On Writing Indigenous Educational Histories: Oral Histories as Indigenous Repositories

• In Event: Reflexivity in History of Education Research: Complicating Oral History, Archive, and Black and Indigenous Voices

Abstract

“original” land or an “original” past/nation/being that erases the layers of time geography and history; rather they mediate multiple relationships and by doing so navigate ways of being in the world that reflect contemporary Native experience.” As an Indigenous scholar, I view my research as a disruption to a long legacy of settler colonization, in which the histories of our people are contained within the annals of ship logs, manifests, and government records that remitted notices of the genocide committed against Indigenous peoples. As Tiffany Lethabo King reminds us “Genocide is the defining feature of this form of colonization, not settlement, and when settlement is invoked, it is always tethered to the violence of genocide.” The terminology of violence, contained within official school documents, commissions and reports has served to advance a colonial agenda of the development of what is now called the United States.

The written record was just one part of a systemic colonial wave that has contributed to an onslaught of dehumanizing actions whose intent was to erase and replace. Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us “Unfortunately, we mostly hear that version from a dominant perspective that has assumed the right to tell the stories of the colonized and oppressed that they have re-interpreted, re-presented, and re-told through their own lenses.” This has been a key feature in the canons of historical texts and within the field. What was recorded through written text about Indigenous people contributed to a narrative of primitiveness that was necessary to sustain projects of U.S. imperialism. As Connelly and Fuentes remind us “all archives are incomplete—such historical accounts written primarily by the most powerful have overwhelmingly informed our understanding of the past.”

This paper explores the challenges of writing Indigenous educational histories in the onslaught of colonial archives that recorded genocide framed as civilization. My paper asserts that Indigenous oral and community archives are critical to shaping historical narratives of Indigenous schooling experiences. As researchers who often rely upon archival records, how do we mitigate what colonial records say about communities who did not have a say in what was contained in official records? Colonial educational records often represent the objectification of communities and as Mohawk scholar Laura Terrance reminds us, young children had no say in what was recorded about them. For certain, Indigenous families and children advocated for their education and formed relationships that transformed their schooling experiences. Indigenous scholars who write about tribal schools often highlight student agency as a key theme and oral and community perspectives are integral to understanding student experience.

Author

• Jennifer Johnson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign