This article investigates how culture shapes instruction in three early care and education programs on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Interviews with eight early childhood teachers as well as classroom observations were conducted. The investigation is framed by the following research question: How does the culture of the family and community…

This study examined 15 secondary American history textbooks to evaluate their accuracy in depicting Native Americans as a follow-up to studies by Costo and Henry (1970) and Loewen (1995). The criteria embodied an authenticity guideline based upon the Five Great Values with a rating scale between 1 (lowest) and 5 (highest). The results indicate…

Quilts have become a part of American Indian culture, and they are mentioned and even highlighted in certain works of contemporary Native American literature. Certain questions can be posed in regard to the inclusion of quilt references in contemporary American Indian novels. Do the quilts and the making of quilts have some type of metaphorical…

Most Americans are not very familiar with the first peoples of the Americas. Though some might argue that it is wholly unnecessary to have any knowledge about Native peoples, most would probably agree that some exposure to Native perspectives is a good thing for students. In this article, the author offers his perspective on the most important…

This article traces the history of Native American women clubs from 1899-1955. In its heyday in the early 1900s, the women's club movement attracted about two million participants nationwide. Excluded from higher education at the time, women were moved to create their own opportunities to learn, meeting regularly in small groups to study such…

In March 2005, the Red Lake Reservation in Minnesota catapulted into national headlines when Jeffrey Weise shot five students and four adults at the local high school and then turned his weapon on himself. In the same year, it was reported that some 20 young people had committed suicide on the Standing Rock Reservation in Fort Yates, North Dakota.…

The nationalist function of museums has been the topic of much scholarly attention. The collection of museums at the heart of Washington DC serves as a prime example of how these institutions demand that visitors identify along national affiliations. In this article, the author discusses the case of the National Museum of the American Indian…

Museums are indeed very painful sites for Native people, as they are intimately tied to the colonization process. The museum world has changed significantly from the days when they were considered "ivory towers of exclusivity" to today when Indigenous people are actively involved in making museums more open and community-relevant sites. In this…

Culturally based education (CBE) grounds high quality instructional practices in culturally and linguistically relevant contexts. CBE is more than teaching language and culture as special projects, it is a systematic approach fully incorporating and integrating specific cultural ways of thinking, learning, and problem-solving into educational…

In Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel "Ceremony" the "primacy of the geographical" has often been interpreted as a particularly holistic and healing sense of place--what the critic Robert M. Nelson has characterized as the "spirit of place." This heightened awareness of the spiritual and redemptive power of the natural and the imaginative in…

American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) youth are disproportionally burdened by high rates of sexually transmitted infections and teen pregnancy, heightening their need for sexual health interventions that are aligned to their unique culture and social context. Media technologies, including the Internet, cell phones, and video games, offer new…

In this essay, the author begins by acknowledging the necessity of teaching Native American and other indigenous literatures both alongside and independent of Western texts. Instructors should teach these works by listening to the Native authors' worldviews and literary traditions. However, when instructors try to teach Native literatures…

Approximately 5,640 references oriented to the Navajo people, their land, and environment compose this revised bibliography. The references--published between 1638 and 1971--include historical, enthnographic, biographic, technical, popular, and fictional works as well as archival and congressional materials, newspaper accounts, articles from…