Sam Hurst, 8-28: Create advanced placement academy for Indians

By Sam Hurst, Journal columnist | Monday, August 29, 2005

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Over the last few months I have taken to long walks along the creek with a good friend and intrepid reporter. We are up to five miles a day, a good long hour to reflect on the deepest problems of the community, which we glibly dispatch every quarter of a mile or so. The really big ones - the war in Iraq, the future of the Supreme Court, the fate of Ellsworth, the nature of God - may take a half mile. We wobble along, usually with great humor and disbelief that no one else (least of all our wives) thinks we are as brilliant as we think we are.

In recent weeks, however, there has emerged a question so complicated, so intractable, so shameful, so old, that not a mile, or five, or even weeks of walking have brought us to any real insight. The humor has gone out of the walks. Our ignorance reigns. What can be done about the utterly failed relationship between the Lakota nation, and the white majority of western South Dakota?

It is easy, too easy, to look at the staggering rates of unemployment and poverty on the reservations, the domestic abuse, the alcoholism, the poor quality of education, the busted-up families, the loss of language and culture, and hide behind the shallow conclusion that this is "their" problem. But I am reminded of the old adage offered by Ho Chi Minh to describe the American occupation of Vietnam. Americans, he suggested, "are like thieves in the night yelling 'STOP THIEF.'"

We created the genocide against the Lakota, killing them, ripping apart their culture and religion and families. We took the land, built our new society and now the wreckage is "their" problem.

This week, as school is about to start, I offer one small way to turn "their" problem into "our" problem, but it requires that we turn our approach to Lakota education upside down.

Education in Rapid City is segregated, and in our effort to meet the demands of "No Child Left Behind," we focus on programs that improve the chances of survival for the bottom 30 percent of Lakota children: after-school programs, literacy programs, truancy programs, cultural-awareness programs.

The arguments in favor of this approach are age old. I know. I've made them myself a hundred times. Education breaks the cycle of poverty. Education keeps kids from drugs and alcohol. Education keeps kids away from crime, and out of prison. But here's my question. In focusing so exclusively on the bottom 30 percent, have we abandoned the top 10 percent?

W.E.B. DuBois, the great black intellectual of the early 20th century, once described this group as the "talented tenth." He argued that these individuals, in every community, are the source of innovation, creativity, economic development and, perhaps most important, leadership.

The boarding school movement of the last century recognized the value of the "talented tenth." But the boarding schools took the brightest Indian children in the nation away from their tribal homelands, and tried to wipe out their native identity rather than trying to strengthen it. We could learn from the failures.

In Rapid City and on the reservations of western South Dakota, there are hundreds of children from strong families with deep Lakota cultural roots. The Rapid City school system should recruit them into a Lakota immersion school (from pre-school and kindergarten through high school) that focuses just as heavily on math and chemistry as Lakota culture, and just as heavily on Lakota language as English literature. These are children who will have to learn to lead in both worlds, with equal agility.

The school should require parental participation and rigorous testing, both to get in and to stay in. It should be the Eaton and Groton of the Great Plains, from which students could go to Harvard and Yale and Amherst (which, by the way, are begging for talented Native American applicants).

I explained my idea to a neighbor and he balked. "People in Rapid City hate elitism." That cultural value is even deeper in the Lakota community, where individual success is often seen as an effort to put oneself "above" the family or tribe. But it is hard to argue that our current approach is successful, and besides, why can't we start from the premise that every child, even if he or she is smart, deserves the highest quality education we can provide?

For too long we have settled for the excuse that smart kids will take care of themselves. Maybe, but who will take care of the community (or the tribe) after they have left?

When Central High School opens its door this week it will once again be over-crowded - at least 200 students over capacity. Stevens High School will be almost 500 students under capacity! With the growth of the city on the south side and in the Valley, the problem of over-crowding at Central will only get worse.

Perhaps this is an opportunity to identify the smartest, most dedicated Lakota students at Central and North Middle School and encourage them to transfer to an Advanced Placement Lakota Academy at Stevens. It would be good for the over-crowding problem at Central. It would be good for the cultural diversity of Stevens. It would be good for individual Lakota students who are capable of and deserve a rigorous high school education, and it would be good for the community.

Sam Hurst is a Rapid City filmmaker. Write to samhurst@aol.com.