The view from Shayna Parker’s childhood backyard taunts her. From the teal-colored house on Pache Road, just east of the stoplight intersection on Highway 93 in downtown Ronan, Flathead’s Mission Mountain Tribal Wilderness towers upward to meet the high spring clouds. Land and sky shake hands in an ancient deal. But that deal is clearer than the tacit one between Indians and non-Indians in the Ronan public schools, especially for teenagers like Parker.

“We have the mountains and the lake,” says 18-year-old Parker. She looks beyond the housing development she once lived in and up at the wall of wilderness and snowcapped peaks that stretches along the eastern horizon of the Flathead valley.

“We have the view,” she says. “But if we had none of it, there’d be no reason for white people to be here.”

Only a quarter of people living on the 1.3 million-acre Flathead Reservation are Native American. Ronan has the largest number compared to the other towns: of the 6,200 people living there, almost 45 percent are Indian. Polson, the largest city on the reservation, situated just north of Ronan on Flathead Lake, has a 20 percent Indian population.

The Ronan public schools reflect these demographics. About 66 percent of students enrolled there are Indian.

Parker was a student in Ronan public schools, but not anymore.

She’s one of the 27 Native American students who together left the Ronan School District in January to attend the all-Indian tribal school, Two Eagle River, four miles north of Ronan in Pablo.

Her long dark hair swings as she talks, and she fidgets with the stretchy black sleeves of her Nike sport shirt that is as unremarkable as her dark jeans and tennis shoes. Her silver rings flash as her hands race to keep up with her words.

“They’re not killing our lives,” she says of her experience in Ronan schools, “but they’re killing our language, our culture.”

Like many of the nearly 750 teenagers enrolled as members of Flathead’s Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes, Parker is searching for self-validation. Validation of her beliefs, her culture, her identity. But she says that when she looked to her school for cultural support, she found the system wanting, and she was not alone.

Some Indian students who left the Ronan schools claim school administrators and teachers discipline Indians students unfairly. Some say they feel that they just don’t belong there. And some were in academic trouble.

But Ronan administrators say they have tried hard to respect and to promote understanding of the Flathead tribes’ culture.

The school district does have a history of questions about its even-handed treatment of Indian students and its respect for Indian history and culture.

In 1999, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights investigated allegations of unfair treatment of Indian students in the Ronan schools and issued a report that said discipline was unevenly applied. That year in the middle school, 95 percent of the out-of-school suspensions were given to Native Americans, a group that at the time made up only 60 percent of the school enrollment.

Also in 1999, in response to a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the school district agreed to establish single-member districts to help ensure election of Indians to the school board. The ACLU said the at-large election system violated federal law and hampered Indian candidates’ chances for election because they were outnumbered 2-1 districtwide, though they were in the majority in some districts.

The Office for Civil Rights suggested reforms in discipline and record-keeping procedures, and training for all school personnel in cultural sensitivity and communication. It also suggested additional instruction in the schools in tribal culture and American Indian history and government. Finally, the office directed the district to appoint a special panel to “assess, review and revise” the district’s disciplinary policies.

In the fall of 2004 Shayna Parker was the student member of that 15-person panel.

“I was on the panel, but I don’t really feel like I did much,” says Parker. “I was the only student.” She remembers clearly the two questions the committee asked her.

The first: Are the students informed?

Parker says she answered yes; students at Ronan are informed about the problems in the school, such as the debate over whether Ronan’s athletic team mascots, the Chiefs and Maidens, should be changed. Tribal officials and many Indians objected to painting images of the mascots on the new gymnasium floor, but the school board voted to display the mascot names.

The second question the committee asked was one she remembers well enough that she’s played a different response over and over in her mind. Pulling on her black sleeves, she says, “They asked me if I thought the CPC (the panel) had accomplished its goals — if it made any changes to the school.”

Parker answered yes. “But I wish I could’ve answered differently,” she says now. She wishes she had said nothing in school is different, that teachers still treat Indians unfairly, and the school still makes them uncomfortable. She wishes she had told the panel, No.

“I was only one student,” she says. “I guess I was kind of intimidated.”

Most of the changes the committee made were superficial, she says now. They hung six photos of the confederated tribes’ chiefs in Ronan Middle School’s main hall: the Kootenai chiefs Koostahtah and Eneas Big Knife; the Salish chiefs Charlo and Moise; and the Pend d’Oreille chiefs Alexander and Michel. The photos are new, in matching frames and hang in a straight line along the school’s main hallway facing north.

“But we never actually learn about them in school,” she says. “It was just for looks.”

Some Ronan teachers disagree. And they don’t see discipline or racial discrimination as a problem.

“In my personal opinion, I don’t see that Native American students get treated unequally, and I don’t see any negativism toward students because of race,” says Bob Bartlett, who has been a seventh-grade social studies teacher at Ronan Middle School for 25 years.
He says he’s always integrated Indian history in the school’s social studies curriculum.

“I don’t see any differences in opportunities,” he says. “I think everybody treats everyone equally.”

Bartlett says his biggest focus is discipline, and he tries to steer students in the right direction — but it’s a constant struggle for a compromise between kids’ actions outside the classroom and how they’re expected to act inside it.

