Indigenous Heritage Communities of North America

Turtle Island, or North America (Canada, the United States, Greenland, Mexico, Central America, and some Caribbean islands), is home to hundreds of Indigenous communities. There is great diversity among and between Indigenous communities in terms of language, customs, and practices. This diversity is reflected in the goals and instructional content of Indigenous out-of-school learning (OSL) environments, which often differ from typical OSL environments along ontological and epistemological lines. Indigenous OSL environments are grounded in the traditional knowledge systems of a community. Indigenous knowledge systems are tribally specific, rooted in time–space relations, language systems, and particular geographies.

This entry is bound to reduce the complexity of the experiences, both historical and contemporary, of Indigenous-heritage communities. To cover the breadth of Indigenous OSL environments and learning opportunities would ...