Recasting Alaska Native students: Success, failure and identity

This dissertation investigates the multiple contexts and processes that shape the "schooling" of Native Alaskans, with particular attention to the experience of urban Native students. It critically reexamines several areas of scholarship that have shaped our understanding of Alaska Native education in light of new ethnographic approaches to the study of cultural "borderlands.";The research for this dissertation was conducted from 1988 to1989 and in brief periods in 1990 and 1991. I engaged in participant observation at three public high schools in the Fairbanks area, several elementary schools that housed Native centers in Fairbanks and outlying areas, and the Fairbanks Native Association Joseph O'Malley Preschool. I also attended classes and engaged in participant observation at the University of Fairbanks, including a week at the Rural Alaska Honors Institute. I formally interviewed more than 34 Alaska Native high school students who were both rural- and urban-based, 42 Native and non-Native teachers, and 20 Alaska Native elders and community members involved in schools and schooling. These interviews were augmented with materials from local libraries and Native agencies to expand my understanding of local, social and historical issues.;My analysis expands the discussion of "school failure" to recast Native Alaskan education more broadly as the process of constructing viable futures that both draw on and reinforce notions of indigenous cultural integrity. By considering what schools do not teach, as well as what schools negate, I pursue new ways of understanding student silences and parental invisibility. I explore the experiences of students who "succeed," including those who have "dropped out" and later re-engaged in education. Finally, this dissertation reveals the powerful movement through which Native Alaskan "Elders" have created a "healing" space for youth to link livelihoods back to the land, to culturally-significant "subsistence," and to communities that span rural villages and urban Fairbanks. I show how Native Alaskan "community" stretches across space and diaspora and demonstrate how the concept of "borderlands" can usefully broaden the range of schooling experiences that we include in our analysis of education.