I’ve been thinking a lot about culture, especially as it is related to education. A prominent idea is that culture acts as software to our brain’s hardware. The brain catalogs new information and experiences by writing or attaching them onto existing emotions, experiences, or knowledge. Much of that is one’s culture. Not just the surface culture of heroes and holidays, but deep culture—tacit knowledge and unconscious assumptions that lay the foundation for one’s worldview, according to Zaretta Hammond. This deep culture governs how we learn new information. This means it has immense emotional charge and impact.

I had a tiny insight while watching the first episode (for the second time) of the FX/Hulu series, Reservation Dogs. It’s technically a coming-of-age story of four indigenous teens in a fictional town in Oklahoma, but maybe also a story about the power of community, deep culture, and the way deep culture of a people impacts how one makes sense of (or doesn’t) the incorporation of modern American culture (read White middle class culture) on existing deep, historical culture and traditions.

I think this is exemplified in a later episode from the show when two elders coming to terms with and settling a long-standing feud between them and conclude by saying, “we should sing something.” The other, not knowing really what to sing, starts singing Tom Petty’s Free Falling. Deep cultural practices lay the foundation for making sense of modern culture.

Near the end of the first episode, the four teens hold their own private memorial for their recently passed friend Daniel. As the music plays we see them burning sage and smudging and washing the smoke over themselves. Nothing is explained or made of this ritual. It is a normal activity based on deep culture.

If you ask many Americans who look like me, very much a mixture of European descent, many would say they don’t really have a culture. Many might also say they don’t “see color.” What they are not seeing though is that for them White culture is like the background noise not even noticed, and therefore is the perceived to be the norm with everything else being exotic and “otherized.” This might implicitly mean it is less, and in education and other policies it is explicitly viewed as less-than with laws such as no ethnic studies curriculum allowed in schools in places like Arizona. Really then, it is an attempt to erase and eradicate a culture and therefore a people.

It would seem to me that Modern American culture is mostly about individualism while many of the “other” cultures are about collectivism. Hammond (2015) defines them as such (adapting from Hofstede & Hofstede):

Individualism	Collectivism
Focused on independence and individual achievement	Focused on interdependence and group success
Emphasizes self-reliance and the belief that one is supposed to take care of himself to get ahead	Emphasizes reliance on the collective wisdom or resources of the group and the belief that group members take care of each other to get ahead
Learning happens through individual study and reading	Learning happens through group interaction and dialogue
Individual contributions and status are important	Group dynamics and harmony are important
Competitive	Collaborative
Technical/analytical	Relational

As I was watching these teens perform this cultural ritual as a routine happening in their lives, it occurred to me that (in addition to racism) the animosity toward “other” cultures could be as much about envy for individuals who still can access deep culture as a foundation for their daily living, while many in the dominant white-middle class American culture feel no sense of deep culture. Therefore may be lacking a foundation on which to lay history, connected to place, to the land, and to a community rooted in a collectivist culture. I know I’d rather be collaborative and relational instead of competitive and technical/analytical.