California Indians and Public Education During

During the past two centuries, American Indians have endured enormous changes in their history and cultures. The United States government has attempted alternatively to assimilate and terminate their nations. Despite these efforts, they have managed to maintain a tenacious, often perilous hold on their way of life (Campbell vii). Unfortunately, the education system in the United States has often been the means of disseminating policies and attitudes detrimental to American Indians (Campbell vii). Throughout the United States, Indian students have experienced disproportionate levels of school failure in educational systems organized, administered, and controlled by members of the dominant Anglo group (Cummins 3).

The historic pattern of failure of Indian students in the American system of education is not unique to Indians. Cummins observes that such a pattern of failure is common to indigenous groups in most western countries who have been conquered, subjugated, segregated, and regarded as inherently inferior by the dominant group (Cummins 3). The dominant group usually explains the educational failure of minority groups as a natural and expected consequence of their inherent inferiority. Historically, the failure of the American Indian has been legitimated by pointing out the high rate of alcohol abuse in Indian communities, their perceived poor hygiene, and their lack of middle-class child-rearing practices (Cummins 3).

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. Indians themselves began to organize and demand access to the public schools in their districts. The state responded with feeble attempts at integration in the early 1920s by partitioning classrooms and instructing Indian children separately (Time-Life 172). But the Indians would no longer settle for half measures. They sued their local school board in the case of Piper v. Big Pine School District (1924) and finally won the right for their children to be educated alongside whites. All restrictions on Indian enrollment in the state's public schools were removed in 1935 (Time-Life 172). The BIA ceased to have an appreciable role in California Indian education between 1920 and the early 1940s as a result of the Indians' efforts to establish local public schools and gain admittance to existing schools (Forbes 118). Unfortunately, however, the public school movement did not yield the result anticipated by the more optimistic, particularly where the schools were controlled by whites that were hostile to and prejudiced against the Indian heritage (Forbes 118). Before World War II, it was unlikely that an Indian would successfully complete a high school education in California (Forbes 118). Forbes maintains that there was som
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)