It's kind of not mainly about life. For him, life is elsewhere, at home where his family and community are located. Making a living, indisputably important since tribal jobs are scarce, is a matter for schools and the outside world. Making a living is the customary rationale for doing well in school. It makes me stop myself from trying to compete.
People are scared of losing.
Here I see consequences having become causes, in that the students are surrounded by persons who, having done modestly in school, inadvertently model academic underachievement. At the same time, they urge current students to do much better than they themselves did. Given these student insights, I returned to the students' picture of themselves as tired, weak, lazy, bored, and the like. I must wonder if I was so hell-bent on pursuing cultural duality that I made it into a template within which everything else had to fit. I associate the students' malaise with their cultural duality, the inescapable, deep-seated, commonplace multiplicity of their lives that is enshrined in the mission statement of their school.