Thriving in Indian Country: What's in the Way and How Do We Overcome | Anton Treuer | TEDxBemidji

[Music] [Laughter] [Music] buzu miku hopg Bipasha a golden Ogham nin wash indigo Manoa migizi and Odom they showed a Kazakh squad Jamaica ganda chuba thank you everyone for coming out today when they asked me to come into a TED talk nobody said anything about using a foreign language like English in fact it still seems quite ironic to me that although English is the foreign language and I'm speaking to you in Ojibwe one of nearly 200 tribal languages still spoken in the United States that somehow mine is the one that often ends up being thought of as foreign now if I held up my finger and asked you what this is I could start a fight if I didn't clarify in what language so in the language of body parts what is this and it's a finger but in the language of numbers what is this and it's one in the language of space what is this and it's up and in the language of frequent public speaking what is this I got to go to the bathroom now who's right and they're all right in fact when we start trying to tackle some of the biggest problems of our time like race relations this is often what happens someone's up there talking saying you know what this is a finger it's not an elbow it's not a toe and the rest of you people need to and someone's listening saying but that's a one it's not a two it's not a three see they just don't understand and we often misunderstand so one of the challenges to help everybody thrive is to be able to look at things from multiple perspectives and look for adaptive solutions now nobody sees the world the way that it is we all see the world the way that we are and we are all different so I'll give you just a on me these are my folks my father Robert Troyer is actually not native he was an Austrian Jewish immigrant Holocaust survivor spoke nothing but German the first 13 years of his life he has an amazing story of his own but in the interest of brevity eventually he made his way to Minnesota met my mom and Here I am my mother was born in northern Minnesota and raised in the heart of the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota a little village called bina and for her I think things like harvesting wild rice were less a cool cultural pastime and more unnecessary means of survival she knew what it was like to have half a potato for supper every day for a week for me when my folks were getting started I guess my father was hitting the the restart button my mother was trying to find a pathway out of poverty I never experienced poverty the way that my mother did although there were times when we had no electricity or running water and washing up in the creek was the the normal means of getting cleaned up but by the time I hit middle school my mother had become the first female native attorney in the state of Minnesota built a nice house the economic profile for our family changed dramatically and to me it revealed some very important truths one is the importance of education and as I think about the things that can help people thrive nothing seems more important but when we talk about the American dream work hard good morals you too gets sweet American apple pie I feel like that story is half true now the true part is what I saw my folks do and many other stories like it from immigrants and others who have found ways to thrive but at the same time I feel like it's only half true because there are barriers out there and they're not equitably distributed they call it the American dream because you got to be asleep to believe that that's the whole story this is my crew I've got nine kids I've been busy a couple grandkids they've been busy my wife's buried in the middle of the pile there and she's from the Swedish tribe so someone's getting along this is the view off the front deck of my house among other things that happened when my folks were getting started is my father had acquired a piece of property that had originally been a virgin white pine forest clear-cut and turned into farm fields and my father started planting trees in fact he planted all of the trees you see in this picture here it completely transformed the landscape and when I think about the big problems that we're trying to tackle in the world today things like climate change and race relations all too often I think some of my fellow citizens look at that and they think there's no way that I can do anything about that so I'm going to go home and I'm going to tell my kids to be decent people and I hope that's enough but it's not enough all that's necessary for evil to triumph is good people to do nothing wealth will self perpetuate and so will poverty and so well racism those things need to be interrupted through intentional action and I liken the interrupting to planting the seeds now when my mother pursued her law degree she actually went to law school in Washington DC and I was brought back and forth between the reservation in northern Minnesota and our nation's capital going back and forth from being an Indian to being the Indian and it was quite an experience among the things that happen everyone in my class was either white or black and I was the only brown kid and a boy with long hair at that many considered it quite a novelty my first grade teacher actually dressed me up like a girl in front of class barrettes makeup and all of that they had a good laugh now I come from a long line of ferocious warriors there's no way I was going to cry about that so I did come home and say ah ma I want a haircut and I got it I never told her what happened till I was an adult my second grade teacher was black the only teacher of color I've ever had k12 college masters up to my PhD which by the way is the most common educational experience for Native kids in this country never to have a teacher from their racial group my second grade teacher treated me like a normal human being it was such a relief I tried to write left-handed because the teacher was a lefty even though I'm right-handed third grade I froze like a deer in the headlights I was even a self-selected mute for a number of months in third grade simply trying to protect myself from perceived persecution this is an experience that a lot of people of color share one way or another this kid was a foster kid in Texas and the school regulations simply said you need to have a hair cut above the collar to go to school it wasn't just mean people but there was a systemic array that normalized one perspective oftentimes I think white Americans look around and they can see the Dakota access pipeline protest or the poverty at Pine Ridge or perhaps you know protests in Ferguson or Baltimore and sometimes it's hard to connect all of the dots but oftentimes for people of color there's a little something a little