A Comparative Analysis of the Early Educational Experiences of American Indians and African Americans: Educational Imagination and the Dynamics of Settler Colonialism

• In Event: Roots of the Colonial: Reframing and Reimagining Change in Educational Research

Abstract

This paper uses comparative historical analysis to theoretically approach issues of educational reform and action for American Indian students in the United States. Examining schooling prior to and after the advent of the compulsory educational system it contrasts the schooling experiences of African Americans and American Indians students in order to demonstrate how the settler colonial system (Jacobs, 2009) has led to divergent schooling experiences for these two groups. Racial issues in American education are often discussed using the Black/white binary, yet this is decidedly against American Indian political goals as “The politics of sovereignty and self-determination have been about resisting being thrown in with every other minority group by making claims on the basis of prior rights” (Smith, 1999, p. 159). DeGenova (2006) asserts that race relations in the United States in reality form a trinity rather than a binary, with American Indians acting as one of the corners. I use insight from DeGenova (2006) in conjunction with Mignolo’s (2002) concept of the geopolitics of colonial difference to place issues of American Indian education in a distinct epistemic space. I argue that the historical differences in the implementation of education for both groups, despite many connections and some similarities, have changed the Red Educational Imagination in ways that diverge sharply from the Black Educational Imagination, a the term coined by Michael Dumas (Dumas, 2007; Dumas, 2011). Dumas defines the ‘Black education imagination as “ the cultural and political processes through which Black people (individually and collectively) make meaning of school practices and social mobility in relation to their life and identities” (Dumas, 2013). I define the Red Educational Imagination as the process through which American Indians make meaning of school and its relation to their past, current, and future ability for self-determination and sovereignty in an individual, tribal, and intertribal manner. I use this historical analysis to frame a discussion of a distinct red educational imagination that stems from a unique indigenous epistemology and approach to education.

Author

• Bayley Marquez, University of California - Berkeley