Idaho officials, Native American leaders call for more indigenous voices in schools

Officials and Native American leaders are advocating for schools and teachers to incorporate more indigenous voices into their classrooms as Idaho commemorates its fourth year recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day.

Idaho first made this recognition in 2019, when Gov. Brad Little signed an official proclamation. President Joe Biden made a similar federal proclamation in 2021, placing Indigenous Peoples Day alongside the Columbus Day holiday that Congress created nationally in 1937.

Johanna Jones, the coordinator of Indian Education at the State Department of Education, said Idaho has made progress in honoring the history of its indigenous populations but still has more work to do.

“Indigenous Peoples Day shouldn’t be just a one-day event,” she told the Idaho Statesman. “It should be throughout our curriculum all year long.”

Some neighboring states have passed specific, encompassing legislation that directs schools about providing Native American education.

In 1999, Montana passed the Indian Education for All act. The Washington Legislature passed its new curriculum in 2015, Since Time Immemorial: Tribal Sovereignty in Washington State. Oregon followed in 2017 by enacting the Tribal History/Shared History curriculum for all of its public schools.

Idaho has nothing similar to those measures but does have minimum requirements for learning Native American history as part of its social studies content standards, with a heavy emphasis on elementary school.

Jones said Idaho school curriculum are mostly locally controlled, though, and there is little to no reform effort at the state level to require schools to incorporate more Native American culture into lessons.

She said three schools outside of Idaho’s traditional districts teach indigenous culture throughout the year.

The Coeur d’ Alene Tribal School and the Shoshone-Bannock Jr./Sr. High School are the only two tribal schools in Idaho. Both are funded by the Bureau of Indian Education and receive no public funds from the state. Chief Tahgee Elementary Academy is a public charter school in Fort Hall whose mission is to incorporate academics, bilingualism and cultural enrichment into its curriculum.

Indigenous Peoples Day in Idaho

Little proclaimed Indigenous Peoples Day in 2019 after the cities of Moscow and Boise had recognized the holiday in 2017 and 2018, respectively.

The state’s proclamation three years ago read: “Indigenous Peoples Day shall be used to reflect upon ongoing resilience of indigenous people on this land, and to celebrate the thriving culture and value that indigenous people add to our Idaho.”

Idaho has five federally recognized tribes: the Ktunaxa (Kootenai), Nimiipuu (Nez Perce), Newe (Shoshone-Bannock and Shoshone-Paiute) and Schitsu’umsh (Coeur d’Alene).

Indigenous Peoples Day still coincides with Columbus Day, recognized to pay tribute to Christopher Columbus’ arrival on Oct. 12, 1492. Over the past few decades, the honoring of Columbus began to face more and more opposition, with critics arguing that the holiday overlooked violence used against indigenous people and the long-term impact colonization had on their communities.

In an interview with the Idaho Statesman, Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee Chairman Samuel Penney said Columbus Day long ignored a history of settlers’ colonialism and genocide.

“Even the word ‘discovery’ indicates that there was no one here,” Penney said.

Idaho education content standards on indigenous populations

The state’s social studies content standards – which outline the minimum requirements students need to know by the end of each school year – has mentions of American Indians and indigenous populations across several grades.

In third grade, students should be able to “trace the role of migration and immigration of people in the development of the United States, and identify the sovereign status and role of American Indians in the development of the United States,” according to the standards.

By the end of fourth grade, students are expected to recognize the five federally recognized American Indian tribes in Idaho and know how Idaho’s tribes interacted with “newly arriving people.” Students should also be able to “identify the diversity within Idaho’s American Indian tribes and develop an awareness of the shared experiences of indigenous populations in the world,” according to the standards.

At the end of fifth grade, students should be able to describe the interactions that European colonists had with “established societies in North America.”

The Nampa School District’s elementary curriculum doesn’t focus specifically on Indigenous Peoples Day or Columbus Day, and the district’s schools don’t plan any special events around the day, spokesperson Kathleen Tuck said in an email. But the district does cover facts in its social studies curriculum, she said, including information about Columbus coming to the Americas and Native American migration.

The Boise School District includes perspectives and voices of indigenous peoples throughout its curriculum, spokesperson Dan Hollar told the Statesman.

