WASHINGTON, D.C.-The National Congress of American Indians (NCAI) recently announced a partnership with Lumina Foundation to support the expansion of tribally-designed and driven K-12 curriculum in public schools, as well as funding to support opportunities for American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) college students who choose to pursue research careers.
Through a $200,000 grant from Lumina Foundation, NCAI's Tribal Governance and Special Projects department will launch the new Tribal Civics Education Initiative, which will work with NCAI's organizational partners to document, share, and expand the deployment of tribally-designed and driven curriculum about Native people in the K-12 public school systems across the country. This initiative will build on the findings of a report recently released by NCAI's Policy Research Center and its partners titled Becoming Visible: A Landscape Analysis of the State Efforts to Provide Native American Education for All. This report concluded that:
"Most Americans likely have attended or currently attend a school where information about Native Americans is either completely absent from the classroom or relegated to brief mentions, negative information, or inaccurate stereotypes. This results in an enduring and damaging narrative regarding Native peoples, tribal nations, and their citizens. Even though some exceptional efforts are happening around the country to bring accurate, culturally responsive, tribally specific, and contemporary content about Native Americans into mainstream education systems, much work remains to be done."
The 2019 report found that 87 percent of state history standards do not mention Native American history after 1900 and 27 states make no mention of Native Americans in their K-12 currculum.
Additionally, NCAI and its Policy Research Center will leverage these grant funds to provide more support and education to encourage AI/AN students to enter research careers and to promote education on conducting respectful research in partnership with tribal nations. NCAI's Policy Research Center plans to enhance the content of its Annual Tribal Leader/Scholar Forum with new student-focused activities and convert a previously used in-person training on tribal research to an online format for use by college- and graduate school-level instructors to teach all students about the principles of conducting research in respectful partnerships with tribal nations.
NCAI President Fawn Sharp said, "This funding will help us create critical educational infrastructure so that Native students no longer feel erased from the history books, and it also serves as an opportunity to educate our non-Native brothers and sisters about the meaningful and positive contributions that tribal nations of the U.S. have made and continue to make to this country."
To learn more about the Racial Justice and Equity work, please visit: https://www.luminafoundation.org/aof/racial-equity/. To read the NCAI report, visit: https://www.ncai.org/policy-research-center/research-data/prc-publications/NCAI-Becoming_Visible_Report-Digital_FINAL_10_2019.pdf
