UNA EXPLICACIÓN DEL CRECIMIENTO DEL SECTOR PÚBLICO EN ESPAÑA

Some might ask this question: “Is there something wrong in fact with Native people?” The question is not what is wrong with Native people, but what has happened to them (Brokenleg, 2012, p. 9).

Many Indigenous communities have shared experiences of being disconnected from traditional cultural values and languages. Indigneous identity is understood within this research study as a shared identity among those communities of people who experienced societal maginalisation, cultural disaffection and reduced populations within their own homelands because of colonial attitudes and practices. Colonialist attitudes towards many Indigenous communities have stemmed from their own ethnocentric belief structures. Rogoff (2003) describes ethnocentric judgements underpinned by a community’s own cultural ‘norms’ as when “another community’s practices and beliefs are evaluated as inferior without considering their origins, meaning, and fuctions from the perspective of that community” (p.15). Notions of Natives as “inferior” typically underpinned Western-European colonial practices and educational policies (Barrington, 2008; Deloria, 1988; Godlewska, Moore, & Bednasek, 2010; Hickling-Hudson & Ahlquist, 2003; Metge, 1976).

Research from within the discipline of anthropology has contributed to global understandings of colonialism and the impact colonialism has had on Indigenous peoples (De Vos, 1975; M. Mead, 1975; Sissons, 2005). Many Indigenous communities have experienced cultural disaffection in countries where subsequent descendants of the ‘settler coloniser’ have significantly outnumbered the ‘Indigenous colonised’ such as Māori of Aotearoa/New Zealand, Native American communities of U.S.A., Aboriginal communities of Canada, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders of Australia (Chandler, 2013; Ogbu, 1992; Sissons, 2005; G. H. Smith, 1990).

35

Assimilation: Deculturalisation at the ‘chalkface’

Colonial educational practices deliberately targeted Native children in order to assimilate them to enforced British forms of ‘knowing’ to influence successive generations “but in the process children were required to leave their families, communities, language, and culture behind” (Armitage, 1995, p. 3). Colonial educational practices in the United States, Canada and Australia went as far as removing Indigenous children and placing them into residential schools far away from their families and communities (Crow Dog & Erdoes, 1998; Deloria, 1988; Haig-Brown, 2006; Wilson & Yellow Bird, 2005). Similarly, schools established by early British missionaries initially sought to civilise and ‘christianise’ Māori children in Aotearoa/New Zealand (Armitage, 1995; Simon & Smith, 2001). Early colonial attitudes toward Indigenous languages and cultural knowledges considered residential and/or boarding schools to be an effective approach to assimilating the Native child into the coloniser’s language and culture. Native Boarding schools across the United States were designed to “solve the Indian problem…and were intended as an alternative to the outright extermination” (Crow Dog & Erdoes, 1998, p. 242). Similarly, residential schools in Canada sought to separate Aboriginal children from their communities and assimilate the children into the dominant white culture (Godlewska et al., 2010; Neegan, 2005). Australian Aboriginal children shared a similar cultural fate because mission schools, as well as separate Aboriginal schools, attempted to forcibly assimilate and civilise the Aboriginal children from 1880 until well into the 1960s (Santoro & Reid, 2006).

Common to many Indigenous experiences of British colonial school contexts was the use of corporal punishment to enforce the acquisition of the English language (Barrington, 2008). Corporal punishment discouraged and eliminated the use of Indigenous languages in Native schools and resulted in the decrease of language knowledge (and fluency) across successive generations of Indigenous communities (Crow Dog & Erdoes, 1998). Isolating Indigenous children from

36

their respective communities sought to expedite the colonialist agenda of assimilation (Godlewska et al., 2010; Sissons, 2005).