“Students begin to study Idaho’s five federally recognized tribes in third and fourth grade through the context of Boise and Idaho history,” he said in an email. “In fifth grade, students explore the impact of Europeans on Indigenous peoples/cultures and in the sixth grade that is expanded to the study of the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere.”

Hollar said students learn using primary source documents, oral histories, information text and books written by indigenous authors.

When students learn about the times of Columbus and European colonization, they begin by understanding that there were “thriving cultures in the Americas prior to European arrival,” Hollar said.

The district also works with the State Department of Education to incorporate “authentic resources” into classrooms and to give students the chance to visit certain historic sites and museums, Hollar said.

Shiva Rajbhandari, a senior at Boise High who just won election to the district’s school board, said that a lot of progress has been made and that he saw his education on indigenous culture and history develop throughout his years in the Boise School District.

In 2019, Boise High School changed its sports teams and mascot to the Boise Brave from Braves, a move that came after the Shoshone-Bannock tribe asked state governments to remove all high school Native American mascots.

Rajbhandari added that one of his initiatives on student council was implementing a land acknowledgment.

“My experience in K-12 shows how far we’ve come,” he told the Statesman. “In kindergarten, we definitely didn’t understand what it meant to be Native American and the history of the land that we’re on, to now, everyone at Boise High recognizing for several moments every week that we are on stolen land.”

Though the State Department of Education has seen progress in its social studies standards, Jones said many texts used to teach indigenous history are not accurate.

“The texts in schools aren’t written by our tribes or indigenous people,” she said. “They are written by companies.”

‘The shining star in Idaho,’ Lapwai schools help Native American students

Situated on the Nez Perce Reservation in north-central Idaho, the Lapwai School District has about 400 Native American students enrolled from elementary school to high school.

“Lapwai is the shining star in Idaho with the work they’re doing,” Jones said. “They have a great administrative staff who sees that they’re a public school situated in the midst of Nimiipuu country. They’re doing some incredible work to address curriculum and policies that support the success of our American Indian students.”

Iris Chimburas, director of Indian Education at the Lapwai School District, told the Statesman that the goal is to ensure students understand their rich cultural heritage.

“Our goal is to make sure that students are getting an accurate report of history and celebrating even just our contemporary existence,” Chimburas said in a phone interview. “ We don’t so much teach who Columbus was, but instead we teach classes built more around teaching students what it means to be a Native American.”

Lapwai’s Indian Education offers classes on cultural sovereignty, Native American history, art and language. Chimburas said the district also partners with Native American history professors from Idaho universities to speak to students.

With the Lapwai School District as an example, Tai Simpson, co-founder of the Indigenous Idaho Alliance, said Idaho must shift its narrative of Indigenous Peoples Day and change the way people learn about indigenous communities to focus on their history and contributions to society.

More than 12,000 Native American soldiers fought in World War I, and yet Native Americans did not get U.S. citizenship until 1924. Furthermore, Idaho tribal members were not allowed to vote or hold office until 1950.

“Now we have young people who are becoming doctors, lawyers, teachers and educators,” Simpson said. “They’re also our blue-collar folks and our engineers. We take up spaces that we were very purposefully excluded from for several generations, and that’s part of Indigenous Peoples Day, to incorporate who we are in the system.”

Banning indigenous voices in the classroom

Some school boards across the country have tried banning books containing “diverse content,” with topics focusing on the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities and communities of color, the Statesman previously reported.

Books about Native American history — including “An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States,” by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and “Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back: A Native American Year of Moons,” by Jonathan London and Joseph Bruchac — are listed in America’s Index for Banned Books, among others.

In Idaho, the Nampa School District voted to remove Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” from its libraries and classrooms. According to the American Library Association, Alexie’s work was the sixth-most challenged book in 2021 in the United States.

Simpson said the exclusion and blacklisting of certain books and authors is a way to indoctrinate people.

“The fact that they banned that is telling me that a history perspective from indigenous people offends folks who only want to celebrate a white history,” she told the Statesman. “They only want to celebrate the history of Lewis and Clark, ignoring the fact that they couldn’t have survived without York or Sacagawea or any of the countless indigenous people that helped them along the way.”