.9 percent in Oklahoma, and 25.9 percent in Alaska.”
In Montana, American Indian students average about 11 percent of the total student population in grades 9–12. Their percentage of all student dropouts in that grade configuration, however, is 26.7 percent. Somewhere between those two numbers lies the story of the long odds and harsh realities facing Indian students.
An Exception to the Rule
The stretch of northern Montana that runs from the Rocky Mountain front in the west to the North Dakota border in the east is often called the “Hi-Line.” U.S. Highway 2 and a Burlington Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) rail line run in parallel for the entire length of the region, forming two long, straight lines that stretch across the open prairie like twin contrails in the famously big sky. Most of the small farm and ranching towns that dot the Hi-Line sit snug against those two lines of commerce, less than an hour from the Canadian border. A distinct Canadian-influenced twang is common, and many of the residents come from Scandinavian and Eastern European roots.
But other accents are also heard here. The Hi-Line is Indian Country, home to four of Montana’s seven Indian reservations (the Blackfeet, Rocky Boy’s, Fort Belknap, and Fort Peck). For thousands of years, several distinct tribes roamed the area, following the buffalo and weathering a harsh climate that blasts the plains with icy northern winds and deep snowfall in the winter and withers the prairie grass with 100 degree heat in the summer. On the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, close to the geographic heart of the Hi-Line, two of those tribes now coexist: the Assiniboine, who also call themselves Nakota, and the Gros Ventre or A’aninin (Ah-Ah-Nee-Nin), the White Clay Nation. Traditionally, the Gros Ventre believed they were created from the white clay found on the nearby river bottoms—a belief that says volumes about the deep connection between the people and the landscape they call home.
The town of Harlem sits just outside the northwest boundary of the reservation, tucked alongside the Milk River, Highway 2, and the BNSF tracks. Harlem is a dusty little border town of fewer than a thousand people, with the typical assortment of churches, grain silos, mom-and-pop stores, a single main street as wide as a big river, and modest woodframe houses that range from the tidy to the barely standing. On a crisp, spring day, with the snow gone and the sun shining, the town has a wind-scoured, sandblasted appearance, like an old car worn down to bare sheet metal.
In a study funded by the Montana Legislature and published in 2005, researchers made a comprehensive survey of “all schools in the state with statistically identifiable American Indian populations.” Among their findings was “a strong intra-state variability in performance, with American Indian students in urban areas and economically and racially integrated schools significantly outperforming their peers who attend school in rurally isolated Indian Country.”
Put more plainly, Indian students who live off the reservations, in the state’s bigger towns such as Helena, Billings, Missoula, and Great Falls, outperformed those on the reservations. In addition, the Indian students on the Flathead Reservation—the only reservation west of the Rockies, and traditionally a more affluent, white-integrated area—did better than their peers on the more isolated reservations east of the Rockies.
The state study ranked the top 10 and bottom 10 schools in each grade configuration, using test scores, attendance rates, dropout rates, and expulsion/suspension data. Of the top 10 high schools, five were located in the more urban areas and three were on the Flathead Reservation. The only two schools on the list located in small communities east of the Rockies were Colstrip High, 22 miles north of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in the southeast corner of the state, and Harlem High.
In 2007 Harlem High was also named a National Title I Distinguished School, after making adequate yearly progress (AYP) for two consecutive years and getting out of improvement status. While no one at the school or in the state is making extravagant claims about Harlem’s success, the school is drawing attention for its ability to raise the academic achievement of a student body that is both high poverty and 95 percent American Indian. Attendance is up, expulsion and suspensions are down, the dropout rate is shrinking, and more Harlem students are making it to graduation and beyond.
Parents and Community: The Keys to Success
Nancy Stiffarm, the Title VII Indian Education director at Harlem High, has been in the district for more than two decades. During that time she has seen the school at its lowest, in terms of both morale and academic achievement. The current state of the school, she says, is “as good as I’ve ever seen it.”
Stiffarm, a Flathead tribal member whose husband is full-blood Gros Ventre, lives on the reservation and points to an improved relationship with parents, the community, and the tribe as a major source of the current strength. It was not always so.
