One hundred years ago, after the conquest of the West, American Indian schools were founded to encourage assimilation and stamp out indigenous culture. In the second half of this century, American Indian schools took the opposite approach, emphasizing their students' heritage. Neither approach fostered academic success.
Now, one of the most unusual boarding schools in the country marries both approaches. Modeled after East Coast boarding schools that prepare students for Ivy League colleges, the Native American Preparatory School in Rowe, N.M., prepares gifted Indian students, most of whom grew up in poverty on reservations, to walk in two worlds, tribal and academic. It will graduate its first class in June and has already drawn recruiters from more than 30 colleges, including Harvard and Cornell.The school's curriculum includes American Indian perspectives; half of its faculty members are Indian. When 17-year-old Warren Honaberger of Espanola, N.M., studied American history, for example, he read not only de Tocqueville but also speeches by Indian leaders who influenced American democracy. A senior of Pueblo Indian, German and Spanish descent, Warren wears a bracelet he made in a Navajo silversmithing class and credits his classmates with introducing him to the breadth of Indian cultures.
"That's probably the best learning experience I've had," he said.
To recruit students, the school had to overcome a seemingly insurmountable hurdle, the anger and distrust of many American Indians who remember boarding schools that routinely cut off children's braids and forbade them from speaking their own languages.
Native American Prep exists largely because of Richard Ettinger, son of the founder of Prentice Hall, who was disappointed to find no American Indians among classmates at Dartmouth College in the 1940s. He had read Dartmouth's charter, which makes a commitment to American Indian education, and he wanted to know why no Indians were enrolled. To address the problem, he first financed college scholarships but became convinced the solution lay in high schools.
Native American Prep was founded in 1995 with 50 students; Ettinger died of lymphoma a year later.
Today, the school has 74 students from 32 American Indian tribes and 11 states on a picturesque campus, formerly a corporate retreat, in the Pecos River Valley.