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Blackfoot Education: What Abraham Maslow Glimpsed in 1938
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2025
Abstract
This History of Education Society Presidential Address considers Blackfoot education and how psychologist Abraham Maslow attempted to make sense of it after his six-week stay at the Siksika reserve in 1938. Maslow encountered an educated, secure people at Siksika, who had a fully formed system of education grounded in reverence for children, stories, ceremonies, songs, language, humor, land, and connection, all of which had been tested over millennia. Though he might not have been able to interpret what he was seeing and hearing as fully as would a member of the Blackfoot community, what he experienced stuck with him, and can be read as the basis for the theories he presented as the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization. As Maslow learned, Blackfoot history is an education history, which Blackfoot Elders sought to document and keep for generations not yet born.
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- Presidential Address
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of History of Education Society.
References
1 Following the lead of Derek Taira, who writes, “to avoid marking the Hawaiian language as foreign, I do not italicize Hawaiian words,” I have elected not to italicize Blackfoot words. See Derek Taira, Forward without Fear: Native Hawaiians and American Education in Territorial Hawaiʻi, 1900-1941, Studies in Pacific Worlds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2024), xiii.
2 Rosalyn R. LaPier, Invisible Reality: Storytellers, Storytakers, and the Supernatural World of the Blackfeet, New Visions in Native American and Indigenous Studies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press and Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2017), xxx.
3 “Elders” is capitalized to adhere to Blackfoot practices.
4 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 5, 54, 108.
5 See, for example, Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 21.
6 LaPier, Invisible Reality, xxx.
7 Oom Kapisi, Peter W. Choate, and Gabrielle Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective,” Aotearoa New Zealand Social Work 34, no. 2 (June 2022), 38, 40; “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow, Presented by Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavy Head at the University of Montana” streaming video (University of Montana, Missoula, MT, Oct. 27, 2007), video 9, 0:50-4:06, 6:33-6:44, https://www.blackfootdigitallibrary.com/digital/collection/bdl/id/1296/rec/1.
8 Kenneth D. Feigenbaum and Rene Anne Smith, “Historical Narratives: Abraham Maslow and Blackfoot Interpretations,” Humanistic Psychologist 48, no. 3 (Sept. 2020), 232–43; Rene Anne Smith and Kenneth D. Feigenbaum, “Maslow’s Intellectual Betrayal of Ruth Benedict?,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 53, no. 3 (July 2013), 307–21.
9 Maslow’s papers include correspondence and manuscripts about the Blackfoot over a twenty-eight-year period, discoverable through the finding aid for the Abraham Maslow Papers at the University of Akron. “Finding Aid for Abraham Maslow,” University of Akron Digital Collections, Cummings Center Finding Aids, accessed Aug. 22, 2024, https://collections.uakron.edu/digital/collection/p15960coll10/id/684/rec/2.
10 Abraham H. Maslow, “Appendix One: Abraham Maslow’s Unpublished Paper, ‘The Psychology of the Northern Blackfoot Indians,’” in Sidney Stone Brown, Transformation beyond Greed: Native Self-Actualization (Sidney Stone Brown, 2014), 229–35; Abraham H. Maslow and John J. Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality [ca. 1943],” in Brown, Transformation beyond Greed, 237-78.
11 Brown, Transformation beyond Greed, 3.
12 “Complete Maslow Bibliography,” Dec. 3, 2005, https://web.archive.org/web/20051203221954/http://www.maslow.org/sub/m_bib.htm; A. H. Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” Psychological Review 50, no. 4 (July 1943), 370–96.
13 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 245.
14 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 6, 11:29-16:38; video 7, 6:05-12:13.
15 Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective,” 35, 37.
16 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 13, 4:08-4:14.
17 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 13, 3:50-4:00; video 12, 26:42-26:54.
18 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 240.
19 Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective.,” 39; Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality, 250.
20 Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective,” 39.
21 Maslow, “A Theory of Human Motivation,” 382.
22 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” quotes on p. 250; Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective,” 39.
23 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 251.
24 Brown, Transformation beyond Greed, 109.
25 Betty Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing: The Worldview of the Siksikaitsitapi (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2004), 96, 126, 140; Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 8, 0:42-1:40; Michael Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names in Paahtomahksikimi, Waterton Lakes National Park” (PhD diss., University of Lethbridge, Canada, 2022), 23, 71, 79; LaPier, Invisible Reality, 66, 68–71.
26 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 8, 0:16-1:40; Brown, Transformation beyond Greed, 109–10.
27 Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective,” 38, 39.
28 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 104.
29 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 20.
30 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 104, 127–28, 132, 140.
31 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 21, 36, 40.
32 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 144; Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 38.
33 Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective.” 39.
34 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 251.
35 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 259.
36 Maslow, “Appendix One: Abraham Maslow’s Unpublished Paper, ‘The Psychology of the Northern Blackfoot Indians,’” 233.
37 Maslow, “Appendix One: Abraham Maslow’s Unpublished Paper,” 231; see also Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective,” 36.
38 Maslow, “Appendix One: Abraham Maslow’s Unpublished Paper,” 231.
39 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 21, 23, 36.
