"Making It Work": Native and Indigenous Students as Curricular Agents in US Schools

• In Event: Reclaiming Indigenous Knowledge: Decolonial and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies for Language, Art, and Educational Sovereignty

Abstract

Native and Indigenous peoples are frequently absent or misrepresented in history and social studies curricula in the United States. These erasures and misrepresentations are problematic because they reproduce settler colonialism. While previous studies have considered the role adult actors like policy makers, textbook authors, and teachers play in the reproduction and resistance of settler colonialism in the curriculum, the role of youth remains understudied. This study centers Native and Indigenous youth as curricular agents. Drawing on 133 interviews with forty-five Native and Indigenous students, it finds that these youth have the capacity to act as curricular agents in United States schools, resisting the reproduction of settler colonialism in the curriculum through a strategy of “making it work.”

Author

• Kemeyawi Wahpepah, Harvard University