A graduation ceremony at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Photo from American Indian College Fund / Facebook

History of Indian education
By Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
www.nsweekly.com

Even though the Indigenous population of North America was thought in the beginning by white European invaders to be too savage and helpless to ever become a part of the civilized world, what is now called Indian education has somehow emerged into modernity, mostly because early generations of native thinkers, leaders, and politicians believed that they were accountable beings and not brutes nor savages.

Even so, early efforts at Indian education handled mostly by white bureaucrats were not impressive in scope or results. Indian Education, in spite of efforts by some well intentioned people, has now turned into obvious and ubiquitous criminal ventures.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, American Indian history and culture and education was propelled by white anthropologists and the oral traditions. From that time until 1830, America made little or no decent or long range provisions for the education of native children, hoping that the “Vanishing American” was more than mere theory.

When Indians did not “vanish,” it was then announced that the Federal government and the Christian churches would buy (or steal) land to build institutions on whatever land was available to educate native children; thus, the so-called “boarding school era” began. After a century of removing native children from their homes, their languages, their cultures, and their “ignorant and savage” parents, the Boarding School phenomenon thrived. Now it is examined as a damaging colonial strategy to make Indians into white people. It proved to be another failure, this time with catastrophic consequences of social disruption and poverty, and has been largely abandoned in favor of what some hope would be a more enlightened and imaginative landscape.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, a social framework to develop disciplinary strategies, research and writing, published the work by educated Indians throughout the U. S. Indian Studies, a defensive academic discipline, was one of the results. Grassroots and academic Indians became directors of much of their own tribal educational endeavors.

In the late 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s what we now call the reservation based community college system emerged and for many observers, proved to be one of the best ideas in Indian Education in a 100 years!!! Its emergence was probably influenced by a federal reconstruction period which was led by a public and nation-wide protest by indigenous tribes against federal public policy throughout Indian Country and it was called the American Indian Movement. In spite of vicious criticism of the tactics of AIM, it proved to be a loud enough voice to force important changes in public policy.

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(Elizabeth Cook Lynn is Professor emerita/EWU; Santee and Ihanktowan: Crow Creek Sioux Tribe. Ft. Thompson, S.D.)

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