This report shows that over time more American Indian/Alaska Native students have completed high school and gone on to college and that their attainment expectations have substantially increased in the past 20 years. Despite these gains, progress has been uneven and differences persist between American Indian/Alaska Native and White students on…

"Data Trends" reports present summaries of research on mental health services for children and adolescents and their families. The article summarized in this "Data Trends" asks: Does the stress and adversity associated with poverty cause mental illness or is poverty the result of downward social mobility of persons with mental…

As a world community, Indigenous peoples are faced with many common challenges in their attempts to maintain the vitality of their respective languages and to honor the "natural order of the Creator." Ten strategies are discussed that are critical to the task of renewing and maintaining Indigenous languages. These strategies are: (1)…

This paper discusses social and cultural change, deep ecology, and systems thinking in relation to the maintenance of Indigenous cultures and languages. All cultures change, and the current crisis in language loss for Native communities is related to cultural change. From a systems perspective, culture is a way of thinking about one's social…

Neuroscientific evidence for the underlying neuronal activity in the cerebral cortex for psychological states points to the need for an alternative physiological hypothesis for the construct of self concept. Evidence from neuroscience and hereditability studies leads to the conclusion that genetic forces may be clearly at work in the perception of…

The controversies in adoption have extended across a spectrum of policy and practice issues, and although the issues have become clear, resolution has not been achieved nor has consensus developed regarding a framework on which to improve the quality of adoption policy and practice. This book is the first in a series to use an ethics-based…

Immigration and domestic industrial policies have been powerful instruments in the creation of immigrant "niches" in labor markets. While Indians have clustered in the information technology industry, Mexicans have formed niches in low-skilled industries such as agriculture. A review of the relationship between immigration policy and the…

The consequences of not graduating from high school are increasingly serious for both individuals and society as a whole. As a result, state and federal accountability systems now require reporting of more detailed graduation and dropout data. The federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires states to report disaggregated…

This report summarizes the results of a needs assessment of American Indians with disabilities living in the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth (Texas) metropolitan areas. In 1996, 97 American Indians with disabilities were interviewed, and results were compared with those of a similar needs assessment conducted in 1992; 21 of the interviewees had…

This final report discusses the outcomes of a research project that examined the nature of the relationship between 52 Navajo caregivers' perceptions of the early intervention service system and specific program, provider, and family variables. The project also investigated perceptions of 16 early intervention personnel regarding barriers to, and…

This state-by-state directory lists over 500 alcohol and drug abuse treatment and prevention services that target American Indians and Alaska Natives. The directory was compiled from the website of the National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information (NCADI). Their home page on the Internet is located at http://www.health.org/index.htm. The…

A salient characteristic of the morpho-lexical systems of the Salish languages is the widespread use of reduplication in both derivational and inflectional functions. Salish reduplication signals such typologically common categories as "distributive/plural,""repetitive/continuative," and "diminutive," the cross-linguistically marked but typically…

The Indian Education Legal Support Project emphasizes the legal rights of tribes to control the formal education of their members. The project's work includes developing tribal education laws and reforming state and national Indian education legislation. This document compiles 10 voluntary cooperative agreements among federal, public, and tribal…

Traditional Inupiat society was, and is, about knowing the right time to be in the right place, with the right tools to take advantage of a temporary abundance of resources. Sharing the necessary knowledge about the natural world with the next generation was critical. The example of learning to hunt is used to demonstrate features of traditional…

This paper describes situational Navajo language immersion programs, explaining that situational classrooms recreate a situation in which students need Navajo to communicate and noting that Navajo is a very verb centered language. Situational Navajo takes many of the recurring situations in the school and family setting and makes them the core of…