Safety Zone Theory to Zones of Sovereignty: Teaching, Learning and Researching with ‘To Remain an Indian’

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

Abstract

This paper discusses the far teaching implications of To Remain an Indianfor the field of education and hopes for a truly representative democracy. Its publication marked a profound shift in how we teach students and teachers about Native American education, informing how we now teach pre-service and in-service teachers, as well as future researchers to understand the past, present and future of Native American educational policy through the use of Safety Zone Theory (SZT). As a teacher of Native American high school students and a variety of in service teachers before the publication of To Remain an Indian, we often talked about how policies went back and forth like a swing or, as the authors note, like a pendulum. The pendulum perspective left students and teachers seeking connections- why the swings, might things swing back, why forward anti-colonial motion in Native educational policies was not always durable, and most importantly what could be done to make policy gains lasting in Native Education spaces.

Safety Zone Theory SZT supports the field of Native Education helping us see clearly the
impact of settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2006) on the field of education. The careful explanation in
SZT of how educational policies impacting Native Students were and are intimately tied to
settler colonial goals, taking and keeping land and removal and assimilation of Native People,
offered the field ways to teach students and teachers what a safety zone for settlers looked like in legislation, curriculum and teacher education. We now had language to understand what we saw and why it was that way, and how to counteract it in our teaching and research. Of equal importance once students, teachers and researchers began interacting with SZT we could also understand what the opposite of it meant for educational spaces. Without "To Remain an Indian,"a full understanding of Zones of Sovereignty (ZoS), education spaces where Native sovereignty and self-determination are taught and practiced in classrooms, teacher education and curriculum would not be possible. We can learn to recognize both in order to elevate ZoS and develop an understanding of curriculum and teaching practices that support Native futures and teachers can learn to see spaces where the settler safety zone continues to operate and work against it in practice and policy. Through ZoS we see a future where the imagined hopes of democracy might be more fully realized instead of ongoing assimilative practices and Native sovereignty is both taught and fully and meaningfully respected in curriculum as well as in legislative spaces at the federal and state levels.

Author

• Rachel Talbert, Teachers College, Columbia University