Connecting the circle in American Indian education

Let us put our minds together and see what kind of life we can make for our children. (Sitting Bull, Hunkapa Lakota)The formal education of Indigenous people in the US has a history nearly as long as the American educational system itself – nearly parallel but certainly, in the eyes of White Europeans, not equal. Ignoring American Indians’ desires to remain “Indian,” from colonial times to the present, the formal education of American Indians has had as its purpose the assimilation of the Indigenous peoples named American Indians by Christopher Columbus in 1492. As Szasz (1988) and other historians have pointed out, education of American Indians by American Indians was the norm long before 1492 and the later arrival of the colonists in the 17th century. Educational models were established by the Cherokees and Choctaws who operated their own schools in the 1840s, educating their citizens in both their Native language and English; both boasted high literacy rates. Consequently, it is ironic that only in the last 40-plus years has the term “Indian self-determination” been used to describe the current policy and philosophical approach employed by tribes and local Indian communities to educate Indigenous children.