Alumni News & Notes
William Demmert, Ed.D.’73: Push for Native Language
by Amy Magin Wong
In 1968, William Demmert, Ed.D.’73, school administrator for the tiny village of Klawock in southeastern Alaska, had a radical idea. As a native of the local Tlingit tribe, he initiated an educational program using the native language and basing it within the native culture.
“I had reached the conclusion,” he explains, “that it might be a very influential way to motivate the students to stay in school and do something with their lives.”
It was not a popular viewpoint at this time of Anglo assimilation, and Demmert recalls being called crazy. But from these nonconformist beginnings grew a career that has focused on the betterment of education for all Native Americans — an effort that is now even expanding internationally.
Demmert, a professor of education at Western Washington University, returned to the Ed School in March to speak about his involvement as principal investigator in a project designed to test the validity of his convictions. In his keynote address at the 2007 Alumni of Color Conference, he explained how a partnership of researchers are developing and testing curriculum-based measurements to monitor student progress in seven schools across the country that use the native language as the language of instruction, within a culturally based program.
“I am focused on improving academic performance,” he says. “We expect the students to do as well as or better than their peers in other schools that do not have this focus or curriculum.” The basis for this, he explains, is that “we believe that there are things that happen, in terms of image, motivation, and interest in their own tribe, that help to promote their interest in doing well academically.” Also, this educational approach is building a new kind of community, where everyone joins together as partners to ensure success, he says.
His life’s work is a synthesis of his Tlingit upbringing and his career as an academic. He credits his outlook and skills to the training he received growing up in Klawock. Under the guidance of his uncles, who all captained commercial fishing boats, Demmert spent his summers out on the sea, facing dangerous waters. Yet commercial fishing was feasible only in the summer, so he followed family members into their “winter jobs” as teachers, until eventually education became his full-time profession.
When Demmert started at the Ed School, he was one of the first Native Americans to attend. But when he left the rugged beauty of the Alaskan coast and his close-knit community, his introduction to the Cambridge campus was anything but encouraging. It was 1970, and he drove straight into the midst of a riot going on in Harvard Square. As he watched the chaos of protestors clashing with police, he recalls wondering dubiously what he had gotten himself into. But fortunately this day of strife was followed by several peaceful years of study guided by faculty whom Demmert praises as “excellent” and who supported his academic focus on the education of native students.
While at the Ed School, Demmert also worked with the U.S. Senate to help draft the 1972 Indian Education Act, now Title VII. He then served in several federal appointments, including as the first U.S. deputy commissioner of education for the U.S. Office of Indian Education.
Today, Demmert’s long campaign for native education reform has grown beyond national borders, and he is working with an international coalition of education ministers toward the goal of improving opportunities for indigenous students in the circumpolar north.
Overall, he says, “We are trying to show that the language and culturally based education focus isn’t harmful and may in fact be doing some good. The native community believes it.”
Soon, Demmert believes, research will prove its validity.