There are many reasons why students transfer schools and it’s a frequent occurrence on the reservation.

Although 20 to 30 percent of Indian teens at Flathead transfer between schools (or “school-shop” as some teachers call it) in a year, this is the first time such a large number transferred at once. It’s easy to live with a relative, an aunt or a grandmother, in order to attend a different school, says Parker. That’s what she did.

In the last semester of her senior year at Ronan High School, after 12 years in District 30, and as president of the Indian Club, Parker transferred to Two Eagle in January for her last semester. Living with her aunt in Pablo, she was close enough to walk to her new school.

Moving is nothing new for Parker.

Since she was 8, she has floated between foster care, living at the Second Circle Home in Ronan, living “on and off” with her single mother, and more recently living with her “auntie” in the blue, two-story home in Pablo.

Pablo, population 650, is the heart of Flathead Reservation’s tribal education system. It’s home to Salish Kootenai College, Pablo Elementary, and Two Eagle River School, as well as the tribal government.

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai tribes run Two Eagle River School, grades seven through 12. To attend, a student must be an enrolled tribal member.

Designated as “alternative,” students learn tribal history and culture and participate in projects such as star quilt making, woodshop, beading and outdoor activities in addition to the core classes. Elders from the community teach Salish and Kootenai language classes.

“It’s actually really nice that we’re all Indian,” says Parker. “We all have similar experiences. We can relate to each other.”

The school has a point system rather than a grading system, which teachers say gives students more responsibility for their own behavior.

Parker is critical of what she says is the Ronan schools’ disinterest in tribal culture, but she acknowledges that one reason for her transfer was that she learned halfway through her senior year that poor grades in Ronan would have prevented her from graduating this year. At Two Eagle, she could.

Two Eagle’s point system allows some students to complete two years in one, if they can manage enough points. Parker says she “screwed up her sophomore year,” but could make up the classes with points at Two Eagle.

However, she insists her transfer was also a matter of pride — a stand against what she claims is the school’s racism she says she had endured for 12 years.

Julie Cajune, who is Salish, has worked for six years to help bridge the relationships between Ronan teachers and Indian students.

“Students shouldn’t have to compromise who they are to get an education,” says Cajune, the Indian education coordinator for the Ronan schools.

“There’s a fragile relationship that exists in the Ronan schools,” says Cajune, “and it needs a lot of work. But people can’t talk to each other unless they feel valued.”

Tension between the dominant white and the Indian cultures on the Flathead has existed since the reservation was established by the Hellgate Treaty of 1855.

Joyce Silverthorne, who is the Tribal Education Department director in Pablo, attended the St. Ignatius Public School from 1960 to 1964.
Schools on the reservation today haven’t changed enough, she believes. “Indian students today face the same things they did many years ago,” she says.

Forty years after her high school education, after having children and grandchildren go through the Ronan and Pablo schools, Silverthorne realizes that there were and are “unspoken rules” in school. Those rules shape the relationship between Indians and non-Indians.

“You didn’t make friends then based on friendship,” she says. “You made friends by who you are, by where you live, by your culture.”
It’s a complicated social and cultural conundrum for students like Parker.

Parker resents Indians who have forgotten who they are, those she judges to have “given in” to the white population on the Flathead Reservation. She and her friends call those people “apples.”
Red on the outside but white on the inside, an “apple” is somebody who has only white friends, says Parker.

Click Images to Enlarge

In 1999 the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights found that the Ronan School District applied discipline unevenly for its Native Americans and white students. The district changed its procedures. In 2004 the office concluded that the changes made in the Ronan schools were satisfactory.

Ronan City Park is a regular hang out for many youths in Ronan. Shayna Parker, 18, and her friends say Indians and non-Indians don't mix socially. "Sometimes they try to hang out with us, but it just doesn't work. It's too hard for them, I guess," Parker says.

Julie Cajune, Indian education coordinator, Ronan Schools, says: "There's a fragile relationship that exists in the Ronan schools, and it needs a lot of work. But people can't talk to each other unless they feel valued."

Jesse Janssen, dropout prevention specialist for the Ronan School District, talks with Melissa Whitworth, 15, a freshman at Ronan High School in the In-School Suspension room. ISS is similar to detention, but the student's are considered to be out of school. Students are sent here for missing class or for behavioral problems. Janssen checks up on students to make sure they are doing homework and to see what other issues they might be dealing with outside the classroom.

Leslie Caye, leadings a session during the "Peace Keeping Days" for Ronan Middle School's seventh graders. Caye is a dropout prevention specialist for the Tribal Education Department.

Tanya Grey, center, listens as students describe obstacles they face navigating through middle school. Seventh-grade students in Ronan Middle School spent two days this spring talking with mediators and doing community building activities as a part of "Peace Keeping Days."

Tanya Grey teaches her students a game that focuses on cooperation. The two-day mediation session was for the seventh grade class, whose members are still trying to cope with the deaths of two boys last year of alcohol poisoning and hypothermia. Both of the 11-year-old boys were in the sixth grade at the time.