Culturally Relevant Montessori: An Indigenous Perspective

By Brook LaFloe, original article published in 2019 Winter Issue Forza Vitale, Oregon Montessori Association

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In June of 2019 I found myself in Portland, Oregon participating in and presenting at the Montessori for Social Justice (MSJ) conference. This year’s theme was “Decolonizing the Human Potential.” Let’s first unpack what colonization is in order to see how decolonizing, in my definition, is in fact honoring what is Indigenous.

Colonization is the act of setting up a colony, including establishing settlement and oftentimes control over the land and Indigenous peoples of an area, leading to the dominance of the colonizer’s culture. Indigenous culture is lost, as the direct expense of establishing the dominant colonial culture. Therefore, in order to decolonize, particularly the human potential, we must honor the Indigenous cultures that colonization dominated. As an Indigenous Ojibwa woman doing exactly this work, I was inclined to submit a proposal on Indigenous Montessori to share my perspective and work with my peers at the MSJ Conference.

Before colonization, Indigenous children were taught holistically the things they would need to survive in their culture, from child-rearing to sustenance to spiritual practices.  They observed and learned by mimicking their elders and peers – a style of learning which is familiar to every Montessori teacher. But when the Europeans invaded, they dismissed the Indigenous approach to education and focused instead on the complete annihilation of Indigenous culture, with the goal of assimilation – meaning that Indigenous children would lose their own cultures in favor of dominant European language, culture and religion. In the 19th and 20th centuries, children were forcibly removed from their families and educated in militaristic environments called boarding schools. They were expected to perform most of the labor to keep the school running, from sewing their own clothing to growing and cooking food for themselves and their peers, all while being forbidden to speak their own languages or see their families for most of the year.

Children who were caught “talking Indian,” or who had the nerve to run away home, were brutally punished or abused. Many children died and are unaccounted for, in unnmaked graves, to this day. There was no thought of educating the whole child. Quite the opposite: in the words of Captain Richard Pratt, who established the famous Carlisle Indian School, the goal was
to “kill the Indian and save the man.” The United States government was directly involved in this movement: the Indian Commissioner Thomas Jefferson Morgan wrote in 1889 that Indigenous people “must conform ‘to the white man’s way,’ peaceably if they will, forcibly if they must.”

The last of the residential schools closed as late as 1973. Imagine the sheer number of children who were robbed of their childhoods – their education – in their homes, with their families, in favor of cold, harsh boarding schools with strict timetables, where they were forbidden to talk about anything they knew or loved, and forbidden to use their own words.

As society shifted, it became more common for Indigenous students to enter public schools, where their home cultures were reflected in their curricula almost as rarely as in the boarding schools. Students faced racist institutions, teachers, and classmates, leading to lower academic performance and higher dropout rates of Indigenous students compared to their peers.

When students were taught about their own cultures, it was an addendum to the (overwhelmingly Eurocentric) curriculum. Indigenous history and perspectives were never the norm, but always the “alternative" or "electives", demonstrating to indigenous students that their history was marginal and their perspectives less valuable. Even in progressive colleges, you could take “Native American” history and literature classes – as electives. The repeated message to Indigenous students becomes clear: you’re not one of us, you’re something else.

American Indian activists have been fighting in many educational spaces to end the achievement gap by bringing our cultures back to the center of our students’ education. It might not surprise you to learn that there is a movement of Indigenous Montessori schools sweeping the United States, because of the compatibility of the Montessori method with traditional Indigenous ways of teaching the whole child and not just their intellect.

Many tribes traditionally aimed to serve the entire Indigenous child, spiritually, culturally, mentally, and physically. Infants are thought to come from the spirit world to choose their families, and thus they are highly spiritual beings to be loved, valued and respected by all people in the tribe.

Maria Montessori herself believed in a spiritual embryo of the child, a sort of psychic life as well as the absorbent mind which allows a child to take in its environment entirely. “The child has a different relation to his environment from ours… the child absorbs it.  The things he sees are not just remembered; they form part of his soul.  He incarnates in himself all in the world about him that his eyes see and his ears hear.”(The Absorbent Mind, 1949)

As Indigenous children grew, they learned by way of doing, by observing and repeating after their mentors and, through manipulation, developing their own best way. This is also parallel to the Montessori pedagogy where the guide offers work but ultimately follows the child. “And so we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does, but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on his environment. The teacher’s task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment made for the child.”(The Absorbent Mind, 1949).