“I always remember a time we had a tribal member come talk to our staff,” says Stiffarm. “He said, ‘There is a bridge between the [tribal] agency and the school, and it’s not a toll bridge.’” She lets out a hearty, infectious laugh before elaborating. “Before we implemented some of our community-based initiatives, and before we really focused on hiring Native staff members, a lot of our teachers never went to the reservation and weren’t involved in the community. That’s changed a lot.”
According to Stiffarm, one of the biggest challenges facing a school that serves a large Indian population is overcoming a multigenerational distrust of the school system—a feeling that dates back to the forced assimilation policies of the government boarding schools, beginning in the 1880s. For some, she says, those negative associations are less historical and more personal. “One thing you see is that parents are resistant to come to the school, especially at the middle- and high school-level, because maybe their own school experience wasn’t a good one. A lot of times in these smaller communities some of the teachers that the parents had are still in the school system and the parents aren’t comfortable dealing with that.”
Harlem High has taken several parent-friendly, culturally relevant approaches to the problem. First, they have tried to create a school climate that embraces the tribal culture. “You can tell this is a Native school, just in its physical appearance,” says Stiffarm. “We’ve got art work and other tribal-related objects all over the place.”
In addition, she says, “We have theme-based activities throughout the year.” One of the biggest is a student-run powwow that kicks off each new school year. All teachers are required to attend the powwow, which is held during the day at the tribal agency. “That’s a way to get the community involved with school,” says Stiffarm, “but it also gets the teachers involved in the community. That’s part of our approach—rather than always making the parents come here, we want our teachers to go into the community.”
Perhaps the most important avenue for reaching out to parents and the community has come through the school’s advisement program. Harlem’s grades 7–8 middle school shares a campus with the grades 9–12 high school, which allows the district to start its advisement program in the seventh grade. Each seventh-grade class is split into groups of no more than 12, with one staff member assigned as an advisor. The group then stays with the same advisor all the way through high school graduation, meeting for a 27-minute advisement period every day. Assuming a student does not move out of the district, or that the advisor does not leave the school, the result is a six-year relationship between student, advisor, and parents. Advisors monitor student grades and deliver age-appropriate curriculum, such as character education, social skills, conflict resolution, career orientation, and college preparation. But at the same time, advisors develop a sustained mentor-advocate-friend relationship that is much more in line with tribal tradition than the usual school counselor role.
“The single biggest reason we have a good rapport and contact with our parents is because of the advisors,” says Stiffarm. “They have daily contact with the students and frequent contact with the parents. For most students and parents, it becomes the strongest connection they have with the school.”
Principal Terry Bolen, in his third year at the helm of Harlem High, stresses the positive interaction between advisors and parents. “We want each advisor to make at least three positive parent contacts, per student, per quarter,” he says. “No parent likes to hear negative remarks about their kids, so we go out of our way to give them positive feedback. That makes any other kind of feedback easier to navigate.”
Earning Respect, Building Support
With her easy laugh, personal warmth, and deep understanding of local and tribal culture, Nancy Stiffarm is the kind of person who anchors a school. Throughout the average school day, students and parents stream through the office she shares with community liaison Julie Lame Bull. Coffee and good-natured gossip flow freely, and the laughter comes often. Stiffarm directs what is called the Indian Studies Department, which has its own classroom next door to the office, as well as an adjacent Parent Center. “We think of this area as a kind of neutral zone,” says Stiffarm. “It’s a place where parents feel welcome. And at the same time it’s a resource center—we make a lot of resources available to our students and our parents, and they do use it. We have parents come in here to talk with us or with advisors, counselors, and other staff. It’s just a nice, safe place for them.”
Stiffarm has the kind of rapport with both students and parents that can only be earned over time. “That’s something I often tell new staff members, whether they’re Native or white,” she says. “You don’t command respect here, you have to earn it. Our kids don’t trust right away.”
Principal Bolen, a relative newcomer, has obviously earned that trust. As a non-Native, he could have had a difficult time here, but his consistent, honest, no-nonsense approach is a good fit for the school. He treats all students with respect, but emphasizes discipline and high academic expectations.
“Before Principal Bolen came in there was no consistency in our discipline policies,” says Stiffarm. “He’s been able to establish a rapport and earn trust.”
