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Culture, Place, and Power: Engaging the Histories and Possibilities of American Indian Education

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy
Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy*
Affiliation:
Indigenous Education and Justice
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Extract

I am honored and humbled to have the opportunity to consider the role of history and its relationship to “American Indian education” in this special issue of the History of Education Quarterly. Before I offer some commentary and ideas, I want to offer a caveat—or a confession—that should inform the way my paper is read. My caveat/confession is that I am not a historian, let alone a historian of education. Instead, I am an “Indigenous” anthropologist of education. Of anthropologists, Vine Deloria Jr. has written, “Into each life, it is said, some rain must fall… But Indians have been cursed above all other people in history. Indians have anthropologists.” My own thinking about anthropology is that much of Deloria's disdain is well placed. Some of what anthropologists do, however—listen to stories and engage with people and place—is useful to conversations about what American Indian education is and can be. In this case, sometimes rain feeds growth. It is from this viewpoint of growth and possibility that I offer my thoughts on the role of history, its methods, and what this might mean for American Indian education.

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Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 395 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 History of Education Society 

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References

1 Deloria, Vine, Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988), 78.Google Scholar

2 It is worth noting here that “Epic Learning in an Indian Pueblo: A Framework for Studying Multigenerational Learning in the History of Education,” Adrea Lawrence's essay in this volume, relies on Keith Basso's work to argue that, “Place, like time, is a sense-making tool to understand the world around them” (p. 292). Basso is, of course, an anthropologist, and one that I will return to later in this essay.Google Scholar

3 It is important to note here that I am not talking about the Indigenous perspective, but my own as a Lumbee man.Google Scholar

4 I am intentional in not using the term pedagogy. I view pedagogy as our theory about teaching and learning, instead of simply teaching. To this end, I don't think that schools control how Indigenous peoples think about learning; schools have traditionally ignored the very idea that there may be multiple ways of thinking about both teaching and learning. Lawrence's article in this issue highlights this very point. I will return to this later in this section and attempt to elaborate on my point.Google Scholar

5 Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, “Tribal Sovereigns: Refraining Research in American Indian Education,” Harvard Educational Review 70, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 1–21, 2.Google Scholar

6 “Ben Franklin's Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America (1784)” http://dangerousmtersection.org/2006/04/30/benjamm-franklins-essay-about-native-americans/.Google Scholar

7 The Haudenosaunee is the name that members of the six nation, or Iroquois Confederacy, use for themselves.Google Scholar

8 Okakok, Leona, “Serving the Purpose of Education,” Harvard Educational Review 59, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 686–94, 408.Google Scholar

9 Ibid., 409.Google Scholar

10 Adams, David Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 51–52.Google Scholar

11 Parker, Arthur C., “The Social Elements of the Indian Problem,” American Journal of Sociology 22, no. 2 (September 1916): 686–94.Google Scholar

12 Battiste, Marie, Indigenous Knowledge and Pedagogy in First Nations Education: A Literature Review with Recommendations (Ottawa: Apamuwek Institute, 2002), 5.Google Scholar

13 Lawrence, , “Epic Learning,” 9.Google Scholar

14 Basso, Keith H., Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1996).Google Scholar

15 Ibid., 126.Google Scholar

16 Ibid.Google Scholar

17 Ibid., 127.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 130.Google Scholar

19 See note 9.Google Scholar

20 KuuNUx TeeRIt Kroupa, “Education as Arikara Spiritual Renewal and Cultural Evolution,” in this issue, pp. 303–22.Google Scholar

21 Gaither, Milton, “The History of North American Education, 15,000 BCE to 1491,” in this issue, 326.Google Scholar

22 As quoted in Lawrence, Adrea, “Epic Learning in an Indian Pueblo: A Framework for Studying Multigenerational Learning in the History of Education,” in this issue, p. 286.Google Scholar

23 Warren, Donald, “American Indian Histories as Education History,” in this issue, pp. 284–85.Google Scholar