“To Determine Their Own Educational Destinies”: How Indigenous-Sovereign Educational Activism Ended Termination and Brought About Self-Determination, 1960-1975.

Throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the United States government weaponized education to assimilate Native Americans culturally and politically into mainstream American society. From 1871 into 1930s, the federal government forced Native children to attend boarding schools, separating Native children from their communities and assaulted their Indigenous cultures and languages. By 1960, Native communities in Alaska and Arizona began to advocate for greater control over the educational opportunities available to their children, while, simultaneously, Native employees in the federal government worked to change the outcomes of federal Indian education policy. Native communities demanded greater influence in school administrations, lobbied the federal and public schools to hire more Indigenous teachers, and pushed for the school curricula to include courses on their community’s history and language. Simultaneously, Native employees in the Bureau of Indian Affairs proposed new policies designed to provide Native communities more choice and control in education and to end schooling as an assimilationist tool. By employing Native voices, found in Native newspapers, federal documents, oral interviews, and memoirs, and in the actions of Native employees within the federal government, this dissertation demonstrates the foundational role that educational activism played in the Native self-determination movements during the 1960s and 1970s. This activism, which consisted of the combined, yet oftentimes disconnected, efforts of grassroots groups, national Native organizations, educators, parents, students, and Native and non-Native employees in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, advocated for Indigenous-sovereign education and an end to federal policies of assimilation and paternalism. Indigenous-sovereign education activism illustrates one of the most important ways in which Native communities continued to resist assimilation efforts and reinvigorate their own cultures and languages; by ensuring that the younger generations received opportunities to learn their heritage, from their kin and neighbors, in their own languages, and in their own communities.