Dec 11, 2019

Misappropriation of Sitting Bull Quotation Demonstrates the Ignorance of Academic Decision-Makers at the MPS Davis Center


Toward the beginning of a document presented by Eric Moore at the Minneapolis Public Schools (MPS) meeting of the Committee of the Whole, held in the assembly room of the Davis Center (MPS central offices, 1250 West Broadway) on Tuesday, 26 November, a quotation attributed to Hunkpapa Lakota holy man and leader Sitting Bull is given as follows:


 

Let us put our minds together and see

what a life we can make for our children.  

 

Sitting Bull

1890

 

Eric Moore is a fine statistician who heads what is now called the Department of Accountability, Research, and Equity (ARE) at the Minneapolis Public Schools.  The document that he presented was Student Placement and Diversity Impact Assessment (EDIA), the result of a very careful survey of Minneapolis residents of a wide variety of demographic descriptors pertinent to student placement under the school choice system that has abided in the district since the 1990s.  Moore and a citizen committee concluded that while the school choice and placement system was made to promote integration and empower parents (prominently including those who felt dissatisfied with neighborhood school options), the impact of the policy has had the opposite effect  >>>>>

 

>>>>>    Since families of upper income (and by substantial majority, white) tend to have the resources to navigate the system and to prevail with their expressed school options, those of lower income (a category that tends toward African American and recent immigrant families), the policy has resulted in a system deleterious to the goal of equity and promotive of greater segregation and many Racially Identifiable Schools (RIS).     

 

Moore is always on solid turf when he sticks to research.  He was, though, a failure as Chief of Academics, Leadership and Learning (October-December 2018) and Interim Chief of Academics, Leadership and Learning (January-June 2019).

 

And the irony of the Sitting Bull quotation apparently was completely lost on Moore and anyone else at the Davis Center who may have reviewed the document.  Moore has solid credentials as a researcher and statistician, but neither he nor anyone else at the Davis Center has any academic heft in the key subject areas of mathematics, natural science (biology, chemistry, physics), social science (government, economics, geography, history), English usage and literature, and fine arts (visual and musical).  Moore does have a bachelor’s degree in English, which gives him academically more weighty status than Superintendent Ed Graff, Executive Director Amy Fearing and others at the Department of Teaching and Learning, school site administrators, and teachers---  all of whom are products of education departments:  Elementary school teachers have insubstantial undergraduate degrees and very few secondary teachers have a master’s degree in a key subject area.

 

Thus it seems that no one who reviewed the EDIA document understood the following in misappropriating the quotation attributed to Sitting Bull:

 

Sitting Bull was born Thathanka Lyotake to Hunkpapa Lakota parentage.  He was an inspirational force behind the defeat of Custer at the Battle of the Little Big Horn (1876) and a defiantly tough leader in the subsequent resistance to the endeavors of the United States Army to clear the way for white farmers for occupation of land on which the Dakota, Lakota, and other indigenous people of the plains had hunted buffalo and gathered food stuffs for their sustenance.  But when the efforts of the army proved inexorable, Sitting Bull fled to the Northwest Territory of Canada and lived there during 1876-1881 with hopes of mounting a resistance campaign.  But with food sources running low and other material goods of sustenance inadequate, Sitting Bull crossed back over the border and surrendered to United States army and government representatives at Ft. Buford.

 

Sitting Bull in 1885 did a very short stint with Wild Bill Hickok’ s show and developed a firm friendship with sharpshooter Annie Oakley;  but he terminated his participation in the show after a few monetarily remunerative months, the proceeds of which he donated to indigenous people in need.

 

In the late 1880s, a Ghost Dance Movement ensued among Native Americans desperate for a way to counter a militarily superior oppressor.  Sitting Bull was not a leader of this movement but because of his prestige was suspected to be such by United States government representatives.  In July 1890, officials on the Standing Rock Reservation of South Dakota appeared at Sitting Bull’s house to arrest him.  When he resisted, others on the reservation fired at United States officials in support of Sitting Bull.  In deep irony and in an action connoting the limited vocational options for indigenous people at the time, two Native American soldiers (Lt. Bull Head [Tatankapah] and Red Tomahawk [Chankpidutah) employed by the United States government shot and killed Sitting Bull.

 

Thus, the feel-good quotation appearing on the document of reference was supposedly uttered in the year that Sitting Bull was killed by forces of the United States army.  Three years before, the Dawes Act was passed by the United States Congress;  in force from 1887 to 1933, this was the legislation that led to the sale of Native American land, the attempt to turn indigenous people into Euro-American style farmers, and an associated effort to assimilate Native American children in brutal school environments that derided the cultures of their provenance.  From the mid-1930s through the 1940s, an American Indian New Deal policy was superintended by John Collier, leader of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt.  But a Termination and Removal policy of the 1950s involved displacement of American Indians from reservations to urban locations;  although discontinued by the late 1950s, multiple circumstances did induce migration of Native Americans from rural to urban areas, so that whereas only eight percent (8%) of American Indians had lived in cities in 1949, thirty percent (30%) were residing in urban areas by 1960.  This trend continued in subsequent decades, giving rise to such phenomena as witnessed in the circumstances of American Indian life in Minneapolis at the Little Earth residential project.

 

The year 1890 was the year of the Wounded Knee Massacre, the year in which Professor Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his “Turner Thesis” declaring the closing of the American frontier, and the year from which can be revealed (as witnessed in the above account) numerous efforts to rob Native Americans of their cultures and dignity.

 

The quotation from Sitting Bull is of doubtful authenticity:

 

The utterance seems suspiciously plucked off of some quotable quotes website. 

 

I, who have read many works on Native American history and culture generally and on Sitting Bull specifically, cannot determine any work of scholarship that attributes this quotation to Sitting Bull.

 

If uttered, the context must be contemplated, either as an entreaty to fellow indigenous people to preserve and promote Native culture for the benefit of future generations;  or as a wistful appeal to a white society that was not likely to be responsive.

 

Sitting Bull could not have had had any illusions that he and others at Standing Rock were likely to put their minds together with a receptive white society to make a culturally sustaining life for our children.

 

The reality of 1890 being a year from which all manner of suffering of Native American people emanated was apparently completely lost on academic decision-makers at the Davis Center of the Minneapolis Public Schools.

 

And thus does this convey why no program of academic substance will ever be designed by those currently making the pertinent decisions at the Minneapolis Public Schools.                  

  

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