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Children's Learning in Indigenous American Communities
Nonverbal communication is commonly used to facilitate learning in Indigenous American communities. While not traditionally thought of as “talk,” nonverbal communication has been found to contain highly precise and symbolic meanings, as verbal speech traditionally does, and these meanings are conveyed through the use of gesture, posture changes, and timing. Nonverbal communication is pivotal for collaborative participation in shared activities, as children from Indigenous American communities will learn how to interact using nonverbal communication by intently observing adults. Nonverbal communication allows for continuous keen observation and signals to the learner when participation is needed. A study in which children from both US Mexican (with presumed indigenous backgrounds) and European American heritages watched a video of children working together without speaking found that the Mexican-heritage children were far more likely to describe the children’s actions as collaborative, saying that the children in the video were “talking with their hands and with their eyes.”

Many Indigenous American children are in close contact with adults and other children who are performing the activities that they will eventually master. Objects and materials become familiar to the child as the activities are a normal part of everyday life; nothing is changed in order to produce a special learning situation. A key characteristic of this type of nonverbal learning is that children have the opportunity to observe and interact with all parts of an activity. For example, the direct involvement that Mazahua children take in the marketplace is used as a type of interactional organization for learning without direct communication. Children learn how to run a market stall, take part in caregiving, and also learn other work-related activities by cooperating voluntarily without having to forced, or, particularly in the case of older children, prompted at all. Not explicitly instructing or guiding the children teaches them how to integrate into small coordinated groups to solve a problem through consensus and shared space. These Mazahua separate-but-together practices have shown that participation in everyday interaction and later learning activities establishes enculturation that is rooted in nonverbal social experience. As the children participate in everyday interactions, they are simultaneously learning the cultural meanings behind these interactions. Children’s experience with nonverbally organized social interaction helps constitute the process of enculturation.

One aspect of nonverbal communication that aids in conveying these precise and symbolic meanings is "context embeddedness." The idea that many children in Indigenous American Communities are closely involved in community endeavors, both spatially and relationally, helps to promote nonverbal communication given that words are not always necessary. When children are closely related to the context of the endeavor as active participants, coordination is based on a shared reference, which helps to allow, maintain, and promote nonverbal communication. The idea of "context embeddedness" allows nonverbal communication to be a means of learning within Native American Alaskan Athabaskans and Cherokee communities. By observing various family and community social interactions, social engagement is dominated through nonverbal communication. For example, when children illicit thoughts or words verbally to their elders, they are expected to structure their speech carefully. This demonstrates cultural humility and respect as excessive acts of speech and conversational genre shifts reveal weakness and disrespect. This careful self-censorship exemplifies traditional social interactions of Athapaskin and Cherokee Native Americans are mostly dependent on nonverbal communication.

Nonverbal cues are used by most children in the Warm Springs Indian Reservation community within the parameters of their academic learning environments. This includes referencing Native American religion through stylized hand gestures in colloquial communication, verbal and nonverbal emotional self-containment, and less movement of the lower face to structure attention on the eyes during face-to-face engagement. Therefore, children's approach to social situations within a reservation classroom, for example, may act as a barrier to a predominantly verbal learning environment. Most Warm Springs children benefit from a learning model that suits a nonverbal communicative structure of collaboration, traditional gesture, observational learning and shared references. It is important to note that while nonverbal communication is more prevalent in Indigenous American Communities, verbal communication is also used. Preferably, verbal communication does not substitute one's involvement in an activity, but instead acts as additional guidance or support towards the completion of an activity.