Page 473 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

448 L. Waukau-Villagomez and C.S. Malott

with the dominant white colonizing society, but with secondary science education
tending to be more abstract, decontextualized, and irresponsible (we return to this
point and Menominee milieu under “Using Indigenous Knowledge Systems in
the Content Areas”).
***
We commend Chigeza and Whitehouse for promoting ecojustice and the use of
Indigenous knowledge systems in the teaching of science with Aboriginal children
in order to close a perceived gap in educational opportunity and academic achievement.
Like Chigeza and Whitehouse, we believe the Earth cannot be controlled – She
(a term used in the most honoring way here) can only be respected or disrespected,
and if disrespected, there will be hell to pay, as it were. This lesson is a hard lesson
to accept. It requires humility and a sense of respect and responsibility that, for the
most part, science has arrogantly ignored. From an indigenous perspective, this is
the great challenge of our time, of humanity.

Dissolving the Language Puzzle for Native American
and Aboriginal Children

Over the years, there has been high quality and interesting research published on
how to educate Native American children. Much of this research reinforces and
supports the ideas and approaches Chigeza and Whitehouse use in their science
curriculum, in order to address the mismatch between home and school language.
The lack of fit between home and school language has been an issue on the
Menominee Reservation. Several Native women, high school teachers on the
Menominee Reservation, have had long telephone conversations on cold winter
nights, discussing the role of language and instruction and trying to find solutions
to “problems” of Native schools. The Menominee Indian Reservation is located on
land that has been inhabited by tribal ancestors for the last 5,000 years. The reservation
is primarily forest land and the term Menominee means, “wild rice eaters.” One of
these women, a social studies teacher, used to say sometimes that she thought her
Menominee students spoke a foreign language. She had the sense that her students
didn’t understand anything she was asking them to write about. There were two
anthropologists, Susan Philips and William Leap, who helped these teachers begin
to make sense of what they were observing.
• In 1972, Philips, with an interest in linguistics and language, lived on the Warm
Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. At that time, the reservation was
564, 209 acres with a population of 1,500 descendants, where the children were
primarily monolingual speakers of English (Phillips 1972). Nevertheless, the
children did not speak Standard English like their teachers, but a dialect of
English distinctive to the local community with some influences from the Indian
language spoken on the reservation. The tribal leaders and elders were con-
cerned about the disparity between the academic performances of Indian
students when compared to non-Indian students in the same school district