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Children of Native Americans rank near the bottom of almost every economic and educational indicator in Washington. For these kids, learning is handicapped by poverty, cultural differences, and by their families’ mistrust of the school system. In the latest installment of our ongoing series, The Learning Curve, reporter John Ryan examines how tribal stories are helping some of the state’s most disadvantaged first graders learn to read.

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RYAN: The Port Gamble Sklallam Reservation is a short ferry ride from Seattle. For this close-knit rural community, geoducks and salmon fresh from Hood Canal are still staple foods. Incomes are half the state average. Yet an influx of cash from the tribe’s new casino is helping spur a wave of construction, from a tribal-owned convenience store to a majestic longhouse. The Sklallam economy is changing, and so is the tribe’s relationship with the schools its children attend.

Children’s books based on tribal stories are being introduced to the classroom. Though this might not sound like a big innovation, it’s a radical shift from what came before. For generations, Native American children were taken from their homes and forced to attend Christian boarding schools, where abuses were rampant. Even today, textbooks aimed at white middle-class children like Dick and Jane often leave Indian children looking in from the outside.

Some adult members of the Port Gamble Sklallam tribe provide a glimpse of the painful memories many Native Americans have when it comes to school.

DECOTEAU: My grandmother spoke 4 different languages, I know that her experience in boarding school… was very painful. They were punished for speaking their own language, for writing anything in their language, for wearing any clothes from home that were traditional.

JONES: Growing up in North Kitsap for me was not a good experience at all because of bigotry not only with students but with staff, adults, and school community and community as a whole. It was hard growing up here.

DECOTEAU: Native parents have had terrible experiences, and they share that with their children, and so they go expecting the same.

RYAN: To reverse the legacy of past abuse and neglect in the schools, the state Office of Indian Education has teamed up with the Evergreen State College and tribes from around the state to create the Northwest Native American reading curriculum. It aims to help first and second graders achieve literacy as they learn about Washington’s Native cultures. Magda Costantino of Evergreen State College helped develop the curriculum.

COSTANTINO: We are hoping we will excite children about learning and they will continue to go through high school and college and become contributing members of their tribal communities.

RYAN: Costantino had originally hoped to build a curriculum around existing children’s books about Native Americans. But she says most books they found in several months of searching were inaccurate or insulting. She recalls going into a local bookstore last year and looking at a children’s book that the saleswoman recommended.

COSTANTINO: So I’m reading and it says, “Indians eat a lot of fish and oily food, so they often have an oily and fishy smell even after you wash them and you deodorize them.” This is 2003--in Barnes and Noble, in Olympia!

RYAN: She ended up commissioning 22 original books by Northwest Native American authors to form the backbone of the reading curriculum. All the work is now paying off in places like Wolfle Elementary in the North Kitsap School District, just down the road from the Sklallam Reservation.

JAMES (READING): Canoe, canoe, what can you see, I can see squid and clams,

RYAN: Linda Middlebrook’s first graders are learning to read. Today the class is reading stories they wrote based on the book Uncle Jerry’s Canoe.

MIDDLEBROOK: Why is the canoe so important to our Native American friends? Okay, Norman?

NORMAN: The canoes help them to get to different tribes and catch fish.

RYAN: Norman is 7 years old. He’s one of several Sklallam children in this class for students having difficulty reading. He sticks his hand up in the air as eagerly as anyone.

NORMAN: We got a canoe down at our tribe. We have canoe journeys every year.

RYAN: Middlebrook says she’s been amazed by the changes in her Sklallam students since they started using the new curriculum in January.

MIDDLEBROOK: I hear students like Norman, ‘Mrs. Middlebrook, can I read?’; ‘you didn’t call on me, I didn’t read today.’ Before that, Norman never said anything to me about wanting to read. James wouldn’t speak in the classroom. Now he’s right there in the conversation. He knows things. This program is relating right to my Native American kids’ lives.

RYAN: Native parents often mistrust schools and don’t get involved in their kids’ education. But the new curriculum builds trust by inviting family members into class to share their culture. One student’s grandfather recently showed the class how he carves cedar canoes. Today, Jerome Jainga is the special guest. He’s the director of education for the neighboring Suquamish tribe, and a Tsimshian native storyteller. He leads the kids in a song about Moskomol, the white forest bear.

[SINGING]

RYAN: Only one out of six Wolfle students is Native American. But Jainga says all the students are benefiting from the new curriculum.

JAINGA: When a nonnative student sees their native friend that might not be so open in the classroom, if they see them succeeding, they themselves get excited to learn and want to learn right along with them because their friends are very important.

RYAN: The reading curriculum can’t address the poverty, substance abuse, or other problems that plague Native communities and keep many of their children from succeeding in school. But it does get at the cornerstone of a successful education: literacy. Children who don’t learn to read at an early age, are at much greater risk to fail or drop out of school entirely.

HURTADO: They measure the amount of prison beds in the future by the number of students that don’t read at grade level by third grade. That’s scary.

RYAN: Denny Hurtado is head of the state Office of Indian Education and former chair of the Skokomish tribe. He says that many Indian students begin school at a big disadvantage: they have little exposure to the written word and limited vocabularies.

HURTADO: Some tribes’ average income is $4,000 a year! So they don’t have money to go buy books, they don’t even have time to read to their kids. They’re just trying to struggle and survive just to meet their basic needs.

RYAN: Hurtado and Costantino have traveled to every reservation in the state to train teachers how to use the curriculum. Costantino says she usually gets two reactions from the older, Native teachers on the reservations.

COSTANTINO: Half of them have a smile from ear to ear during the entire presentation, they are so happy, and the other half just cry during the entire presentation and then during the break they’ll come and squeeze my hand and they’ll say, “thank you, if somebody had done this to me when I was a little girl, my life would have been different.”

RYAN: A couple dozen schools now use the curriculum. And based on the results from classrooms like Linda Middlebrook’s, the Office of Indian Education is seeking funding to get the curriculum to every elementary school in the state.

[SINGING]

JAINGA: Good job, give yourselves a hand. [APPLAUSE] And you’re only in first grade? Wow, you guys are writing stories already! By the time you get to be my age, you’re gonna be writing…

CHILD: Books.

JAINGA: Books! Good job.

SECOND CHILD: Or stories.

JAINGA: Or more stories. That’s good!

RYAN: Eventually, the curriculum’s developers hope to sell it outside the state and use the proceeds to build a scholarship fund for Native American students here in Washington.

John Ryan(JR), KPLU News: