Formal schooling in the U.S. has a long and violent history towards Indigenous peoples, today morphing into exclusion and erasure. Using a novel longitudinal dataset of U.S. textbooks (n = 193) from California and Texas, published from 1850 to 2019, we seek to shine light on the issue through a comprehensive analysis of depictions of Indigenous…

This research study examined how students and I navigated learning and teaching about genocide and mass violence in the context of a semester-long high school comparative genocide and human rights elective course at DeWitt Junior-Senior High School in rural south-central Wisconsin. Specifically, the study examined how students individually and…

This essay examines the depiction of Native Americans by the US Information Agency (USIA), the bureau charged with explaining American politics to the international public during the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USIA broadcast the message that Americans had begun to acknowledge their nation's history of conquest and were working to…

Each new demographic shift and economic or social change bring seemingly new issues into popular and political focus--questions, debates, and policies about the role of language in education and society and the recent claims that transnational migrations and globalization are resulting in unprecedented forms of ethnolinguisic…

The fragmentation of large nineteenth-century reservations resulted in the creation of American Indian allotment geographies in the United States. Federal Indian policy, namely the General Allotment Act of 1887, allowed the US government to break up large reservations, allot land to individual Indians, and sell the surplus to non-Indian settlers.…

This article discusses Chief Joseph's surrender that marked the beginning of his diplomatic stand for justice in Indian Territory, where his tribe was forcibly exiled in accordance with American Indian policy of the time. Joseph battled for the repatriation of the Nez Perce through protests and other legal means, winning the support of the growing…

If we are to aim toward a genuine democracy, we must be willing to look at the uncomfortable topics that continue to sabotage what we aspire to as a society. This article aims to problematize the ways we conceive of and implement the social studies. To do so, I investigate the social studies in K-12 practice through critical theoretical lenses,…

Legal gaming on Indian reservations has increased dramatically since the 1987 landmark decision by the United States Supreme Court in "California v. Cabazon Band of Mission Indians." In this case the Supreme Court upheld by a 6-3 vote the right under federal law for Indians to run gambling operations without state regulation in states…

Malea Powell has argued that Charles Alexander Eastman "imagined new possibilities for Native resistance and survival in the face of violent assimilation strategies." To Eastman, Natives had little choice but to acculturate to white society if they were going to resist white domination and survive. But gaining full equality in U.S. society proved…

Despite a dark history marked by the eugenics movement, increasing numbers of people with disabilities are choosing to become parents. Recent research reveals that more than 4 million parents--6 percent of American mothers and fathers--are disabled. This number will unquestionably increase as more people with disabilities exercise a broader range…

History has not always been kind to Sagoyewatha, or, as he is more commonly known, Red Jacket. One of the most eloquent spokesmen for Native sovereignty in the early national period, Sagoyewatha was nonetheless accused by his peers of cowardice, alcoholism, and egotism. Fortunately, this picture is beginning to change. Christopher Densmore's…

Eminent African American historian Carter G. Woodson in his book "The Miseducation of the Negro," published a generation before the "Brown v. Board of Education" decision, concerned himself not with the racial composition of classrooms and schools, but with the curricula taught both in the schools and the larger culture. Certainly Woodson…

Two case histories of the treatment of the Indians and Blacks in America illustrate the historic lack of concern, where profitable, for injustice under law. (Author/KM)