“What is Education?” How 'To Remain an Indian' Reframes Educational Paradigms

• In Event: “To Remain an Indian” Revisited: Discussions on the Significance and Theory of Indigenous Educational Sovereignty in the 21st Century

Abstract

To Remain an Indian has been a text that I return to over and over, starting from my time in graduate school through my work as an assistant professor. I imagine I will continue to do so many times more as I continue in academia. I first picked it up as a graduate student who was writing about Indigenous education and it became the central text I used when I designed a course on Indigenous Education; the first of its kind to be taught at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education. While the text did a number of important things in that course, such as giving students a historical grounding on Indigenous boarding school history, discussing tribal sovereignty in relation to education, and providing theoretical interventions to explain federal Indian policy, what I realize now was one of its most important aspects was how it helped my students question the definitions of education that they took for granted. In my well-worn copy I can feel how the spine naturally opens up to page twenty, with the subheading “what is education.” This section helped me to lead my students through a discussion that shifted their paradigm of what learning and education looked like. It helped give me the courage to reframe terms like pedagogy and teaching in my own work and to challenge conventional definitions of learning. The book in fact, has continued to be a tool to that has helped me reframe patterns of thought about schooling and open up new lines of thinking. For example, when writing a journal article in 2020 on a Dakota bilingual reader that I found in the Hampton University archives, it was re-reading “Chapter 5: Control of Culture: Federally produced Bilingual Materials, 1936- 1954,” that led me to connect this archival document to the bilingual readers written by Ann Nolan Clark for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. To Remain an Indian, like the amazing scholars who wrote it, is like a wonderful friend who sits me down and helps me make new connections and through those connections shift my mindset and scholarship in new directions.

Author

• Bayley J. Marquez, University of Maryland