Two Life Histories of Native American Women Becoming Literate

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.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2015

Author dc:creator

• Roberts, Karen Leslie

Contributors dc:contributor

• Arlette Ingram Willis

• Women's Studies

Language dc:language

eng

Identifier

(MiAaPQ)AAI9971177

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/80410