During the nineteenth century, the federal government forced many natives to move from their ancestral homes to remote territories in the central and western United States. Also during that century, the United States opened off reservation boarding schools for native youth. The first of those institutes was the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,…

Discover how top-down, policy-into-practice educational mandates have adversely affected Indigenous communities in the United States' midwestern core. The author scrutinizes how leaders and intermediaries in Nebraska, involved at various tiers of policy development and reform, conceptualized and implemented school accountability policy in Indian…

The Johnson-O'Malley (JOM) program provides academic and cultural supports to meet the specialized and unique educational needs of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students enrolled in public schools and select tribal schools. The Bureau of Indian Education (BIE), within the Department of the Interior, contracts with Tribes, tribal…

Repatriation of archival materials holds great potential for decolonizing archaeological archives. This paper argues that while repatriation of human remains and cultural objects is required by law under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), traditional manuscript archives can and should be subject to the same…

William Frederick ("Fred") Cardin served as a director of instrumental music in the Reading, Pennsylvania, School District from 1930 until his retirement in June 1960. An accomplished performer and composer, Cardin studied at the Curtis School of Music and the Conservatoire Américaine in Paris, France. He is remembered as an outstanding…

This conceptual paper examines the colonial conditions of possibility for a formative moment of US public higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862, and considers how these conditions continue to shape the present. The federal government's accumulation of Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century helped provide the material base for land-grant…

Arguing that records and other forms of evidentiary documentation are increasingly being 'weaponized' against various communities and categories of people, this essay addresses diverse calls for the recognition of personal and community rights in records and recordkeeping. After reviewing some prominent examples and the growing literature on…

Researchers and practitioners in social studies education have not often taken up responsibilities to Indigenous communities on whose Lands they work and live. Drawing on Indigenous research methodologies, along with specific Indigenous stories and artwork, four authors of varied positionalities, contexts, and regions offer conceptual and…

The 2023 Tribal Leaders qualitative study is an emergent perspective from twelve Tribal leaders on education, Tribal sovereignty, leadership, and change presented as a poster session at the 2023 NRMERA conference in Omaha, Nebraska. This conceptual paper presents a review of literature acknowledging a lack of research inclusive of the voice of…

Extracurricular activities such as sports and music offer a means to glimpse the complexity of students' experiences in federally-run boarding schools for Native children in the United States. Studies of music in residential schools typically include a mix of quantitative and qualitative sources, including "unexpected archives" such as…

The Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings and Standards (OSEUS), a vision of many individuals, tribes, and organizations for several decades, were realized through legislation in 2007. In 2021, the South Dakota Department of Education, South Dakota Department of Tribal Relations, Office of Indian Education, and Region 11 Comprehensive Center…

This article outlines Indigenous data collection as a methodology that expands a sampling frame by using tribal Indigenous cultural knowledge, such as creation stories like those of the Cocopah and Quechan nations, to address limitations found in the methodological quality of Native American survey data in currently available datasets. Indigenous…

This qualitative study explored the dynamic aspects of American Indian language integration in education along with language revitalization efforts. Due to the special government to government relationship between the Tribes and the federal government, formal Native American education began with forced assimilation and language loss was linked to…

Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration,…

Federal agents, church officials, and education reformers have long used schooling as a weapon to eliminate Indigenous people; at the same time, Indigenous individuals and communities have long repurposed schooling to protect tribal sovereignty, reconstitute their communities, and shape Indigenous futures. Joining scholarship that speaks to…