Shaping Children’s Trajectories to Learn & Flourish
by Patrice Kunesh
Across the country, a new school year is beginning, along with the annual migration of millions of children and thousands of teachers back into the classroom. While children from 3 to 18 years old will get down to the business of learning the basics of reading, writing, and mathematics, hopefully they will play a lot too. Play and socialization are powerful drivers of inquiry, expression, experimentation, and teamwork, and other competencies that foster resilience and perseverance. These experiences create pathways for healthy childhood development.
Native cultures understand that learning takes place both formally and informally. In Lakota, the word for “school” is owóksape, which translates to “learning place.” Owóksape encompasses the process of becoming a whole person through knowledge of self and identity acquired from family, tribe, and place, as well as through language, culture, and traditions. Wherever learning takes place, education can change a child’s life trajectory to flourish and prosper.
As a new school year starts, it is a good time to consider how to enrich these learning places for Native students and their families. For decades, Native students have experienced worse educational outcomes than their peers, a reflection of a history mired in historical trauma and social hardships, and recently compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic. Creating an environment to bend the arc toward success carries enormous responsibilities. It will take the sum of us to reshape that trajectory and ensure that Native children and families can flourish.
Shaping Positive Trajectories
Early Childhood Development
Research studies show the power of education in shaping children’s trajectories over the long term, beginning with the youngest of learners. For example, early education is the foundation of a child’s journey: every stage of education that follows relies on pre-primary development. Investments in early childhood education pay substantial returns: for every $1 invested in high-quality early childhood education, our society receives up to a $7-$12 return on investment. Children who receive good quality early childhood education are more likely to graduate high school, have a lower risk of heart disease and obesity, and have higher income as adults. Research also suggests that quality education in later grades may be as important for long-term outcomes, including earning potential, since children continue to develop key neural pathways well into their teenage and young adult years.
Beyond the classroom, education changes lives in more personal ways. The data show clearly that children who get better schooling are healthier and happier adults, more civically engaged, and less likely to commit crimes. Schools, moreover, are much more than academic hubs – they are dynamic environments for learning non-cognitive skills, like grit, resilience, and teamwork, which are increasingly important for generating economic and social mobility.
Similar benefits also accrue to Native children and communities, beginning with early childhood development. Research shows that Native early education programs that integrate the culture and language can promote resiliency in children, reduce effects of adverse childhood experiences, and promote beneficial life skills. When the right components are in place, enriched education experiences also support long term success by helping close the wide and persistent gaps between Native children and white children in school achievement and high school graduation rates. Further studies show that even modest income support to Native families can help improve high school graduation rates, extend years of education, decrease arrest rates, higher likelihood to vote as adults, and decrease rates of smoking, heavy drinking, and obesity.
Food and Nutrition
Most children spend 6 or more hours a day in school-related activities, and while in school they consume more than half of their daily calories at school. This means that the school environment is natural place to help shape lifelong healthy eating behaviors and a critical resource to alleviating hunger and food insecurity.
The federal government defines food insecurity as “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.” Food insecurity does not necessarily cause hunger, but hunger is a possible outcome of food insecurity. No other group in the United States lacks reliable access to affordable, nutritious food to the extent as Native communities—one in four Native Americans experiences persistent food insecurity.[1] This obstinate vulnerability is the culmination of historic federal policies[2] and institutions that have led to the deterioration of health and well-being of Native families and communities.[3] An obvious pattern of severe deficits in Indian Country emerges when maps of US food insecurity and health outcomes are overlaid with maps of poverty and economic inequality.
These high levels of food insecurity worsened during the Covid-19 pandemic. Nearly half of Native American and Alaska Native households experienced food insecurity during the pandemic. According to a recent report released by a consortium of Native food organizations, many Native communities continue to lack access to a secure food supply chain. Communities with the highest rates of food insecurity are located in Alaska Native villages and reservations in South Dakota.[4]
In June of this year, Congress passed the Keep Kids Fed Act, partially extending Covid-era school meal benefits through the next school year. This is an important step toward mitigating the impact of food insecurity across the country and improve child nutrition. While the Act provides critical support for childcare centers and summer feeding programs, more assurances are needed to end childhood hunger through programs that fill school lunch bags and empty family pantry shelves.
We know this policy works and generates benefits well beyond health and nutrition—it impacts learning potential as well. Several studies find a close association between good nutrition and improved educational outcomes.[5] Thus, by improving school nutrition and reducing food insecurity, we can positively enhance students’ learning experiences and support better academic outcomes. In Indian Country, making simple changes to ensure students’ have access to nutritional food both inside and outside of school can further help improve their academic performance, which in turn can lead to more opportunities in the workforce and ultimately stabilizing the economic turbulence of poverty.
