The high achieving Sioux Indian child: some preliminary findings from the Flower of Two Soils project.

This paper focuses on thirty Oglala Sioux children from the 2nd and 4th grades and attempts to identify a variety of emotional, cognitive, and cultural factors that differentiate high academic achievement from low academic achievement. The small sample was taken from within a large, ongoing prospective study, The Flower of Two Soils, of approximately one thousand children at four reservation sites in the United States and Canada. High achieving children score better than their low achieving classmates on the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for ChildrenRevised (WISC-R), but not on the Draw-A-Person test. They tend to come from intact, two parent families with a solid employment history, a strong social network, frequent contact with the school, and acculturation tendencies toward the majority culture. The children show an identification with overall educational aims. These tentative findings await confirmation from the full project. This paper reports preliminary analyses of year one data collected at the South Dakota Oglala Sioux Reservation on 30 second and fourth grade children as part of a large National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)-funded epidemiologic survey of Indian children entitled The Flower of Two Soils) The study came about as a result of previous work with American Indian youth. Beiser and Attneave (1982) surveyed national data from the Indian Health Service in 1974 and compared that data to 1969 National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) data. At all ages except five to nine, Indian children were at a higher risk for entering mental health treatment than were non-Indian children (see Figure 1), with a strikingly high treated prevalence for Indian female adolescents. While this data has a number of methodological uncertainties, it strongly suggests what clinicians experience: a high rate of emotional difficulties in Indian children. Coupled with results from earlier research conducted by John Bryde on the Sioux reservation in the 1960's, additional concerns become apparent. Bryde (1968) administered the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) to 105 8th grade students on a Sioux reservation and found significant differences between Indian and non-Indian children on 26 of 28 key variables. Feelings of depression, alienation, withdrawal, meaninglessness, and self-estrangement were particularly high in this group of students. American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research, 1(1), June 1987, pp. 41-56. American Indian and Alaska Native Mental Health Research Copyright: Centers for American Indian and Alaska Native Health Colorado School of Public Health/University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus (www.ucdenver.edu/caianh)