> I am particularly interested in the response some of you may have to the > idea that each child should have a program individually tailored to her/his > needs and that some children will graduate at 14 and others at 21. > > Selma
This is the same as musical instruction. My daughter's good friend in the third grade was playing the Mozart A Major Piano Concerto which I played in High School. My daughter had the same Earth Sciences course in middle school that I had as a non-science student at the University of Tulsa, while others at University had the "Music Appreciation" course in college that I had on the reservation in 9th grade. The only order to learning is within the discipline and is limited by psycho-physical considerations, otherwise we are speaking of social realities. The social realities are also the issue with Campbell in British Columbia. Does anyone know whether the Chugach program is Aleut, Indian and Inuit? Those communities up there are Native. There was also that key word about culture in the article. I was interested in why they didn't mention that but all of the articles about Tar Creek and the Quapaw Reservation (where I'm from) always mention the town and never anything about it being Indian either. There was also the comment about alcoholism which is another code word for Indian used by the media. The program resembles a program used on our reservation as I said and another that I read about at a reservation in Washington State. Often the Tribes go out looking for a White Man to come back and teach us our realities because the government will not allow us to use our own. So if we want our own processes then we must find some White Man who has developed a business around that "white" version which is then authenticated and OK to us on the reservations. It happens regularly and the politics of it is well known in Indian country and is assumed. By the way, wampum is made from a shell, is a Lavender purple and comes from a particularly difficult part of the shell to harvest and work with. It is easier now with machines and one can imagine how difficult it was before the use of metal tools. The color is sacred and the value is both that and the extreme difficulty in manufacturing it from the shell that has little color in it. The confusion is with the belts which are a form of heiroglyph to record contracts. They are called Wampum belts whether they have wampum beads in them or not. But the conversation was interesting. Regards, REH
