Against a Divided Land is a tale of escape from the poverty of the Yuma Indian reservation, the flight of a young girl and her family into modern American in the 1970's. The stories in the collection emerge via the narrator: a forty-year-old woman exploring landscape and memory. Her recollections as a mother and international traveler, juxtaposed alongside her childhood on the reservation, reveal the unique concerns of Native Americans in the era of government relocation and displacement. The stories in this collection paint a picture of United States subculture rarely seen. The accounts link the narrator to the past in surprising ways as they push forth with a modern voice, imagining a brighter future: a future filled with both loss and beauty. From Africa to the Southwest, the characters in these essays seek relationships across typical boundaries.

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This dissertation examined personal, cultural, school, and family factors that contribute to the decision of Native American students to remain in school until graduation or to drop out. One hundred eighty-one participants who had either graduated or dropped out of school completed a 140-item questionnaire. Participants lived on the Shoshone-Bannock Indian Reservation located at Fort Hall, Idaho. Factors examined in the survey instrument included substance abuse by self or family members, peer pressure, trouble with the law, self-esteem, teen pregnancy, family structure, socioeconomic status, parents education, academic achievement, teacher attitudes and expectations, school attendance, tribal self-identity and pride, and bilingualism. This research was based on the assumption that issues and processes in Native American education must be addressed by Native people themselves in order for positive change to occur. In addition, the research looked for factors that seem to keep Native Americans in school. The analysis suggested that respondents who were at a higher risk of dropping out of school had a negative self-attitude, frequently skipped school, and had negative attitudes about their teachers' expectations. These results differed significantly from those of Native Americans who had positive self-attitudes, positive attitudes about their teachers' expectations, and positive family influences. Themes of poverty, self-esteem, and teacher attitudes repeatedly surfaced. Graduates frequently reported that positive family expectations (including teachers) kept them in school. This dissertation provides important information for those involved in Native American education. In addition, this dissertation brings together the views of the Native American, specifically the Shoshone-Bannock people, in the journey of education. Together, the review of literature and data collected on the Shoshone-Bannock Indian reservation provide a valuable resource for teachers, parents , and community members now involved, or soon to be involved, in Native American education.

Indigenous languages worldwide are rapidly disappearing, forced out of use by the spread of dominant Western culture and its languages. On the Warm Springs reservation of Oregon, the Culture and Heritage department, the tribal agency in charge of language preservation, is offering instruction in all three languages of the reservation: Wasco, Sahaptin and Northern Paiute. Most of the class offerings target the children of the tribes. In an effort to stimulate their interest, Culture and Heritage has considered creating language learning computer games. During a ten-week internship with Culture and Heritage in the spring of 1999, I did preliminary research for a Wasco computer game. Using participant observation and informal interviews with children, elders and Warm Springs Elementary School teachers, I developed a possible structure and scenario for a game centered on traditional subsistence activities. I also identified obstacles to the realization of language computer games, such as lack of technological resources in Warm Springs, and elders' resistance to computers. Results and recommendations were issued in a public meeting in Warm Springs and presented in a report. This thesis is a case study exploring in greater depth issues that arose during my internship, like the politics of anthropological fieldwork on reservations, and issues related to the Wasco computer game project, such as the pragmatics of language preservation and the role of computers in reversing language shift. On the latter, it was found that the introduction of computers tends to disrupt traditional hierarchies and patterns for the transmission of knowledge. In view of the cultural, financial and logistic costs, the benefits of Computer Assisted Language Learning for the preservation of severely endangered languages are uncertain at best. / Graduation date: 2002

This study was designed to determine the effectiveness of the 10-week filial therapy model as an intervention for Native American parents and their children residing on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Filial therapy is an approach used by play therapists to train parents to be therapeutic agents with their own children. Parents are taught basic child-centered play therapy skills and practice those skills during weekly play sessions with their children. The purpose of this study was to determine if filial therapy is effective in: 1) increasing parental acceptance of Native Americans residing on the Flathead Reservation of their children; 2) reducing the stress level of those parents; 3) improving empathic behaviors of those parents toward their children; 4) changing the play behaviors of children with their parents who participated in the training; and, 5) enhancing the self-concept of those children. The experimental group parents (N=11) received 10 weekly 2-hour filial therapy training sessions and participated in weekly 30-minute play sessions with one of their children. The control group (N=10) received no treatment during the 10 weeks. All adult participants completed the Porter Parental Acceptance Scale and the Parenting Stress Index. Child participants completed the Joseph Pre-school and Primary Self Concept Screening Test. Parent and child participants were videotaped playing together in 20-minute videotaped play sessions before and after the training to measure empathic behavior in parent-child interactions and desirable play behaviors in children. Analyses of Covariance revealed that the Native American parents in the experimental group significantly increased their level of empathy in their interactions with their children. Experimental group children significantly increased their level of desirable play behaviors with their parents. Although parental acceptance, parental stress, and children's self concept did not improve significantly, all measures indicated positive trends. In addition, this study gives rise to questions regarding the suitability of current self concept measurement instruments for Native American children and possible cultural differences in parent stress and parental acceptance.

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The Coast Reservation of Oregon was established under Executive Order of President Franklin Pierce in November, 1855, as a homeland for the southern Oregon tribes. It was an immense, isolated wilderness, parts of which had burned earlier in the century. There were some prairies where farming was possible, but because the reservation system itself and farming, particularly along the coast, were unknown entities, life for the Indians was a misery for years. Those responsible for the establishment of the reservation were subject to the vagaries of the weather, the wilderness, the Congress, and the Office of Indian Affairs. Agents were accountable, not only for the lives of Oregon Indians, but also for all of the minute details involved in answering to a governmental agency. Some of the agents were experienced with the tribes of western Oregon; others were not. All of them believed that the only way to keep the Indians from dying out was to teach them the European American version of agriculturalism. Eventually, if possible, Oregon Indians would be assimilated into the dominant culture. Most agents held out little hope for the adults of the tribes. This thesis lays out the background for the development of United States Indian policies. European Americans' ethnocentric ideas about what constituted civilization became inextricably woven into those policies. Those policies were brought in their infant stage to Oregon. Thus, the work on the reservations was experimental, costing lives and destroying community. How those policies were implemented on the Coast Reservation from 1856-1877 concludes this study. / Graduation date: 2000 / Best scan available for photos. Original is a black and white photocopy.

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Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 391-413). Also available online in Scholars' Bank; and in ProQuest, free to University of Oregon users.