Could you please explain this part? I am not sure how you meant it. Is the main problem that the resources are not in the language of your tribe? Or is that a lack of educational resources regardless of language (e.g. simply not enough textbooks to give to each child)? What kind of educational resources do you wish you had?
So, what's the twist? Tribal schools tend to be administrated by the federal government which makes problems extremely slow and hard to address. With some asterisks, the local elementary school was basically provisioned as a consequence of a federal treaty with the US Senate, and is/was mostly administered by a the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), which rolls up into a federal department that until 2020ish, had never been run by a native person. All of these things make it very tricky to work with.
In spite of that, believe it or not, this is a massive improvement: until relatively recently, the school was a mandatory boarding trade school meant to teach kids to be (basically) English-only maids. This lead to a substantial percentage of the population being either illiterate or semi-literate, with no meaningful work experience, and with very very few opportunities that were not menial work. That inertia is extremely challenging to overcome, and the most natural place to try is the education system, which generally is simply not up to it.
I am stating these as a neutral facts on purpose. Regardless of how we got here, the hand is ours to play. Some of us got out and whether we succeed in the next generation depends on whether we can mobilize the community to productively take advantage of the resources we do have. This is why it's painful to me to hear about, e.g., land acknowledgements. If you have seen this pain firsthand I just do not see how that can be the #1 policy objective.
Yeah.
English as a first language is a huge advantage (you have most of the internet at your disposal, with tons of educational resources), but illiteracy is a huge problem.
> hard to recruit good teachers
Good teachers are rare. I wonder if you could find some people to teach who are not teachers in the usual sense. People having a different job, or university students, who would just come and teach kids one lesson a week. It's not perfect, but it could be the most popular lesson, just because it is unusual.
But the important part would be to grow your own teachers; help the best kids become the teachers of the next generation. Maybe you could encourage kids to do this from the start; for example, take the best kids at each grade, and tell them to teach some younger kids one lesson a week.
I wish I could help, but I'm on the opposite side of the planet.
I'm not the OP but you could consider hypothetically as an example, would great teachers largely choose to settle in PNW?
> would great teachers largely choose to settle in PNW?
One possible reason is that some of them could be born there. Again, this differs between communities. Some of them respect their smartest members. Some kick them out.
raise the economic level of the community, and education rises with it
that's why I said the best way to improve the education is to improve the economic conditions of the community