For Bolen that trust is based on open communication and clear expectations. “The discipline aspect is a huge part of our students’ success,” says Bolen. “We hold our students accountable for their actions, and we do that calmly and consistently. When we need to, we sit down with parents, but I always look at that as another opportunity for making a connection. It doesn’t have to be a negative thing. And that’s worked—we’ve had tremendous support from our parents.”
One example of how that trust and support can directly affect student performance comes from a potentially explosive direction. In Indian Country, athletics—and basketball in particular—are more communal obsession than simply sport. Harlem routinely competes for Class B state championships, and team performance can be a source of both community pride and heartbreak. Throughout Harlem and the Fort Belknap Reservation, the topic is never far from the surface.
The school’s decision to increase academic eligibility requirements for all extracurricular activities could have set off a time bomb. In the past, student grades would often drop off as soon as basketball season ended. To combat that situation, the district chose to do two things: Eligibility is now determined at the end of each quarter, and fall eligibility is based on the previous spring.
“Our requirements are far above those of the Montana High School Association,” says Bolen, “and also beyond those of most of the schools we compete against. That could have been controversial, but because we did it with the support of the Building Leadership Team, we were able to make it work.”
Stiffarm also points to both the Building Leadership Team and the District Leadership Team as a key to the school’s success. “Those teams are part of our school improvement plan,” she says, “and both of them involve community members. That’s been a good way to get some of our community involved with the decisions that are made in this school and to give them input on a variety of issues. There are decisions we’ve been able to make that would have been very difficult without that kind of support and community input.”
A New Era?
At Harlem High School, closing the achievement gap between American Indian students and their white peers has not meant taking the Indian-ness out of their education. In fact, they have found success by doing the exact opposite. Some efforts—such as a Native oral language program (offered in both Gros Ventre and Assiniboine), Native dance and drumming clubs, and a Junior Tribal Council—have been in place for many years. Other policies and programs are more recent, such as a districtwide emphasis on hiring Native teachers whenever possible.
Some evidence—including the recent statewide study on closing the American Indian achievement gap—suggests that a new approach to Indian education is truly beginning to take hold, not just in places like Harlem, but across the state. The Montana Legislature’s support of the Indian Education for All law, which attempts to create awareness and understanding of the many tribal cultures that exist in the state, is a welcome event to many. Stiffarm, for one, sees it as a potential seismic shift in Indian education. “It has the potential to go beyond being a token representation of Native cultures, geared toward white students,” she says. “It can be a way to embrace different learning styles and different ways of looking at things. For Native students and their parents, it can send a positive message that the school system is not in opposition to their culture.”
As Stiffarm sees it, understanding and embracing cultural differences is essential to keeping Native students in school and to improving academic performance. “One of the things about the achievement gap that people need to understand,” she says “is that Native parents love their children and want them to succeed, just as much as any other parent. But they don’t typically have the same demanding, school-based expectations that the non-Native culture puts on its children. They don’t have that ‘you’re in trouble if you don’t make the honor roll’ kind of mentality. Part of it has to do with learning styles—Native people have traditionally had a different way of teaching and of demonstrating understanding. So, there is a way to get parents to buy into the idea of academic achievement and high expectations, but you have to present it in a culturally-appropriate way. And then you have to celebrate your successes.”
Celebrating academic success has not always been easy to do in Montana’s Indian Country. Hopefully, Harlem High is a sign of things to come. 
By the Numbers
- 6.2 percent of Montana’s total population is American Indian, according to the 2000 Census.
- 16,502 students or 11.4 percent of the total public school population in Montana are of American Indian descent.
- 45 of the 83 schools that did not make AYP in 2005 have a 50 to 100 percent American Indian student population.
- 27 out of 62 districts that did not make AYP in 2005 have a 50 to 100 percent American Indian student population.
- All 31 schools identified as being in restructuring as of 2005 are schools with a 50 to 100 percent American Indian student population.
- Sixty-six percent of the 35 school districts that are on Indian reservations did not make AYP in 2005.
- From 2003 to 2006, the average graduation rate for American Indian students in Montana was 66.3 percent. During the same time period, the average graduation rate for white students was 88.6 percent.
*These statistics are from the Montana Office of Public Instruction’s Montana Statewide Dropout and Graduate Report for the 2004–2005 School Year, released April 2006. www.opi.mt.gov/pdf/indianed/IEFADataFactSheet.pdf