Unsettling the Roots of Colonial Education Policies: Unforgetting the Legacy of Indigenous Boarding Schools

• In Event: Disrupting the Language of Power: Translanguaging, Whiteness, and Educational Futures

Abstract

Objectives

This paper examines the historical and enduring impact of U.S. education policies—particularly the Indigenous boarding school system—as instruments of settler colonial violence. It seeks to: (1) interrogate how formal education was deliberately structured to separate Indigenous children from their families, cultures, languages, and lands; (2) trace how education policies enacted cultural genocide through assimilationist schooling and religious indoctrination; (3) analyze the raciolinguistic logics that justified such policies; and (4) reveal the central role of Indigenous families and communities in resisting these separations and transmitting cultural survival, linguistic continuity, and collective memory.

Theoretical Perspectives

This work draws on settler colonial theory (Tuck & Yang, 2012), raciolinguistics (Rosa & Flores, 2017), and critical Indigenous scholarship to frame U.S. educational policy not as neutral or benevolent, but as a tool of cultural genocide and social engineering. Through institutions like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and its hundreds of successors, federal and religious authorities sought to “kill the Indian, save the man” by forcibly removing children from their homes and erasing their languages, epistemologies, and kinship systems. These policies were anchored in raciolinguistic ideologies that pathologized Indigenous languages and framed English monolingualism as both a civilizing force and a measure of intelligence, morality, and worth.

Methods/Modes of Inquiry

This study uses historical analysis and critical discourse analysis, archival materials, reports, school records, federal policies, and survivor testimonies to trace the explicit and systemic intent of education as a settler colonial project. Key sources include the 1819 Civilization Fund Act, the establishment and expansion of federal boarding schools, the Meriam Report (1928), the Indian Education Act (1972), and recent efforts of the U.S. Department of the Interior’s 2022 Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative.

Scholarly Significance

By “unforgetting” these histories, this paper surfaces the foundational role of education in the U.S. settler state’s broader project of Indigenous erasure and assimilation. It challenges liberal narratives of schooling as universally empowering and highlights how education was weaponized to break kinship ties, facilitate land dispossession, and control labor. Yet, this work also centers Indigenous refusal, adaptation, and resurgence. Parents taught children to hide from agents, wrote appeals to school officials, and maintained cultural and linguistic continuity in defiance of systemic efforts at erasure. These legacies of resistance are as vital as the violence they opposed. We underscore that resistance was not episodic but woven into the fabric of survival.

Connection to Conference Theme and Implications for the Future

Aligned with the AERA 2026 theme’s call to “unforget histories” and “imagine thriving futures,” this paper contends that understanding the present and future of education requires reckoning with its violent roots in settler colonial policy. Education’s role in the separation of Indigenous children from all that sustained them—family, culture, language, land, and labor—cannot be divorced from today’s disparities or reforms. Reimagining education must involve Indigenous nations and communities, investment in intergenerational knowledge transfer, and advancement of restorative justice.

Authors

• Dee Sherwood, Western Michigan University

• Julian Vasquez Heilig, Western Michigan University

• Jamie Stuck, Michigan Tribal Legislative Liaison