Two Life Histories of Native American Women Becoming Literate
Roberts, Karen Leslie
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/80410
Description
Title
Two Life Histories of Native American Women Becoming Literate
Author(s)
Roberts, Karen Leslie
Issue Date
2000
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Arlette Ingram Willis
Department of Study
Education
Discipline
Education
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Women's Studies
Language
eng
Abstract
This life history study presents two Uptown Chicago Native American women, who overcame obstacles in their literacy development. Vonda Gluck interchanges between a traditional Santee Sioux life as well as a traditional Jewish life. Debbie Valentino has acquired knowledge, making a dramatic change within her Onieda and American lives, which she shares with the Uptown Native community. The life history includes a critique of existing Native American autobiographical literature, which is also compared to descriptions of the data. Four interviews asked each woman about family literacy experience, schooling literacy experience, adult literacy experience, and life's reflection regarding literacy as a holistic experience. Both Native American women's literacy development was a lifelong bicultural/biliterate trial & error toward pathways of the collective conscious. These two Native American women experienced, developed, and refined six safe and peaceful pathways toward literacy development, which are individual respect, integrating knowledge, nonintervention, entropy, abstracting themes, and body memory. Both Vonda and Debbie utilized acquisition of a tribal identity, an essence of community, and an initiating of a conscious or unconscious application of these pathways as cultural filters to become literate. Therefore, both Native American women overcame the barriers for a specific tribal identity, problems with alcoholism, and the displacement experience of Native American women in a non-Native dominant society.
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