Sherman Alexie's "Indian Education" and Narrating Educational Oppression

Shelley Peterson's work demands teachers devote greater attention to the power of narrative as a means of having students engage with writing to learn. Taking her cue, I returned to a short story of Alexie's called "Indian Education," in which he provides halting narrative accounts of the memories that remain of his public education, from grade one through to grade twelve. I think such an account is provocative because of its working from the baseline story of a student working through each grade level, but then incorporates into this near-universally experienced timeline the deeply incongruous and often distressing variations in the "common" story that have been experienced (/endured) by Native American peoples in the United States.

Educators have become increasingly aware in recent years of the urgent need to incorporate greater attention to the lived experiences, past and present, of Native Peoples in Canada, especially the trauma's suffered in residential schools across this country. Yet, in spite of this growing sensitivity, it seems that many have struggled to integrate these stories into their jobs as curriculum-providers. Narratives like those provided by Alexie can bridge this gap between what we know we need to teach and the curriculum, all while benefiting from the multiple boons associated with teaching writing and history through narrative.

In fact, using Alexie's text as a model could prove even more useful. Once students have seen the way the basic structure of exploring each grade, 1-12, can be channeled to tell such a personal and provocative tale, they could be set to the task of similarly building a narrative one grade at a time, from either personal memory or fictional accounts, toward the construction of a unified story with some semblance of thematic unity. Working with students who are still somewhere along the 1-12 timeline provides the added opportunity of allowing them to carry their story forward, in a sense using their personal educational narrative as a basis for thinking about how their own story can grow or change in the coming years.