Abstract:

This case study of a twenty year experiment in bilingual education conducted on the Crow Indian Reservation in south central Montana from 1970 to 1990 seeks to define the multiple perspectives and describe the broad matrix of factors that lead to educational success or failure for reservation-based Native American students. It is also an ethnography of the politics of language, culture, and social inequality that unfolded during the eight years of the author's participant observation on the Crow Indian Reservation from 1978 to 1986. The perspective is that of a practicing anthropologist and school district administrator examining language-focused politics in the classroom, among parents and families, in the staff room, the superintendent's cabinet, the board room and beyond. Methodology included survey research with parents, elder interviews on education, and classroom discourse analysis.

Utilizing over thirty years of language shift data and deep contextualization born of long-term research, the study was able to chart the changing indices that marked racial separation and the decline of the Crow language. Findings suggest that a complex set of factors, based largely in the power relations of interracial practices, from local to national, had combined to undermine the academic promise of bilingual education for Crow speaking youngsters. Instead of bilingual instruction stabilizing the Crow language while improving English language proficiency, the Crow language was lost at an accelerated rate. This was due in part to the guided change the educational institution underwent to better bridge the cultural gulf to its students. As the school changed, the indices of language-based racial barriers declined.

The Crow people's proud and pragmatic leadership, their historic and metaphysical relationship with their land, combined with their linguistic and ritual continuity, set them apart and out of sync with the practices of Euro-American education where success or failure are measured in vastly different ways.