Konaway Nika Tillicum Native Youth Academy: Enacting a medicine wheel educational framework

Native American youth need educational experiences that promote positive, healthy development, which requires decolonizing current educational experiences. Konaway Nika Tillicum Native Youth Academy (KNT) offers a holistic approach to education, incorporating Tribal cultures and values along with valuing higher education. Across two complementary studies, we seek to understand how the Medicine Wheel framework supports the design of educational experiences and the effectiveness of this design on positive development factors, including cultural identity development, self-esteem, and academic optimism.

To address our research questions, we first share an ethnographic study including participant observations and interviews with five KNT staff to investigate how the educators of KNT enact the Medicine Wheel in designing educational experiences for Native youth. We then examined the effectiveness of this Medicine Wheel framework on positive development factors across two summers of the academy with youth ages 11-18 (23 boys, 38 girls) representing diverse tribal affiliations.

Findings from our first research question reveal a Medicine Wheel Educational Framework that offers holistic and culturally sustaining/revitalizing education experiences for Native youth. Findings from our second research question indicate that Native youth experienced significant increases in their cultural identity and academic optimism directly and indirectly via increasing self-esteem through engaging in the KNT.

Implications of findings show that when educated in a learning space that promotes Native students' culture, youth show healthy development in factors valued across Indigenous and Western perspectives, including cultural identity, self-esteem, and academic optimism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).