American Indians, Education of

Education by Native Peoples: Sovereignty

In the global transformations that accompanied European colonialism in the 15th through the 18th centuries, Indigenous populations suffered tremendous demographic decline due to the impacts of epidemic diseases, warfare, and dispossession. Scholars conservatively estimate that Indigenous populations of North America declined by at least 90% during this period. Despite such horrendous losses, Native peoples and cultures have survived and even thrived. Today, more than 550 American Indian nations and Alaska Native villages are recognized by the U.S. federal government as sovereign entities; in addition, several hundred other groups, including Native Hawaiians, have not been so officially recognized but doggedly assert their rights, among others, to root their children's education in community-based languages and cultures.

Sovereignty encompasses the bundle of human rights possessed by a people (sometimes, but not always, organized as a nation-state) to self-government, self-determination, self-education, and self-preservation. Over the centuries, the tremendous diversity of peoples Indigenous to what is now the United States each developed coherent, consciously designed, thoughtful educational systems to transmit the values, knowledge, practices, and skills required to integrate individuals as competent, caring adults into a functional social system. This process of enculturation is common to all human societies, across time and place. Native educational forms and practices have not often resembled the structural forms and practices of European American schooling, but they are equally “formal” in the sense of being consciously designed; rooted in cultural values; structured for age-appropriate development; dependent on well-trained, community-endorsed teachers; punctuated by appropriate assessments of development; and focused on the goal of producing competent adults. Exemplary contemporary articulations of these characteristics specific to Alaska Native cultures can be found in the work of Oscar Kawagley and Jerry Lipka. Although colonial schooling has often denigrated Native educational systems as primitive, haphazard, inadequate, or even nonexistent, these allegations are not true; they must be understood as rationalizations for colonial control.

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