Chapter 8: The Penal Project: Program Evaluation and Native American Liability

This chapter is an effort to describe two seasons of research in the Dine’ Wellness Center evaluation project and an effort to work in harmony with the community and cultural values of the Little Singer school and Bird-springs area of the Dine’ (Navajo) Nation. As I work here I cannot avoid finding the contradictions of school life and the expectations of the larger society regarding school goals, ideas of good health, and community solidarity.

In contemplating culturally responsive curriculum and evaluation, the effort must also be responsive to the exploitative conditions of consumerism and capitalism in the so-called New West, which fuel the poverty that leads to family “imbalance” and persistent health problems, including grant-driven health care, as a poor substitute for continual, on-site treatment centers. (As I write this Wellness Center is history, unfunded after 3 years of operation.) This would make the responsive evaluation read as a direct response to problems in the community. As it stands cultural responsiveness read to me like a code language, using “culture” as a placeholder. Culturally responsive evaluations are fixing a problem: the problem is lack of community members conducting evaluation studies. Or creating an educational experience that will sensitize, make the community stranger, more “culturally competent.” To many, evaluation problems in Native or minoritiy communities are incorrectly named in the first place. The program environments often reek with unjust, maldistributed resources, an extension of colonial conditions made worse in the collapsing welfare state, amid galloping globalization, that is stripping minority communities of basic living resources. Lacking the will to name this immiserative trend, in comes culture to the rescue. Culture awareness, sensitivity, and responsiveness may be a necessary condition for truthful community pictures to be drawn, but it is not sufficient. And worse, it threatens to be a distraction, a feigned move to reclaim lost intellectual territory, but without what DuBois would call the language of freedom, of justice, culture is a more colorful band-aid laid over a 50-stitch wound.