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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