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History without Silos, Ignorance versus Knowledge, Education beyond Schools

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

K. Tsianina Lomawaima
K. Tsianina Lomawaima*
Affiliation:
Indigenous Education, Center for Indian Education, within the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ
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Extract

Contributors to this thematic issue of the Quarterly call education historians' scholarly attention to the particularities of Native histories and the diverse ways that Native people experience and think about our worlds. Their call to envision—or re-vision—histories of Indigenous education weaves together suggestive directions for productive scholarly inquiry. In my commentary, I focus on three of their main points. First, they note the unfortunate phenomenon of academic “silo-ization” that all too often leads to a disciplinary tunnel vision blocking our view of useful—even necessary—sources, archives, methods, evidence, perspectives, questions, and analytic frameworks. Second, they point out the vast and critical difference between two common interpretations of the phrase “American Indian education,” which is to say the difference between Indigenous self-education and colonial education of Indians by settlers and their institutions. Over the last five centuries, the divide between education by Indians and education for Indians has been glaringly obvious to Native peoples but often conveniently ignored by others. That willful ignorance, of course, has been necessary to the settler colonial imperative to “eliminate the Native” and thus solidify settler claims to lands and national identity itself. Third, they make an urgent and timely call for more attention to Indigenous educational philosophies and practices in Indigenous contexts, that is, education (in Bailyn's terms) outside of the walls of (usually colonial) schools. They direct our attention to teaching, learning, and intergenerational transmission of knowledge embedded within and constitutive of Native histories.

Type
Responses
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 54 , Issue 3 , August 2014 , pp. 349 - 355
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 History of Education Society 

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References

1 Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, “American Indian Education: By Indians vs. for Indians,” in A Companion to American Indian History, eds. Philip Deloria and Neal Salisbury (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2002); Wolfe, Patrick, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, (Dec. 2006): 387–409. Wolfe, makes the point that elimination has sometimes (but not always) entailed genocide; the erasure of the Native can take many forms, including erasure from the documents upon which historic research depends and from the narratives crafted by historians, as the contributors to this issue argue. The important point is that erasure has not been in the past–nor is it now–accidental, unintentional, or haphazard. For a tour de force exploration of the processes of writing Native Americans out of local history, see O'Brien, Jean, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). For a brilliant example of writing us back in, see Deloria, Philip J., Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004).Google Scholar

2 Bailyn, Bernard, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (New York: Vintage Books, 1960).Google Scholar

3 Nicholas, Sheilah E., “Negotiating for the Hopi Way of Life through Literacy and Schooling,” in Language, Literacy, and Power in Schooling, ed. McCarty, Teresa L. (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005), 31.Google Scholar

4 Nicholas, Sheilah E., “Becoming ‘Fully’ Hopi: The Role of the Hopi Language in the Contemporary Lives of Hopi Youth: A Hopi Case Study of Language Shift and Vitality” (PhD diss., University of Arizona, 2008). For a summary presentation of the dissertation's key findings, see Nicholas, Sheilah E., “Language, Epistemology, and Cultural Identity: ‘Hopiqatsit Aw Unangvakiwyungwa’ ('They Have Their Heart in the Hopi Way of Life'),” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 34:2 (2010): 125–144.Google Scholar

5 For a preliminary attempt to mine Native auto/biographies in such an attempt, see Lomawaima, K. Tsianina and McCarty, Teresa L., “To Remain an Indian“: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 2006), 23–42.Google Scholar

6 O'Brien, , Firsting and Lasting, xvii and xx.Google Scholar

7 Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, “The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherit America,” in The Society of American Indians and Its Legacies, eds. Chadwick Allen and Beth Piatote, special joint issue American Indian Quarterly 37'(3)/ Studies in American Indian Literatures 25(2), (2013): 686–94.Google Scholar

8 Wolfe, , “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 389.Google Scholar

9 Lomawaima, and McCarty, , “To Remain an Indian,” 1–3, 58–64.Google Scholar

10 Lomawaima, , “The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty,” 335.Google Scholar

11 Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an Indian,” 20–21, emphasis in the original.Google Scholar

12 This issue, p. 294.Google Scholar

13 Using JStor, I accessed the Table of Contents for each issue. I relied on titles to determine if the articles focused primarily on schooling or on broader contexts beyond schools. When titles were unclear, I checked the article abstract. I did not include in my quick, informal survey historiographical reviews, essay reviews, or book reviews. I also did not double-check my numbers, and cannot guarantee 100 percent accuracy in my count.Google Scholar

14 I included all essays listed under the headings “Articles” and “Reviews from the Field.” I did not include editor's introductions, presidential addresses, or “Reflections on the Field.”Google Scholar

15 Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian Agricultural School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). “An emphasis on them [boarding schools]… moves the institutions toward the forefront of an education narrative, implying that prior to Euroamerican contact the Indigenous peoples of the United States lacked enduring practices of teaching and learning” (Warren, this issue, p. 263) and “leaves the long history of learning among Indigenous American people unexplored” (Kroupa, this issue, p. 304). I hope that all historians of Indigenous education might recognize our shared commitment to the particularities of Native histories and the diverse ways that Native people experience and think about our worlds. It has never been my intent nor my message that any areas of Indigenous education should be left unexplored, much less that they do not exist. For a vigorous argument to the contrary, see chapter 2, “The Strengths of Indigenous Education” in Lomawaima and McCarty, “To Remain an Indian,” 16–42.Google Scholar

16 I have taught survey classes about Indigenous nations regularly (although not each semester) from 1987 through 2013, enrolling one hundred fifty to three hundred fifty students per term.Google Scholar