Page 472 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

Chapter 37
Indigenous Stories: Knowledge Is Sometimes
Where You Least Expect to Find It

Lauren Waukau-Villagomez and Curry S. Malott

The famous American baseball player Yogi Berra, who played for and coached the
New York Yankees once said, “this is like déjà vu all over again.” As we read the
chapter Australian Torres Strait Islander Students Negotiate Learning Secondary
School Science in Standard Australian English: A Tentative Case for also Teaching
and Assessing in Creole, Berra’s famous comments rang true for us as a Native
person who has worked in Native American schools for nearly three decades and
as a white man who has worked in critical pedagogy as a teacher/researcher for
many years. However, we are not trying to be glib. The similarities between Native
Americans from North America and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait communities
from Australia are just far too obvious. It is sad for us to see the same oppression
and failed decontextualized pedagogy being implemented for the education of
Aboriginal children as have been implemented in the United States for Native children.
In our response, we reflect on the ways in which our educational experiences on the
Menominee Reservation in Northern Wisconsin mirror issues similar to those expe-
rienced by Chigeza and Whitehouse in Australia’s Torres Islands.
In Teaching Native America Across the Curriculum: A Critical Inquiry (Malott
et al., 2009) we discuss how Menominee children tend to do well in elementary
science education because it is contextualized within the seasons, which approxi-
mates the ways in which they are traditionally socialized into the world of nature
and science by their grandparents. Within this process, children are taught a
cosmology of interconnectedness, which views nonhuman life forms as having
inherent rights to exist and be respected as opposed to just serving the shorter-
term self-centered needs of people. In other words, for example, through ceremony,
children learn to respect the trees, learn to act responsibly, and conserve the
whole forest. Children are taught the importance of maintaining balance and taking
what they need without becoming a destructive force to the environment.
However, science achievement scores among Menominee youth (and Native
youth more generally) tend to drop significantly by middle school, and especially
high school, which we attribute to not only poverty and the association of school

L. Waukau-Villagomez and C.S. Malott
D’Youville College

D.J. Tippins et al. (eds.), Cultural Studies and Environmentalism, 447
Cultural Studies of Science Education, Vol. 3, DOI 10.1007/978-90-481-3929-3_37,
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010