For Māori, early settler values and attitudes swiftly framed the dominant discourse which rendered Māori values, attitudes and practices as ‘barbarous,’ ‘irrelevant’ and construed Māori as people needing to be civilised (Barrington, 2008; Mikaere, 2011; Neegan, 2005). Kelsey (1984) asserts “arrogant and paternalistic notions of white supremacy are veiled behind such terms as ‘civilisation’” (p.21). Examples of ethnocentric judgements can be traced historically to Aotearoa/New Zealand’s early government education policies, ‘Education Ordinance, 1847’ and ‘Native Schools Act, 1858’ (Calman, 2014).

The Education Ordinance, 1847 and the Native Schools Act, 1858 were two specific acts of Parliament that established schooling conditions for Māori with an emphasis on compulsory English language instruction(Barrington & Beaglehole, 1974). Barrington (2008) notes the purpose of early educational laws in Aotearoa/New Zealand was to carry “out the work of civilisation among aboriginal Native race…the Māori tongue is sufficed for the requirements of a barbarous race, but apparently would serve for little more” (p. 19). Barrington (2008) further describes how early-settler attitudes viewed English as the perfect language and Māori language as “imperfect as a medium of thought” (p.20). While early missionary school teachers initially taught Māori children through the medium of the Māori language, the Native Education Act (1867) effectively closed mission based schools and instead determined English to be as the primary language of schooling instruction in both public and Native state schools (Barrington, 2008; Simon & Smith, 2001). The impact of monolingualism reduced the presence of te reo (language) and tikanga Māori (cultural protocols of values and beliefs) in the lives for many Māori whānau (family/families) over successive generations (Hōhepa, 2014).

Another destructive impact of assimilative educational practices on Indigenous peoples has been how generations of students have experienced low educational achievement. Sharp (1990) suggested that notions of superiority remained

37

embedded within institutional policies and these notions of superiority are typically evidenced within the nation’s social and educational statistics. He stated that “whilst personal and cultural racism may be described in their own right, institutional racism is to be observed from its effect…the effects were the statistics of inequality” (p.209). Sharp (1990) also argued that large achievement disparities between Māori and Pākehā students countered Aotearoa/New Zealand’s claims to be a society underpinned by social justice, equality and fairness. By 1978, “67.1 percent of Māori...left [school] with no qualifications, compared with 28.5 per cent of Pākehā. Only 6.9 per cent of Māori attained...the University Entrance qualification, compared with 31.7 per cent of Pākehā” (Sharp, 1990, p. 184). By 2009, educational statistics demonstrated that 29 percent of Māori students achieved University Entrance compared with 54 percent of Pākehā and non-Māori students in the same cohort (Ministry of Education, 2015b).

Indigenous students continue to experience low achievement as learners in contemporary state schools (Adams et al., 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1995, 2006; Ortiz, 2009; Schimmel, 2007; Valenzuela, 2002). Institutional racism is reflected in Māori students’ current achievement disparities and parallels the achievement disparities experienced by Indigenous American Indian/Native Alaskan students (Ministry of Education, 2015b; The Education Trust, 2013). American/Indian/Native Alaskan students are more likely to feature lower in the U.S. public school reading and mathematics achievement data compared with White and Asian/Polynesian Island students (The Education Trust, 2013). Native American students also feature disproportionately in ‘drop-out’ rates for 16–24 year olds from the U.S. public schools, in comparison with White students (Aud et al., 2012; Chapman, Laird, Ifill, & KewalRamani, 2011). Finally, the achievement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in Australia closely resembles the educational achievement and school outcomes of Māori, American Indian and Native Alaskan students (Frigo & Adams, 2002). Indigenous student achievement disparities are an outcome of both systemic inter-generational Indigenous hegemony resulting from inter-generational attitudes and practices of Eurocentric superiority.

38

From a dominant colonial perspective however, Indigenous assimilation to colonial languages and cultural world-views could be perceived as being highly successful because Indigenous disaffection from Indigenous languages, cultural forms of knowing and understanding increased significantly over successive Indigenous generations (Brokenleg, 2012; Wexler, 2014).