Reading on the Rez
A new reading-promotion program is helping young Native Americans
Staff -- School Library Journal, 9/1/2000
Aided by a $5,000 grant from the American Library Association (ALA), Roy, a professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Texas in Austin, hopes to help schools like St. Peter's improve their library programs and promote literacy in ways that preserve Native Americans' cultural identities. (ALA's grant is piggybacked on a $6-million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to the University of Texas. That grant helps schools on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico create culturally responsive curriculums that use new technology.) Roy and an assistant, Sarah Joiner (at the time, a graduate student in library science), spent the past year piloting the "If I Can Read" program at the Laguna Pueblo Elementary School, a K-5 school 25 miles west of Albuquerque, NM. They helped plan a kick-off event at the beginning of the school year, inviting parents to join them after school for readings and refreshments in the library. Roy and Joiner also developed a thematic approach to literature (it includes "spooky stories about the Rez," says Roy) and visited the school every six to eight weeks, reading stories to its 370 students. Roy also tried her hand at soliciting donations: last year, publishers gave the Laguna Pueblo school 1,000 new books, valued at $15,000. And for the first time ever, the school library was given a book budget--$2,000 to spend on serials and in-class collections. This year, the "If I Can Read" program will expand to reach 2,200 children in six schools, including St. Peter's.--Rick Margolis
Loriene Roy, who heads up a one-year-old literacy program for young Native Americans called "If I Can Read, I Can Do Anything," describes the state of a library at one of the schools she plans to work with. "We're very interested in going to St. Peter's Indian Mission School," she says, singling out the tiny, 180-pupil school on the Gila River Indian Reservation in Arizona, "because the kids have never had books. The [library] collection has been noncirculating, which we didn't know until we arrived for a site visit. The librarian said that if a child was very good in class, they were allowed to come to the library and check out a book for an hour and bring it right back."
