Chapter 5: Puente De Hózhó: An Evolving Story of Revitalization, Schooling, and Globalization in the Southwest

Despite a recognized path for success in American Indian schooling through culturally responsive approaches to teaching and learning (Brayboy & Castagno, 2009; Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Ladson-Billings, 1995; McCarty & Lee, 2014; Paris, 2012), few schools have embraced the elements of culturally responsive schooling that are so central to indigenous calls for education systems to align with language revitalization, cultural preservation, and American Indian/Alaska Native sovereignty. To the contrary, many schools continue, often unknowingly and with good intentions (Castagno, 2014), to perpetuate an assimilatory trend of schooling through noble attempts to “close the achievement and opportunity gaps.” But the achievement gap is, in many ways, a repackaging of old ideas—a discursive shift—to assimilate indigenous students into the colonizer’s language, culture, epistemology, and ideologies. Native communities, families, and tribal nations have been decrying, and at times openly resisting, this assimilatory trend for generations and calling instead for self-determination, language and cultural preservation/revitalization, and equal educational opportunity (McCarty, 2018).