Social mobility
Schools also fill an essential role in creating healthy social connections that help overcome economic deficits. Recent studies indicate that children who grow up in socially connected communities likely will overcome intergenerational cycles of poverty. Using “big data” analyses, Raj Chetty and his research team show that early friendships and cross-class relationships, called “economic connectedness,” can be life-altering forces, producing stronger impacts than school quality, family structure, or job availability. Nathanial Hendren’s research demonstrates that targeted investments in vulnerable communities can improve economic outcomes of children who grow up and remain tied to their home communities. In addition, economist John N. Friedman, finds that education is the primary vehicle for social mobility in the country.
Synthesizing the import of these studies to Indian Country is a significant undertaking, mainly because the contours of social and economic mobility for Native children are not well-known. We can begin the inquiry, however, from the premise that there is a profound and persistent relationship between place and people throughout the history of Indian Country. This connection, both cultural and personal, is the bedrock of tribal sovereignty and self-government and for larger policy considerations in terms of housing, health, education, and infrastructure investments. Further insights are derived from a recent examination of Chetty’s big data to assess the landscape of opportunity for Native peoples. Not surprisingly, economist Donna Feir found that the opportunities for economic mobility look fundamentally different on tribe-affiliated census tracts. Three striking trends stand out.
First, Native women seem to experience the largest disparities in intergenerational mobility. Second, Native American children have the lowest rates of upward economic mobility and are more likely to end up in the bottom of the income distribution in adulthood. Third, nevertheless, Native children raised in Census tracts that significantly overlap with American Indian reservation lands show greater upward mobility. This finding undercuts a general understanding that American Indian reservations are firm predictors of negative outcomes for Native children. The data are not perfect, and more analysis and context are required to get the full picture of the underlying narratives driving these low intergenerational mobility cycles, including poverty.
This analysis, however, compels us to pursue multiple lines of inquiry: one about the benefits emanating from reservation life through cultural connections and community relationships and a comparison of the off-reservation experience for Native children; and the other is about how and where to enhance resources to “low opportunity” communities, such as children and Native women. Perhaps looking at ways that communities, families, and culture act as protective factors will help inform policy discussions about promoting opportunity in low-opportunity areas. Rather than counseling people to migrate to areas of greater opportunity, as some mainstream development experts do, we can focus our work on supporting reservation-based economic development. Too often we hear censure about the reservation as a place to raise children or appeals to move away to seek better opportunities. These admonitions clearly overlook the potential located in Native peoples and places themselves.
For example, a few years ago a major media outlet aired a program called “A Hidden America: Children of the Plains,” which portrayed a grim picture of the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Immediately, students from Pine Ridge responded with their own video hailing “We are more than that.” “We have so much more than poverty,” they said, marking themselves with messages of resilience, family, culture, traditions, hope, and the future.
We need to take seriously the students’ refusal to be defined by poverty and resolve to be “more than that.” That determination is paying off in real economic progress across Indian Country. Recent studies show that a growing number of Native nations are experiencing sustained economic growth and becoming hubs for arts and cultural activities. According to the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona, “Native nations’ governance success is evident in the role many tribes now play as major regional employers and service providers. By these demographic, economic, social and political measures, Native communities … appear poised to have an even greater impact in the years to come.” Economist Randall Akee and several researchers have begun to map these positive economic trends to promising tribal social welfare outcomes.[6]
Conclusion
The Pine Ridge Lakota students’ assertion of being “more than that” resonates today as we grapple with the devastating impacts of the Covid pandemic across Indian Country. Almost overnight, the communities were suddenly separated from places where they work, worship, and socialize. Schools shut their doors too, putting the education of thousands of students at risk. Many Native communities responded with remarkable creativity and adaptability—they created new owóksape learning spaces and redefined what is possible.
For example, most classes continued online, but were available only to those who had access to affordable internet service and education devices. Despite the digital divide in Indian Country, Native communities came together to support remote learning by finding ways to provide free Wi-Fi access and hotspots and home-delivered laptops to every student. Educators used social media platforms to check in with students and support their mental health. Tribal radio stations became critical communication conduits, providing information and social connections to students and families. When Covid exacerbated food insecurity on the Navajo Reservation, chapter houses partnered with schools to distribute food and water to families and helped them secure SNAP and P-EBT benefits.
Schools are vital hubs for students and families. In addition to providing the foundations of education, they are critical links to healing trauma and promoting health and wellbeing, individually and community-wide. With new research into social and economic mobility, we should ask which policies help to build good education institutions that enable societies where everyone can thrive.
Some preliminary research has begun to investigate educational and workforce outcomes for Native people, as well as initiatives some Native communities are taking to promote effective, culturally appropriate education and workforce development programs. These studies show that education is indeed a key credential that can unlock constructive social and economic opportunities, particularly when investments target Native children and youth.
