This paper describes a qualitative study of how indigenous people experience medical school in the United States. Nine American Indians and Alaska Natives participated in the study: five women and four men. They came from eight different tribes, but they have asked me to protect their confidentiality, so I will not identify their tribes. Their ages ranged from 27 to 39. Five of them had children. Two of them were unmarried.

In the United States, the need for indigenous physicians is great. Twice as many American Indians die from homicide and suicide as non-Indians in the United States (Wallace, Kirk, Houston, Amnest, and Emrich, 1993); three times as many die from accidents and more than four times as many die from alcoholism (Indian Health Service, 1996). Diabetes is rampant among American Indians and Alaska Natives. Women are the hardest hit (Gilliland, Gilliland, and Carter; 1997). More than five times as many American Indian and Alaska Native women die from diabetes than non-Latina white women.

Although Europeans and Americans involved American Indians in their educational systems almost from first contact, it was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the United States government made a full scale assault and took control of virtually all aspects of American Indian education, with the purpose of forcing or encouraging assimilation. This assault began with treaty-based support for education in government schools run by both federally hired schoolteachers and missionaries, paid for directly with money the tribes received for their lands. By the late nineteenth century the federal government, recognizing the failure of day schools in the assimilation process, turned to the use of boarding schools, on-reservation and off, through which Indians were trained in vocational and domestic skills and which were intended to sever children’s ties to their cultures. During this time few Indians were educated at a college level. The English and later Americans expected those who were educated to use their educations to help in the assimilation process. These educational systems, while disrupting (though not destroying) reservation life and culture, focussed almost exclusively on industrial and domestic, not intellectual, training. The quality of education provided was so low that even Indian students wishing to attend college were often academically ineligible for entrance.

A project is currently underway at http://arts.deakin.edu.au which is innovative on a number of fronts. It has multiple beginnings: in the proactive, as culture dissemination work of a number of Yanyuwa and Garrwa women, who proclaimed in the white man’s world that they were ‘bosses themselves’ (Gale 1983) and who in various ways have sought to bring their culture to the attention of the wider world. This has been accomplished through a prize-winning (Atom Australian Teachers of Media awards in 1991) film, Buwarrala Akarriya: Journey East (1989), of are-enacted ritual foot-walk in 1988 from Borroloola to Manankurra 90 kilometres away. They also made a another prize winning film called Ka-wayawayarna: The Aeroplane Dance (1993) which won the Royal Anthropological Society of London award for the best ethnographic film in 1995. Since 1997 senior Yanyuwa women have been involved on a regular basis in sharing their knowledge of Yanyuwa performance practice with tertiary students in a subject called Women’s Music and Dance in Indigenous Australia which is offered as a course in anthropology through the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies Unit, they have also lectured in core anthropology subjects in the faculty of Social and Behavourial Sciences Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of Queensland. They have also engaged actively in work as language preservers and teachers at the Borroloola Community Education Centre (hereafter BCEC) and in the Tennant Creek Language Centre program called Papulu Apparr-Kari.

The purpose of this project is to implement strategies that will empower Indigenous Australians in mainstream education; specifically, at Chatswood Hills State School, Springwood. The proposed plan will continue to be implemented over a three-year period with on-going development expected beyond that time. My primary role will be as facilitator in initiating appropriate strategies. As a permanent teacher on the staff of the school, I will also participate in some or all of the programs, as requested.

This paper re-evaluates Fanshawe’s (1976) description of effective teachers of adolescent Aborigines in the light of more recent literature and research pertaining to the effective teaching of children from a variety of cultural backgrounds. While particular attention is paid to the two-dimensional warmth-demandingness model of teacher effectiveness which informed the work of Kleinfeld (1972, 1975) and Fanshawe (1976, 1978, 1989), consideration is also given to other teacher characteristics besides warmth and demandingness, as well as teaching strategies and learning environments which are likely to be associated with positive educational outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children. The discussion concludes with the identification of important possibilities for future cross-cultural research into teacher effectiveness.

In the Coalition’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs 1998 election policy statement, The Honourable John Herron, Senator for Queensland and Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, claimed that a second term Howard/Fischer government would continue to assist Indigenous Australia to move beyond welfare by continuing to target key areas that include education and economic development (Herron 1998:1).