On Our Own Terms: Indigenous Histories of School Funding and Policy

The title On Our Own Terms encapsulates author Meredith McCoy’s argument by illuminating “archives of survivance” and the Indigenous communities and individuals who generate and sustain them (4). In these various stories and sources, Native Nations and their communities, educators, and leaders navigate systems of colonialism in schools, educational programs, funding, laws, policies, and multiple levels of governance. In the process, Indigenous peoples learn and create pathways to stand for their sovereignty, especially the right to determine their ways of life and education. McCoy reiterates how Native Americans, as both collectives and individuals, aimed and sometimes succeeded at resetting these systems and structures “on their own terms” and for their own purposes.Highlighting examples through generations, including at the height of federal Indian boarding schools and assimilationist education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, McCoy shows how Native Americans engaged in and rewired these systems to support their people and sovereignty. She refers to Native educators, including administrators, teachers, and government bureaucrats, who sought to balance their work and commitments to their nations and families, and she reflects on her Anishinaabe family’s lived experiences and journeys in the belly of the colonial beast.Some of the most moving parts of McCoy’s book are the personal stories of her ancestors and the voices of Indigenous educators, whom McCoy knows as relatives or through her work as a former “public schoolteacher” and “policy assistant” in Native American education (xiv). McCoy does not include many oral histories or interviews, but she amplifies the insights of leaders who fight for their people’s future through education, including Sunshine Carlow of the Standing Rock Language and Culture Initiative and Native Nations in North Dakota. These voices underscore the challenges in upholding Indigenous sovereign education, challenges that violate treaty obligations and the federal trust responsibility. The federal government is continually reducing support, and its funding system perpetuates colonizing forms of education that diminish Indigenous self-determination.McCoy’s attention to the funding systems and budgets for Native American education is a significant contribution that enables more accessibility and understanding of complex “entanglements” of Native Nations and the federal government and states (107). The appendices include several graphs to this effect, such as one that traces federal grants to Indian education over fifty years. The continued tensions between Native Nations, the US government, and states call for more unpacking. Indeed, the US government pushes education to the states, which are not under the same treaty obligations and contend for resources and control over education and local communities. McCoy’s recognition of the NoDAPL movements and efforts to model Indigenous sovereign education undergird these points. In one instance, she shows that when the North Dakota state government condemned the Indigenous school at the water protector camps, the federal government reinforced state interests and dismissed Indigenous sovereignty. Although some US national leaders have made gestures toward supporting Native American education, McCoy reveals various ways that their actions and language still perpetuate the colonial machine of American systems, especially in schools and education.For these reasons, the terms of Indigenous peoples matter most in education, and McCoy bears hope in highlighting how Native Nations and communities innovate. They not only try to repurpose colonializing systems for their own gain but also look for possibilities to make their own systems “that are both by and for Indigenous people” (143).