micro aggression or misunderstanding and there's so many of these things they're not like dots it's a solid line see they just don't understand it could be a high school team that has a native mascot so the opposing teams show up with banners saying hey Indians get ready to leave in a trail of tears round two well hallelujah it could be any number of things and oftentimes I think are predominantly white teaching core titters around on eggshells unsure how to help people who are different from them thrive 5.6 percent of American teachers feel prepared to work with students from cultural communities different from their own but you can be sure that all of them will have to already the majority of the k-12 kids in America are students of color only a little over half of them are reaching the finish line with high school it can't be a recipe for a healthy nation if our largest demographic of kids is only getting to the finish line a little over half the time somehow we're going to have to start listening to other perspectives the late great Malcolm X one time said that we cannot teach what we don't know and we can't lead where we won't go a lot of times when we start to talk about these things we end up talking in sugar-coated language like diversity which means let's do the Feast of Nations everybody bring your dish and we'll all say they taste good but avoids the heavy lifting or we'll talk in terms of inclusion which oftentimes boils down to we have this big beautiful basket of whiteness and everyone can come have a spoonful so people of color get invited to the game but there aren't always assurances that they'll get to see much less play or have equal access to opportunity in spite of these problems there are some stunning success stories I get to lead our Hawaiian field program from our University and we bring students to the Big Island of Hawaii there are actually 22 schools that are operated in Hawaii as Hawaiian medium schools meaning that the Hawaiian language is the medium of instruction among the other things that they do there is a culturally informed pedagogical approach at the start of school every single they the entire staff is waiting in front of school teachers janitors cooks administrators they're all lined up waiting for the kids and the kids get dropped off and they line up facing the staff and then the kids have to sing asking for permission to come into the school when the staff feels they're sincere they sing back and welcome all the kids into the school and then every kid gets a hug from everybody who works there every single day Aloha now to outsiders it might sound like a cultural curiosity or maybe even a luxury like the kids are awake in the morning shouldn't we be working on academic English and math but consider this truancy rates for students of color are disproportionately higher than they are for white students at some schools the truancy rates are as high as 50% these schools have no statistically significant truancy problems they can work so much faster at everything by speaking to someone in their cultural language I can tell you that half of the Native American kids in this country are failing the state mandated tests in English and in math but in the state of Wisconsin there is an Ojibwe language immersion school called wadu' coding where they've had a 100% pass rate for 15 years in a row now if someone's figuring this stuff out maybe we should pay a little more attention to that all too often our policymakers and problem solvers are like the fireside commercial at the school for the gifted where the sign on the door says pull and they're busy pushing saying how come we can't help Native Americans thrive a lot of times there's pushback and people are afraid that if people of color somehow rise or thrive that that our economy and our worlds like pie and someone else is going to have to take a thinner slice but the reality is if your neighbor's house value goes up well yours goes up if your neighboring nation is rich in prosper to get a border like the one we have with Canada instead of the one we have with Mexico Senator Paul Wellstone said it best we all do better when we all do better my family both exemplifies and defies the statistics that you've heard and the stories you've heard about Native American people I feel like most human beings are kind of like water rushing down the mountain they follow the gorges and paths of least resistance but once in a while someone stands in the torrent and redirects the flow I do feel that my mother was one of those people her brothers I think followed the flow and often paid a heavy price last year we buried one of my uncle's he had pretty much burned out his liver drinking we buried another one several years ago from a drug overdose my aunt also from a drug overdose even my grandfather was a decorated veteran from World War two Omaha Beach committed suicide at age 86 he was still sitting up when I found him and we brought him out had to roll up the carpet experiences like that really can change you now at the same time of the four children that my parents had together my youngest brother is a medical doctor we consider him the loser my my sister has a law degree she's a judge now my other brother and I both have PhDs we've published 20-some books between us I think all of the kids collectively have around 15 grand babies for my folks and everyone's doing okay the adults are load-bearing citizens the kids are going to school and everybody wants to know how did that happen in a place that seemed to take so many people down around you how did it turn out differently and my mother will say I I don't rightly know but I do know this I didn't just tell my kids to spread their wings and fly I made sure they had Roots I emphasized education but by that I don't just mean education from books I made sure that they knew how to pick rice I made sure that they knew how to snare rabbits I made sure they had exposure to their language their culture and that made all the difference in the world because nothing can stop an Indian who knows who he or she is indeed for all of our kids in this country no matter what their cultural background is this is our challenge and this should be our goal to connect with them in their cultural language to build their identity so they can feel good in their own skin and this is a reasonable and attainable goal if we all just lean in as Margaret Mead said never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world indeed it's the only thing that ever has thank you me th [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 32,103

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Humanities, Culture, Education, Education reform, Truth

Id: dIxcfAlzwNk

Length: 16min 58sec (1018 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2017