Safety Zones and Zones of Sovereignty in K-12 Indigenous Education

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

Abstract

Of the many important historical and theoretical interventions offered in "To Remain an Indian": Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education, the “safety zone” has proven an invaluable framework for critiquing the politics of inclusion within public schools. First theorized in the context of federal schooling for Native students, the safety zone situated the seemingly arbitrary and paradoxical practice of allowing certain types of cultural expression within explicitly assimilative schools as a coherent way to manage Indigenous difference. Although focused on the ideologies and institutional practices that contain Indigenous difference, the theory also accounts for Indigenous agency and the creative ways Indigenous people continually subvert and expand the safety zone, which they have since theorized as “zones of sovereignty."

In this commentary, I highlight how the “safety zone” has informed my scholarship on the politics of inclusion and containment that undermine Indigenous education, and how their complementary concept, “zones of sovereignty,” meaningfully reflects the spaces Indigenous students, educators, and families create within constrained contexts to foreground their own experiences, knowledges, and aspirations.

Author

• Leilani Sabzalian, University of Oregon