ABSTRACT
When we began this work, during the summer of 1996, we knew that it would forever change our lives. Our plan was to bring together a group of respected, Native Hawaiian, American Indian (indigenous people of North America), Alaskan Native, Maori, and Australian Aborigine leaders who championed innovative educational initiatives in their home contexts. We wanted this group to be representative
of young-novice and elder-seasoned educators, male and female, from a variety of institutional settings serving preschoolers through adults. The purpose of our work together would be to create a visionary space to talk and to listen, to learn about our uniqueness and similarities, and to share ideas and practices that have supported and shaped learning experiences for Native children and youth. We understood that the ideas that would emerge from the gathering would positively and effectively address many dilemmas confronting Native educators. In particular, we hoped to craft a Native vision, which would replace the English-American model of learning. This model has not only been ineffective, but often destructive to Native ways of knowing and learning. V.Deloria, Jr. (1991/1994) wrote:
English education, represented fi rst by benevolent members of the aristocracy who gave funds to support Indian schools and later embodied in the United States government’s encouragement of mission activities among the frontier tribes, represented, and still represents, an effort to effect a complete transformation of beliefs and behaviors of Indians. Education in the English-American context resembles indoctrination more than it does other forms of teaching because it insists on implanting a particular body of knowledge and a specifi c view of the world which often does not correspond to the life experiences that people have or might be expected to encounter, (p. 20)
Hence, the hard work of the gathering was to think deeply about how both Native and Western worldviews might coexist in dynamic educational settings that value spirituality and connection to land, language, and ancestry.
