Lies My Teacher Told Me: Native American Narratives in Education

Elisabeth Eittreim juxtaposes the Carlisle boarding school for Native Americans and the colonial school system in the Philippines to explore American attempts to assimilate colonized peoples through education. Eittreim focuses on the role of teachers, whose personal beliefs and circumstances often took precedence over the government's larger mission. Ultimately, she argues that the extent to which empire was shaped in the schoolhouse was heavily dependent on the successes and failures of the individual teachers on the front lines of imperial education.

Colonized through Art explores how the federal government used art education for American Indian children as an instrument for the "colonization of consciousness," hoping to instill the values and ideals of Western society while simultaneously maintaining a political, social, economic, and racial hierarchy. Focusing on the Albuquerque Indian School in New Mexico, the Sherman Institute in Riverside, California, and the world's fairs and local community exhibitions, Marinella Lentis examines how the U.S. government's solution to the "Indian problem" at the end of the nineteenth century emphasized education and assimilation.

In the late 1960s, Indian families in Minneapolis and St. Paul were under siege. Clyde Bellecourt remembers, "We were losing our children during this time; juvenile courts were sweeping our children up, and they were fostering them out, and sometimes whole families were being broken up." In 1972, motivated by prejudice in the child welfare system and hostility in the public schools, American Indian Movement (AIM) organizers and local Native parents came together to start their own community school. The story of these schools, unfolding here through the voices of activists, teachers, parents, and students, is also an in-depth history of AIM's founding and early community organizing in the Twin Cities--and evidence of its long-term effect on Indian people's lives.

Drawing works primarily from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (Pennsylvania), the Hampton Institute (Virginia), and the Seneca Indian School (Oklahoma), Jacqueline Emery illustrates how the boarding school presses were used for numerous and competing purposes. While some student writings appear to reflect the assimilationist agenda, others provide more critical perspectives on the schools' agendas and the dominant culture. This collection of Native-authored letters, editorials, essays, short fiction, and retold tales published in boarding school newspapers illuminates the boarding school legacy and how it has shaped, and continues to shape, Native American literary production.