It’s fitting that Kwiyagat Community Academy, Colorado’s first public Native American reservation charter school in Towaoc, will wind up its first school year with the Ute Mountain Ute’s Bear Dance, a tradition that focuses on the fresh and new, preparations for summer and blessings from the bear.
The dance, one of the oldest recorded, “coordinates storytelling in real time,” said Ernest House Jr., a Ute Mountain Ute tribal member and senior policy director for the Keystone Policy Center, a nonprofit that drives shared solutions to contentious policy challenges. Through storytelling, Native students orient themselves within their culture here and now, and as part of a lineage of Colorado’s oldest continuous residents. Elders have a place at school, too, to share oral histories and traditions.
House talked about the importance of students “being comfortable with who they are.” Other large questions and collective introspection among tribal members: Where do I fit in? Where’s my culture? “This school has been such a benefit to bring that conversation back,” House said.
Priority is on learning, speaking and sharing the Ute language, Shoshonean.
We’re glad to hear it as KCA moves toward success with its Indigenous approach. At first glance, this is not a divisive concept. If you think about it, though, this pedagogy is contradictory to the commotion over critical race theory. Utes are educating their children about their history, their way, and actively recovering and restoring what was lost during colonization. Hardcore opponents of critical race theory don’t want to hear about this. They certainly don’t want Indigenous perspectives in textbooks.
As reported in The Journal on April 13, KCA launched in August 2021 with 23 kindergarten and first grade students. Now at 27 students, the school will add a second grade in the fall, with a new grade added every year through fifth grade. Other planned expansions include a playground and a library.
We’re curious and hopeful about student outcomes.
Evidence-based research shows kids have to first feel safe – physically and emotionally – before any learning happens. Students attending school outside their cultural context have a harder time speaking up and participating. Native children often get in trouble because of misunderstandings and biases between teachers and students. Nationwide, Native American students are five times more likely to be suspended or expelled than white students, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. This figure could change for the better at a Native school.
While KCA mined its heritage for answers about how to prepare children for bright futures, right up the road, Montezuma-Cortez School District RE-1 Board of Education passed a resolution opposing critical race theory in September. Critical race theory is now a side to choose, a rallying cry, a slogan more than an explanation of how racism shaped public policy. Some locals may oppose critical race theory because it’s not part of the package of their own political persuasions. But it’s not exclusively at the core of who they are. Not really. Can anyone in the Southwest stand up and say Native Americans are better off after white people arrived? We seriously doubt it.
Critical race theory has been a lightning rod from Washington, D.C., to the Front Range, the Four Corners and everywhere in between and in each direction. And for what?
Here, we have a Native school making a stand to improve education. This is intertwined with and not exclusive of understanding residual wrongs done by white people who thought they were more deserving of the land the Utes moved through. This happened. There’s no whitewashing it. It’s impossible to be both pro-Native charter school and anti-critical race theory. The two don’t fit.
It’s good news that KCA is finding its way back to Ute Mountain Ute’s original roots to position tribal members to succeed in this confusing, wide new world. We imagine more people are philosophically in support of it than they even realized.
