![]() ![]() Indigenous children would become “civilized” and their need for reservations would fade, federal officials had hoped, “thus freeing large amounts of additional land for the white man.” Reservation boarding schools were ‘painful and traumatic’ The Kennedy Report acknowledged that the boarding schools’ assimilation of young Natives fed into a national land grab. “The colonialism here has been so successful,” Cuch said, “that we’ve been robbed all the way around.” They are now suing - and Cuch argues state leaders rarely listen to the Utes unless they bring their lawyers to the table. Tribal leaders say their bid for it last year was intentionally rejected by the state. Cuch specifically pointed to the state’s recent sale of Tabby Mountain - land that was part of the tribe’s reservation before it was winnowed out. Not being educated “inhibits the tribe’s development” and “keeps the Indian down,” contributing to poverty and powerlessness on the reservation, he argues. “If the tribe was more educated and more competent, they would be more aggressive and limit the state from taking advantage of them, especially in water and other resources.” “The state of Utah is satisfied with that,” Cuch said. ![]() The way he sees it, the negligence is intentional. Instead, he asks: Who has benefited from Ute students failing in public schools? State and education officials, he said, have clearly known about the gulf in achievement and not decisively responded to it for decades. Today, Ute test scores are the lowest in the state, and the students drop out of school at a higher rate than any other demographic.Īt this point, says Forrest Cuch, a former education director for the Ute Tribe, the question is no longer why failures to educate the tribe’s kids have endured. Utah leaders chose not to participate and rejected the money. Red flags continued as Congress passed occasional reforms each decade into the 2000s, when the No Child Left Behind law offered funding to support Native student learning. In the 1950s and ′60s, at least seven students at Utah universities wrote their thesis projects on the shortcomings they found.Ī second national alarm was sounded in 1969 with the scathing report, “Indian Education: A National Tragedy - a National Challenge,” named for then-President John F. (Uintah County Regional History Center) Ute students stand inside the boarding school in Whiterocks in this photo from the early 1900s.Īnd once the tribe’s students were moved into public schools, report after report documented the schools’ persistent dereliction of their responsibility to serve them. Such neglect was sharply called out in the influential Meriam Report from 1928, which chastised the nation for its poor education of Native students. Ute students started being left behind by the two boarding schools on the Uintah and Ouray Reservation - where white superintendents focused on labor over academics. His 1962 research, done at the request of the Ute Tribe, is one of a century of warnings that Ute students were being denied an effective education. The analysis, he wrote, shows “this disadvantage becomes larger as the children move through the public schools.” ![]() Witherspoon didn’t anticipate just how poorly Ute students would fare: He found that many were scoring “no higher than chance.”Įither the Ute children “had learned nothing from their education experience,” he decided, “or for some reason the test was not an effective measure.”Īfter trying a mix of verbal and nonverbal tests instead, Witherspoon had his conclusions: Ute students were starting school less prepared and were not able to catch up. To measure the disparities in the Uinta Basin, he gave Ute and white students the same standardized exams. ![]() And he had concluded that Indigenous kids were being generally failed by public education. Witherspoon knew he would find a gap when he investigated how well Ute students were learning compared to their white peers.Īs director of the University of Utah’s Bureau of Indian Services - which no longer exists - Witherspoon read studies of Native students across the country. Editor’s note: This is the second story in a three-part series about how Utes students have been failed by educators for decades. ![]()
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