40 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 104, 215; see also Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 19.
41 LaPier, Invisible Reality, 27.
42 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 89, 90, 94, 126.
43 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 36.
44 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 7, 12:51-14:50; Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective”; Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality.”
45 Abraham Maslow to Henry Geiger, Dec. 29, 1966, in The Unpublished Papers of Abraham Maslow, ed. Edward Hoffman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996), 179.
46 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 272–73.
47 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 259.
48 Maslow, “Appendix One: Abraham Maslow’s Unpublished Paper,” 232.
49 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 255, 260, 262.
50 Montana Campus Network for Civic Engagement, “Centering Indigenous Knowledge: Blackfeet Community College,” YouTube, Feb. 15, 2023, 6:43-29:57, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLZccDhbHSc; see also Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 130.
51 Brown, Transformation beyond Greed, 51.
52 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 128, 130.
53 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 129.
54 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 8, 14:23-17:33; video 9, 0:12-4:06; Brown, Transformation beyond Greed, 46; Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective.,” 37–38, 39, 40.
55 Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective”; Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 7, 12:51-14:50; video 8, 1:53-4:12; video 11, 3:07-3:28.
56 Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective,” 36.
57 Dorothy First Rider et al., “Genomic Analyses Correspond with Deep Persistence of Peoples of Blackfoot Confederacy from Glacial Times,” Science Advances 10, no. 14 (April 2024), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adl6595. This study was done in collaboration with Blackfoot Elders, several of whom are co-authors of the study.
58 Ives Goddard, “Blackfoot and Core Algonquian Inflectional Morphology: Archaisms and Innovations,” in Papers of the Forty-Seventh Algonquian Conference, ed. Monica Macaulay and Margaret Noodin (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018); Frank T. Siebert, “The Original Home of the Proto-Algonquian People,” Algonquian Papers - Archive 1 (Dec. 1967), https://ojs.library.carleton.ca/index.php/ALGQP/article/view/427.
59 David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 882.
60 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 4, 14:46-14:50.
61 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 23.
62 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 11, 22, 53.
63 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 80; see also Sean P. Harvey, Native Tongues: Colonialism and Race from Encounter to the Reservation, illustrated edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). Early missionaries who were sent to North America to study and learn Indigenous languages were often not permitted to do so because of the esoteric knowledge that many languages conveyed. It is not surprising, then, that a common form of sign language developed among North American peoples for communication.
64 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 27, 36, 43, 90.
65 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 70, 93.
66 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 121.
67 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 4, 14:46-14:50.
68 Goddard, “Blackfoot and Core Algonquian Inflectional Morphology”; Siebert, “The Original Home of the Proto-Algonquian People.”
69 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 1, 12:44, 13:05-14:10; video 3, 4:43-6:13; video 11, 16:14-16:43; video 12, 4:26-5:20; Kapisi, Choate, and Lindstrom, “Reconsidering Maslow and the Hierarchy of Needs from a First Nations’ Perspective,” 36.
70 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 245.
71 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 19. See also Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young, The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada (Penticton, British Columbia: Theytus Books Ltd., 2006); Ronald Niezen, Truth and Indignation: Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools, Teaching Culture: UTP Ethnographies for the Classroom (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada’s Residential Schools, vol. 1, The History, Part 1: Origins to 1939, Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 6 vols. (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015); Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada’s Residential Schools, vol. 5, The Legacy (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015); Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Canada’s Residential Schools, vol. 6, Reconciliation (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).
72 Maslow and Honigmann, “Appendix Two: Northern Blackfoot Culture and Personality,” 245.
73 Brown, Transformation beyond Greed, 42.
74 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 98; Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 37.
75 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 138, 145, 148; Brown, Transformation beyond Greed, 46.
76 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 21; see also Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 80.
77 LaPier, Invisible Reality, 23-63.
78 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 95, 123, 138; Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 3, 12:12-13:40; video 4, 0:16-13:14; video 11, 12:19-12:29; video 14, 18:30-18:35.
79 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 102, 135, 139.
80 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 4, 5:00-5:13.
81 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 4, 17:52.
82 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 3, 12:12-15:00.
83 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 123, 138, 139; Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 21.
84 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 2, 85, 95, 135, 145, 148; Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 4, 0:16-2:14, 7:07-7:11, 8:18-13:14; Brown, Transformation beyond Greed, 47-48; Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 21.
85 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 105, 123, 125, 139.
86 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 102, 145, 148.
87 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 95, 100, 102; Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 4, 5:28-7:11; video 11, 3:07-3:28; Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 21.
88 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 127-29; Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 11, 53, 70, 93.
89 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 139; Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 3, 12:32-12:41; video 8, 14:23.
90 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 93, 105, 123, 125.
91 Bastien, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, 106, 107, 142; Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 4, 9:15-9:17; video 6, 14:17-16:38; video 12, 4:26-5:20; Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 19.
92 Blood and Heavy Head, “Blackfoot Influence on Abraham Maslow,” video 4, 14:46-14:50; Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 21, 27, 36, 37, 43, 52, 80, 90.
93 Bruised Head, “The Colonial Impact of the Erasure of Blackfoot Miistakistsi Place Names,” 20.