By Robert DeCoteau, Director of Workforce Education, NWIC
As educators and funders, we often step in with grand plans and resources, hoping to steer young Native Americans towards success. But do we truly understand their worldview, their motivations, their challenges? Let’s take a step back and explore, in a frank and informal way, what makes them tick. Because when it comes to supporting Native youth, empathy and understanding are key ingredients that often go missing in the recipe. There are three points to consider:
First and foremost – Intergenerational trauma lingers. Boarding schools taught our ancestors that the western idea of success meant erasing identity. That message echoes in families still.
Next – Our cultural values prioritize community over individual job titles. We see elders live meaningful lives without degrees and question a system that measures worth by career status.
Finally – Opportunities are scarce. Most jobs that respect a degree require leaving the rez, forcing a choice between education and home.
The trauma inflicted on the Lummi people and Indigenous communities across North America is a tragic chapter in history. The aim of Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate Native American children by severing ties to their tribes, languages, and traditions – a form of systemic, intergenerational abuse. This forced separation and attempted erasure of identity has had profound, long-lasting effects: loss of language and cultural knowledge, intergenerational trauma, and ongoing health and social disparities.
By middle school, most kids everywhere have already lost their natural curiosity. But for Native youth, the extrinsic motivation – parental pressure, community expectation – that’s supposed to fill the gap, is often missing. The expectation to graduate might be there in name, but without the deeper belief that education leads to something meaningful within the community, it becomes just another box to check. Or not.
The boarding school legacy taught many families that school was a place of pain, separation, and forced assimilation. So, when a kid brings home a bad grade, the response isn’t always “try harder” – sometimes it’s “that place was never for us anyway.” When no one around you has walked across that stage, diploma in hand, graduation becomes abstract – a story about other people’s kids, not your story. You don’t see it in your uncle’s fishing boat, or your dad’s logging, or the cousin who fixes cars in his front yard. Without those footsteps to follow, the path itself disappears.
Then there’s the suspicion passed down like an heirloom – grandparents who remember school as a place that stole their language, who warn you in quiet moments that book learning might teach you to forget where you come from. That hesitation gets under your skin. It makes dropping out feel less like failure and more like listening to your elders. Even those families that do try to motivate their youth are often in situations of “do as I say, not as I do”.
Many, if not most, of the high school equivalency students that come to us at NWIC are products of this intergenerational trauma. While there are a handful of families that celebrate two or three generations of high school graduates and higher than average graduation rates, there are still several families with only a handful of high school graduates that are outliers to the norm.
The Western education system’s emphasis on individual achievement and credentialing conflicts with Native cultural values that prioritize community contribution, interdependence, and collective well-being. Lummi cultural values assign significantly less weight to individual career status and educational credentials – a perspective shared across many Native peoples. This divergence fosters a fundamental disconnection: students navigating these two worlds often find the academic measuring stick culturally misaligned with the communal identities that ground their sense of self.
The public-school curriculum reflects a monocultural worldview – European history, Manifest Destiny, western literary canon, capitalist economics – leaving Native students to conclude their own communities exist only as historical artifacts, not living cultures with present-tense knowledge worth mastering. Not welcome guests in the classroom, we became participants compelled by legal minimum grade completion requirements, learning how little our people count in the American narrative.
Economic opportunities that value a degree often require leaving reservation lands, forcing a brutal choice between educational achievement and cultural home. Reservations were deliberately positioned outside commerce’s flow – either placed in economically barren land or intentionally bypassed by surrounding commercial interests. This wasn’t an accident; it was infrastructure by neglect. When youth weigh this “opportunity cost,” they’re not evaluating job offers. They’re measuring whether crossing a moat built by design justifies abandoning the kinship networks and communal responsibilities that ground their identity.
Youth who do not internalize capitalism’s metrics – wealth accumulation, career status, consumer identity – are measurably less likely to pursue higher education and, consequently, less likely to complete high school. When the educational system’s implicit reward structure clashes with values that prioritize communal sufficiency over individual advancement, the curriculum ceases to be a path and becomes a filter. Many students simply step aside.