Indian Country’s experience during Covid shows that it takes the sum of the community to address big challenges and safeguard wellbeing. The Navajo have a word for this collective care and concern—K’é, which means kinship and community. A Navajo teacher incorporates K’é in her classroom, because “That's something that is extremely important to my identity.” The strengths and abilities children develop at school are crucial for their social, physical, and cognitive growth, which in turn shapes their future economic trajectories. Our homework then, is to prioritize and support further research, policy interventions, and economic resources that will optimize the ability of our children to learn and flourish.
About PATRICE
Of Standing Rock Lakota descent, Patrice H. Kunesh is the founder of Peȟíŋ Haha Consulting, a social enterprise committed to fostering social and human capital and pursuing economic equity in Native communities. Previously, Patrice established and led the Center for Indian Country Development at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and has held appointments as the Deputy Under Secretary for Rural Development at the US Department of Agriculture and as the Deputy Solicitor for Indian Affairs at the US Department of the Interior. In addition, she served as in-house counsel to the Mashantucket Pequot Tribe and on the faculty at the University of South Dakota School of Law. Patrice began her legal career at the Native American Rights Fund and recently returned to NARF as the major gifts officer.
[1] See the map of food insecurity, Native American reservations that continue to lack access to food. In the 1970s, the federal government created the Food Distribution Program on Indian Reservations (FDPIR) as part of the Food Stamp Act. FDPIR gave Native people living in rural reservations an alternative to the food stamp program, which required participants to shop in grocery stores, which often did not exist on most reservation or required as much as a full day of travel. Today, more than 25 percent of all Native Americans receive some type of federal food assistance and FDPIR serves 276 tribes across the country.
[2] One stark example of this demise is the once abundant bison, which were nearly slaughtered to extinction within just a few decades in the late 1800s. The slaughter of the bison was one of the largest economic shocks in recorded North American history (Feir, Gillezeua, and Jones 2019). For the Native Americans who relied on the bison, this sudden loss meant devastating upheaval. Their diets deteriorated and they would suffer long-term health impacts and disparities. Research shows that bison-reliant people were once the tallest people in the world, but the generations born after the slaughter were among the shortest. Not only did they lose their economic livelihoods, but valuable social contacts as well. Today, formerly bison-reliant societies now have between 20-40% less income per capita than the average Native American nation.
[3] Reservation poverty and food insecurity also have legacies linked to family separation, relocation, and poor health outcomes. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, most reservation communities suffered from dreadful poverty conditions (Meriam Report 1928). Without their traditional ways of hunting, gathering, and fishing, they had no way to feed themselves, and the federal government was compelled to supply basic foodstuff. These food rations, called commodities or “commods,” consisted of food packaged in cans and boxes, and ingredients unfamiliar to most Native people, like white flour, shortening, and sugar. Shipments of commodities often arrived late or were too moldy to consume.
Sadly, the commodity program exacerbated health problems and malnutrition were exacerbated. The food supplied was of marginal nutritional value and the supply was often insufficient to feed large multi-generational family households. Children and the elderly were constantly hungry, and the health of reservation communities slowly deteriorated. When tribal governments could not provide better food options for their families, many parents reluctantly sent their children to boarding schools to ensure they would at least be fed. In this way, persistent hunger and food insecurity has contributed to the breakup of Native families.
[4] According to the map of food insecurity, among all 3,142 US counties, three Native communities rank in the top ten counties facing the highest level of food insecurity: Kusilvak Census Area in Alaska (26.8%), followed by Todd County, South Dakota, homelands of the Rosebud Tribe (26.4%), and Oglala County, South Dakota, homelands of Oglala Lakota Sioux and the Pine Ridge Reservation (25.9%).
[5] Sorhaindo, A., & Feinstein, L. (2006). What is the relationship between child nutrition and school outcomes. Wider Benefits of Learning Research Report No.18. Centre for Research on the Wider Benefits of Learning.
One of the most extensive studies of the health outcomes was the Carolina Abecedarian Project, which followed two groups of babies from poor families beginning in 1972. In the first group, the children were given full-time day care up to age 5 that included most of their daily meals, games, and other stimulating activities. The other group received baby formula and no additional social or educational stimulation. The study examined whether additional treatment impacted cognitive abilities in the long run. Forty-two years later, the researchers found that the group that received an enriched learning experience were far healthier. The study, published in the journal Science, is part of a growing body of scientific evidence that adversity in early childhood has lifelong health implications. This and other studies not only outline the problem in concrete details, they also offer evidence that policies targeted to providing enriched nutrition and educational experiences, especially in the early years, might prevent it.
[6] See also, Patrice H. Kunesh, The Power of Self-Determination in Building Sustainable Economies in Indian Country, The Economic Policy Institute (2022).