The compatibility of Montessori with Indigenous ways of teaching has caught the attention of programs and tribes across the US. Many tribes had found Montessori on their own before there was a collaborative of Indigenous Montessori schools that knew of one another. As soon as we found each other, we began to share our experiences and best practices with Montessori as the method of delivering a culturally relevant early childhood education.

Because tribes are varied across America – in language, cultural practices, and even skin tone – there is no "one size fits all" way to deliver Indigenous Montessori. That is the ownership and
leadership of some very caring adults in our tribes, who had the courage to start these Indigenous Montessori programs to reclaim sovereignty by delivering the best education to our children, that allows them to flourish in their personhood, including their cultural identity and ways of life. While some of these programs started as Indigenous Montessori classrooms, some have recently been introduced and begun transitioning their programs to Montessori. This movement of Indigenous Montessori is taking off in Indian Country, as the Indigenous Montessori Institute has been formed to train Indigenous Montessori guides. It’s important to note that Montessori is not the end-all, be-all, but it is the vehicle for delivering a culturally relevant education.

In order for white and non-white teachers alike to honor Indigenous peoples and cultures in their classrooms, it is imperative to recognize three things. First is land-acknowledgment, recognizing that the land America built its home on came at the expense of Indigenous peoples' homes and
life ways. The land that is inhabited should be named based on the local tribes that originated there prior to colonization (e.g. these lands belonged to the such and such tribe). These local tribes stewarded the land that was eventually worthy of development to make homes for many. This calls for some research about your local tribe(s).

Second, connecting the land to the people of the tribe and the local cultures that also existed prior to colonization. Too often are Indigenous people thought to be a people of the past, but we exist today and so do many aspects of our culture which have adapted and evolved over time despite many of the United States' public policies for assimilation. This may call for more research about your local tribe(s), but even better would be consulting with them or inviting a guest in to share something with your children. It is appropriate to offer a gift in exchange for the knowledge, time and effort shared; this is a favor, and there should be some reciprocation. It's always better to give Indigenous people their own platform to represent themselves since much of our history has been written for us, without us. Not only will you have demonstrated to your children the recognition of the land and the people, but also that we continue to co-exist despite cultural differences. Ours is a relationship of resiliency, and acceptance of one another.

Lastly, tell the children the truth. Not every aspect of American history was righteous; at times certain groups were propelled forward, leaving others behind. Indigenous peoples experienced biological genocide, losing populations in the millions to New World diseases, cultural genocide and the loss of Indigenous languages through the boarding school era and continuous
US Government assimilation policies. Generations of Indigenous people have experienced this as intellectual warfare: when one loses understanding of who they are, where they come from and how they identify. Tell the children the truth about our dark history, but nonetheless, tell them how resilient Indigenous tribes are to have survived colonization. Tell them that Indigenous people are still working today to steward the land, to bring back their languages, and to co-exist with every culture they come in contact with.

At the Montessori American Indian Childcare Center (MAICC) (http://www.americanindianmontessori.net/) we are mission-driven to address the early childhood needs and academic achievement gap of American Indian children through revitalizing the language and culture. Through embedding the cultural and Indigenous language, children have new profound opportunities:

·      To see and be cared for by American Indian staff

·      To hear native language and oral stories

·      To feel welcome and safe in a beautiful, culturally-reflective environment

·     To explore and experience the wonder of the world around them

·      To speak and develop their native language

·      To share and learn that “we are all related"

At MAICC, children see themselves and their culture reflected in the curriculum, the materials, the classroom environment, and their teachers and staff. This supports the decolonizing of
the human potential of American Indian children particularly by providing them the tools and knowledge that they would not receive in a traditional school setting. Radically so, children absorb that they are not the alternative or the elective, and Indigenous knowledge systems are just as valid as their counterparts - all through the Montessori method! A strong cultural identity emerges and resiliently carries the child through their life in a more confident manner. In order to decolonize our ways of being and living in this world, we must start with the children who will carry on the work and decolonize the rest.