This brief provides an overview of three federal laws that address native-language education and illustrates how these federal laws produce different results when coupled with state laws and other regional circumstances. For the purposes of this brief, native-language education refers to American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians and…

This paper discusses ways Dine peoples can use cultural knowledge to rebuild and decolonize the Navajo Nation. In the past, leaders, warriors, and all peoples worked together to sustain their community's way of life. These stories and strategies can be helpful in rectifying and resolving many challenges and problems Dine peoples face in the…

In Native American communities, the "global here and now" (Appadurai, 2001) is linked to twin movements for standardization and English supremacy, resulting in the decline of Indigenous languages and persistent educational disparities. This article takes up Appadurai's call to democratize research on globalization, juxtaposing theories that…

The author has been teaching at the Navajo Nation's Dine College for 22 years--five at one of two main campuses and 17 at a remote branch campus in Crownpoint, New Mexico, where he went following his retirement after 30 years as an English professor at Allegheny College. Throughout his academic career, he has made a point of teaching beginning…

To determine if Navajo language classes made a difference in students' lives, thirty Navajo language and culture students were selected to be interviewed. The students selected were those who were in the language and culture programs in the elementary, middle and high school. The focus was to find out the students' perspectives on Navajo…

I present evidence from Navajo and English that weaker, gradient versions of morpheme-internal phonotactic constraints, such as the ban on geminate consonants in English, hold even across prosodic word boundaries. I argue that these lexical biases are the result of a MAXIMUM ENTROPY phonotactic learning algorithm that maximizes the probability of…

Interest in North American Indian code talkers continues to increase. In addition to numerous works about the Navajo code talkers, several publications on other groups of Native American code talkers--including the Choctaw, Comanche, Hopi, Meskwaki, Canadian Cree--and about code talkers in general have appeared. This article chronicles recent…

This article presents the keynote address given by Dr. Monty Roessel, Superintendent of the Rough Rock (Navajo) Community School, at the Center for Indian Education Relaunch Celebration held on the ASU Tempe campus May 6, 2011. Here, the author reflects on the legacy of the Center, co-founded by his father, Dr. Robert A. (Bob) Roessel, Jr., who…

This paper uses Philip Deloria's "Indians in Unexpected Places" as a lens by which to understand the expectations and reviews of Navajo author Blackhorse Mitchell's "Miracle Hill." Written in Navajo English, the book, from an introduction by T. D. Allen to a number of reviews of the book in the popular press, consistently misrecognized the…

Popular cultures are key sites Philip Deloria has called the "production of expectations," and as a major form of popular culture, film has figured prominently in the circulation and reproduction of expectations about Native American peoples since the early twentieth century. This paper explores the ideologies and practices involved in the process…

This report, sponsored by the Office of English Language Acquisition (OELA), is a summary of evidence-based research on teaching reading to Chinese, Korean, Navajo, and Russian children. It complements a recent summary of the literature on teaching reading to Spanish speaking students. There is a significant need for evidence-based research on…

This paper outlines the ways that Navajo poetry was framed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as "unsophisticated" and non-literary by the introductory materials written by non-Native Americans for collections of Native American poetry. At issue was a view that saw the use of Navajo English, a distinctive vernacular dialect, as a deficient form of…

Native American languages, contemporary youth identity, and powerful messages from mainstream society and Native communities create complex interactions that require deconstruction for the benefit of Native-language revitalization. This study showed how Native youth negotiate mixed messages such as the necessity of Indigenous languages for…

In this interpretive analysis elucidating fundamental tensions of the implementation of the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act within Native-serving schools, we point to ways in which NCLB further limits the already contested sovereignty tribes exercise over how, and in what language their children are instructed. We discuss issues related to…

Warrior Elementary is a pubic school within the Navajo Nation. District and school reforms fought against school closure or private restructuring due to pressures associated with repeated failure on standardized tests under the 2001 No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. Warrior Elementary saw tremendous academic gains on these tests one year after a…