Giving Compass' Take:

• To have a culturally inclusive curriculum for students of color, we need to include Native American students, writes Shawnta Barnes at The 74. 

• Barnes suggests we work together to ensure inclusivity. What resources do teachers and administrators need to drive change?

• Read more about rethinking school design for Native American students. 

The history of Indiana’s beginning typically doesn’t include what author Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz details in her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

She explains how Shawnee brothers, Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, “forged a pan-Indigenous framework made more potent by combining Indigenous spirituality and politics while respecting the particular religions and languages of each nation.” This created fear in the hearts of the colonist squatters.

Many times, when education advocates, including myself, say “black and brown kids” or “students of color,” we are only focusing on two groups, black students and Latino students. What about the first people on our land? What about their children? What type of education are they receiving?

Only 392, or 42.8 percent, of the 915 Native students who took the 2017-18 state test passed both the English/Language Arts and math components, according to Indiana Department of Education data. The only student group with lower scores was black students, with a 24.8 percent passing rate for both sections of the exam. When the data was released, I read several articles that highlighted how poorly black and Latino students performed on the test, but not one article I read mentioned the second-lowest-performing group, Native students. Do the 523 native students who did not pass the assessment not matter in Indiana?

When we look back through our state’s history, we see a long-standing pattern of not caring about our indigenous population. This is unacceptable. As much as education advocates call for a more culturally responsive curriculum to help black and Latino students, we need to do the same for our Native students, not only so they can see themselves reflected in the curriculum, but so other students can see them and know their story too.

Read the full article about speaking up for Native American students by Shawnta Barnes at The 74.