Current status and future directions of research on the American Indian child

American Indians are the most severely disadvantaged of any population within the United States. By adolescence, Indian children show higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, delinquency, and out-of-home placement. School achievement is severely compromised, and many youths drop out before graduation from high school. The Indian child understands the environment through intuitive, visual, and pictorial means, but success in the Anglo school is largely dependent on auditory processing, abstract conceptualization, and language skills. This difference compounds existing problems of poverty, dislocation, alienation, depression and intergenerational conflict and can partially account for the higher rate of emotional and behavioral problems among Indian adolescents.