American Indian Identity and Education

This entry does not describe the voluminous literature on American Indian education and identity. Instead, it outlines some of the ways that the concept of identity and American Indian education have been taken up and addressed in research. The entry begins with a brief discussion of the term identity before describing how identity has been used as both a concept and an analytical tool in educational research. The aim is to highlight a number of broad themes that frame the conversations in the literature, including American Indian identity as related to

• indigenous culture and language,
• notions of race,
• legal constructs,
• school reform, and
• place and community.

In an article published in the Harvard Educational Review, Creek scholar K. Tsianina Lomawaima (2000) wrote, “The history of American Indian education can be summarized in three simple words: battle for power” (p. 2). Although Lomawaima was interested in outlining the relationships between Indigenous tribal nations and scholars, her words serve as an insightful introduction to the topic of American Indian education and identity. Identity is the terrain of relationships—of who American Indian peoples are and what that means in a particular context. Identity is also a key site of struggle because American Indian relationships to land, intergenerational bonds, and communal structures that prevented individuals from negotiating with settler governments for land threatened the emergence of the U.S. nation, which required more and more land, a system of private property, and laborers. Early schools provided the mechanism through which intergenerational relationships could be broken. With forced removal of American [Page 101]Indian youth into boarding schools, American Indian children could be taught to adopt an alternate set of values that affirmed private property, and American Indian youth could be made into unpaid or low-paid laborers to fuel the burgeoning economy. In this way, American Indian education is both a struggle against oppressive external forces that seek to disempower and displace and a struggle for robust cultural/linguistic expression and community relationships.

When it comes to American Indian education, both Indigenous identity and American identity are at issue. Consider that while American Indian education policy appears to shift between moments of inclusion and exclusion, K. Tsianina Lomawaima and Teresa L. McCarty, for example, advance their safety zone theory, noting that U.S. policy develops in response to whether American Indian culture is perceived to threaten American identity—or whether Indigenous culture is “safe” or “dangerous” to American nationalism. Thus, in order to describe American Indian education and identity, it is essential to explore the external forces influencing American Indian identity, such as racialization and U.S. citizenship, as well as the internal community dynamics related to tribal/national membership, intergenerational bonds, connections to land and place, and cultural and linguistic genealogies.