ABSTRACT
Language preservation is critically important to American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian communities. School achievement and school completion rates of Native Americans are strongly linked to students’ positive cultural identity (Deyhle, 1992), and especially influenced by strong support from culturally resilient families (Cleary & Peacock, 1998). Our own recent research on indigenous language immersion schools demonstrated that students in such programs outperformed their grade-level peers in English instruction programs in most content areas (Aguilera & LeCompte, 2007); we attribute this to the grounding in cultural knowledge in such programs. Research about culturally responsive pedagogy and curricula and indigenous language revitalization also indicate that effective culturally compatible education enhances both social and emotional development and academic success for indigenous students (Aguilera, 2003). In fact, students who become fluent in their native language as well as another language achieve greater cognitive flexibility (Cummins, 2000; Escamilla, 1994) and are stronger scholars than those who are monolingual. By contrast, mainstream education does not produce high academic achievement among Native American students, as proponents of culture-based education have long argued (Demmert & Towner, 2003).
