The Inter Mountain Educator

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Returning Home features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné (Navajo) boarding school students at the Intermountain Indian School, which was the largest federal Indian boarding school between 1950 and 1984. Diné student art and poetry reveal ways that boarding school students sustained and contributed to Indigenous cultures and communities despite assimilationist agendas and pressures. This book works to recover the lived experiences of Native American boarding school students through creative works, student interviews, and scholarly collaboration. It shows the complex agency and ability of Indigenous youth to maintain their Diné culture within the colonial spaces that were designed to alienate them from their communities and customs. Returning Home provides a view into the students’ experiences and their connections to Diné community and land. Despite the initial Intermountain Indian School agenda to send Diné students away and permanently relocate them elsewhere, Diné student artists and writers returned home through their creative works by evoking senses of Diné Bikéyah and the kinship that defined home for them. Returning Home uses archival materials housed at Utah State University, as well as material donated by surviving Intermountain Indian School students and teachers throughout Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Artwork, poems, and other creative materials show a longing for cultural connection and demonstrate cultural resilience. This work was shared with surviving Intermountain Indian School students and their communities in and around the Navajo Nation in the form of a traveling museum exhibit, and now it is available in this thoughtfully crafted volume. By bringing together the archived student arts and writings with the voices of living communities, Returning Home traces, recontextualizes, reconnects, and returns the embodiment and perpetuation of Intermountain Indian School students’ everyday acts of resurgence.

The purpose of the study was twofold: 1) To ascertain the proportion of time spent by distributive education teacher-coordinators in the intermountain area in performing the five major functions of the distributive education teacher-coordinator: Classroom Teaching, Coordination, Guidance, Public Relations, and Operations and Administration. 2) To ascertain the proportion of time spent by intermountain coordinators on specific tasks within each of the 5 major functions. The population for this study, was limited to certified teacher-coordinators in the states of Idaho, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. The survey was conducted during April and May of 1973. The major conclusions reached were: 1) Intermountain coordinators spend 10% more time on the classroom teaching function than the national average of coordinators. 2) Consequently, intermountain coordinators spend less time on coordination, guidance, and operations and administration than coordinators do nationally. 3) The intermountain coordinators devote approximately 50% of their class period to lecture-discussion methods of instruction and 50% to individual and small group study. 4) Intermountain coordinators devote approximately half of their coordination time to visiting with the sponsor/employer and only 5% to visiting with student's parents. 5) Intermountain coordinators spend nearly half of their guidance time on students' work related problems. The other half is nearly equally divided between career guidance and students' personal problems. 6) A majority of the intermountain coordinators' public relations time is devoted to personal contact with individuals. 7) DECA activities account for more than half of the intermountain coordinators' operations and administrations time and approximately 5% of the coordinators' total school time.