Miseducation of the Negro: School encouraged students to dance around teepees, dress up as Indians with headbands of multi-colored feathers and give each other “Indian names”
The Oxendine family have long valued how Montessori schools educated their four children, especially with Montessori’s stated principles of inclusiveness and compassion.
They were, thus, thrilled when their youngest children Jada, 7, and Jase, 5, received scholarships in 2012 to the Maria Montessori School in San Diego due to their family’s Native American and military backgrounds. But now the Oxendines say an ongoing conflict over the school’s problematic, now cancelled Thanksgiving curriculum has led to the revoking of Jada’s scholarship, something school officials deny.
Red flags were raised in early November 2012 when they learned the school was planning Thanksgiving classroom activities encouraging students to dance around teepees, dress up as Indians with headbands of multi-colored feathers and give each other “Indian names.”
“Whenever we go back to [the Pine Ridge Reservation] where my wife is from, [the children] are surrounded by ceremonies and dances. They’re taught feathers are sacred and only for ceremony,” said James Oxendine, Lumbee, an information systems officer in the U.S. Navy. “And it was confusing for them to see the school doing it differently and perpetuating stereotypes in this way.”