Out of control: Resistance and compliance in the fight to conserve diversity in an Indian education program

Abstract

This dissertation describes interactions between tribal and federal program bureaucrats of an education and labor training program for Indian youth, and tribal members on a reservation in the western United States. The goal of the program was to prepare Indian youth to enter the workforce through education, and training and then maintain employment. This goal was undermined at the program site by non-Native executive program personnel and tribal bureaucrats whose definition of "success" and expectation of youth achievement were culturally different than that of tribal youth workers and youth. Systems in which Indian people participate are in many cases socially disruptive as well as psychologically violent---they are often, quite literally, "out of control." Yet indigenous communities resist compliance within these systems. The focus of this study is on the complex nature of this historical matrix of power, control, resistance, and compliance. This dissertation uses a combined focus of social and psychological analysis to document the social history of Indian education administered as a ritual of assimilation, the bureaucratic processes that constrain Indian people from using education as a ritual of empowerment, and critically examines the people's resistance within the bureaucracies. The primary research questions are: (a) What are the bureaucratic processes that hindered the youth workers in successfully in advocating for their youth? (b) How do the youth workers resist these bureaucratic machinations? Through participant and non participant observation and ethnographic interview I describe how the bureaucratic processes which hinder collectively manifest from a deficit paradigm projected upon the workers. The youth worker's most consistent form of resistance was to voice their opinions about what was going on, and to explicitly name the actions of oppression.