In 1955, a black housekeeper named Rosa Parks, weary after a long day as a housekeeper, refused to give up her seat to a white person. From this simple stand for human dignity, the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the entire civil rights movement in America was started. In 1963, during the March on Washington, Dr. Martin Luther King talked about reaching the mountaintop of human equality and human dignity. The mountaintop of Dr. King, while realized in fits and starts for other minorities, is simply a mirage to Native Americans. Few Native Americans have ever had the opportunity to see even that mirage. The mountaintop of equal opportunity can never be realized if our students never receive an equal educational opportunity. Fifty years ago in Nazi Germany, other important minorities entered concentration camps and gas chambers, never coming out again. Today, in America, Native American students enter public schools, with a sense of hope, adventure, and excitement, and exit twelve long years later as second class citizens, brain dead, unable to compete or cope, lacking job training or skills, unsuitable for higher education, leading lives of hopelessness, alienation, joblessness, homelessness, and despair.There is a crisis in Indian Country today. Throughout Native America there is a crisis as great as the genocide and repression that took place in other times, in places such as Massacre Cave, Bear Creek, or at Wounded Knee, among so many others. The crisis in Indian Country today is that the educational system pledged by treaty with sovereign Indian Nations is itself perpetuating a permanent second class citizen, the educational system is doing this by creating a holocaust of the mind and a genocide of the human spirit. Our children are leaving our schools with their minds empty and their spirits broken.The educational crisis in Native America is worst today because the trappings of equality are there: The legal right to equal educational opportunity, adequate buildings in most, but not all, school districts, sufficient books, credentialed teachers, and other trappings of the educational system. The inability to teach our students the essential skills, the failure to teach each student the way each student learns, colonial and racist policies that allow direct service administrators to live outside the communities they serve- thus severely limiting their accountability, the apathy of parents about the quality of education that their children receive, a blind acceptance that this huge and lumbering educational system is the best we can do and that we need to be satisfied with what we have, the lack of nurturing of our teachers so that their "cause" has become a job and their vision to change the world into a better place has become simply an attempt to survive, the lack of leadership and the inexperience of principals so that children, parents, and teachers, are left out, put down, dispirited, destroyed, and worst of all accepting all of this as an inevitable conclusion.Our children are being treated as second class citizens because while they have the right to equal educational opportunity under the law, the educational delivery system is failing to teach them the essential skills of reading, writing, math, and thinking. Our cause is about justice for every child in America, regardless of the color of their skin or their cultural background, or their sex, or their disability. True justice in America needs to come from providing an essential education to our children. Only through education will our children have an equal economic opportunity in our society.Anyone who works with Native American children knows the high level of intelligence that our children have. Yet, year after year, our children do not learn how to read, write, or do math at grade level. Year after year, our children score lower than the rest of the country on nationally normed tests (tests on which their parents did much better, so let us ignore those who say the tests are culturally biased). Year after year, our children graduate from high school without the basic skills they need to obtain employment in our society. Our children often languish for years after high school, not finding a meaningful job or career and not furthering their education, losing their sense of purpose and self-esteem, becoming members of a lost generation. Our Native American children represent the best and the brightest of America. They have skills across the spectrum: Artistical, musical, creative thinking, athletic, mechanical arts, and academics. Yet our children fail to keep up in school, falling behind other students in the country, dropping out in higher rates than others, with few advancing to postsecondary training, lost to poverty, drugs, alienation, delinquency, and despair. Our children are torn between the rich culture of their heritage and the culture based on economics of the rest of society. Native American children are daily imitating the gang cultures of another minority, ignoring the culture of The People. They ignore their own culture because they do not know it. They do not know it because schools and parents have failed to teach it. We cannot afford to lose a single Native American student. We need every child to become productive members of the greater society and the tribal community.We have seen the hurt in the faces of our children and wiped their tears when the ugly face of prejudice showed itself. We have seen those evil looks that kill the spirits of our children at stores and swimming pools and shopping malls, looks that devalue our children and damage their self-esteem. We have seen our student's bodies pulled from alcohol-related auto accidents. We have seen them frozen outdoors after using drugs or alcohol. We have seen their bodies after they given up all hope and ended their own lives. We have comforted their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters. We have thrown dirt on the coffins of our youth and we have wept tears that never stop. We will cry no more. We cannot afford to lose even a single Native American youth.Our Native American educational system is in a deep crisis. A crisis so severe that failure to resolve these issues today, may well lead to the termination of Native America tomorrow- for the path to self-destruction is wide and is well traveled. We will not accept the destruction of Native American cultures or Native American children by the massive failure of our educational systems to properly educate. We will not accept the present conditions effecting our children. We are determined to make the needed changes to ensure that each child receives an adequate education that prepares him/her for further education or a job-which has always been the promise of an American education. We will ensure that each child will read, write, do math, and reason at grade level- right from the beginning of their school years. We will not be stopped.

The Mission

Indian Education in America can go where it has never gone before: Into a time when every Native American child can read, write, and do math, as well as, or better, than any other child in America. Whether the child's address is Lake Forrest, Illinois, Laguna Beach or Beverly Hills, California, or Newcomb, New Mexico or Kyle, South Dakota, the key to America's future lies in providing an essential education to every child. The essential mission in Indian Education is to enable each child to reach his/her full potential in spirit, mind, and body, by providing each child with essential skills in reading, writing, math, and thinking, assuring that they achieve at or surpassing the national norms and standards, by providing a bridge between the culture of The People and the culture of the larger society, by motivating, coaching, and inspiring our children to be morally, physically, and mentally fit, by instilling the values of hard work, the determination to succeed, a strong immunity to failure, and focusing totally on the task ahead, by providing our children with enthusiasm, energy, commitment, and passion for learning and achieving success, by teaching every child the way that each child learns, by creating the necessary connections between the world of the classroom and the real world and the real world of work, and by providing our students with the technological skills necessary to survival in the 21st Century. We can and we will provide Native American children with a world class educational environment. A world class educational environment has outstanding educational leaders, dedicated and fully credentialed teachers, an outstanding curriculum that stresses high academic achievement with high expectations for student success, a faculty that is constantly dissatisfied with their instructional strategies, are always learning, and constantly striving to meet each child's needs, a system where the largest amount of teacher's time is spent on instruction and the largest amount of the student's time is spent on learning, where time on and dedication to task is the focal point, where students and teachers are safe, and where students interact with each other and with the local community. A world class school system provides students with the finest facilities, libraries, technological equipment, and sports facilities. Bricks and mortar are not everything, yet our children must learn under acceptable conditions.We become a world class community in stages. In the first stage, we change the signs on our schools to read: Our School, Striving to be A World Class Educational Community. Immediately, students, parents, faculty, and administrators will stand a little taller, their backs will be a little straighter, and the mental quantum leap into school improvement will begin. The next stage, a few years and a lot of work later, will have the slogan: Our School, Becoming a World Class Educational Community. The final stage will have the slogan changed to: Our School: A World Class Educational Community.