Surviving School and “Survival Schools”: Resistance, Compulsion and Negotiation in Aboriginal Engagements with Schooling

In Australia, Aboriginal peoples have sought to exploit and challenge settler colonial schooling to meet their own goals and needs, engaging in strategic, diverse and creative ways closely tied to labour markets and the labour movement. Here, we bring together two case studies to illustrate the interplay of negotiation, resistance and compulsion that we argue has characterised Aboriginal engagements with school as a structure within settler colonial capitalism. Our first case study explains how Aboriginal families in Victoria and New South Wales deliberately exploited gaps in school record collecting to maintain mobility during the mid-twentieth century and engaged with labour markets that enabled visits to country. Our second case study explores the Strelley mob’s establishment of independent, Aboriginal-controlled bilingual schools in the 1970s to maintain control of their labour and their futures. Techniques of survival developed in and around schooling have been neglected by historians, yet they demonstrate how schooling has been a strategic political project, both for Aboriginal peoples and the Australian settler colonial state.

Get Out

In this chapter, the authors propose that education, which historically has been mainly under the jurisdiction of religious institutions and has been administered by spiritual leaders and attendants, is a sacred and spiritual transaction. Thus, churches and schools are equivalent and have the same spiritual obligation, which is to create in an individual a new spirit. Given the spiritual nature of education, we see the colonial schooling system as a conduit for spirit infusion that provides the opportunity for not only “acting White” but also for the possibility of becoming White by spirit possession. This line of thought leads to the main objective, which is to dismantle current notions of African American student success that is often positioned as going to or graduating from college rather than getting out of the schooling process altogether.

French Lessons

This chapter extends Chapter 4’s examination of the impact of colonial schooling on Assia Djebar, Mohammed Dib, Albert Memmi and other writers. It reflects on what went on inside the classroom, and speculates on what it was, even in a colonial education, that made it fruitful, at least in some respects, for some students. It begins by considering the dynamics – inadvertent and perverse from a colonial perspective – that sometimes made French schooling positively politicizing for colonized students, notably in relation to notions of nationalism, national identity and language politics. It then focuses on writers’ accounts of studying the French language and French literature, evidently a key part of the process, educational and psychological, that brought into being their ‘francophone’ works, which duly reflect back on their colonial/literary/educational experiences. In these ways the chapter explores how some of the children subjected to colonial schooling became some of its most astute critics, as well as its greatest success stories; and how French/colonial schooling helped shape the forms and fictions of self-reinvention for which many of the writers are known. [177]

Toward an Indigenous, Decolonizing School Leadership: A Literature Review

Background: The colonial origins of schooling and the implications these origins have on leadership is missing from educational leadership literature. Indeed little has been published on decolonizing and indigenous ways of leading schools. Purpose: In this article, we synthesize the literature on indigenous, decolonizing education leadership values and practices across national and international spaces that have been informed to various degrees by colonial models of schooling. Methodology: Through a review of the research and keywords including colonialism, educational leadership, indigenous communities, and decolonization, we identify two overarching themes. Findings: First, we found that the literature revealed a critique of the way in which Westernized Eurocentric schooling serves as a tool of imperialism, colonization, and control in the education of Indigenous peoples. Second, we discovered that the literature provided unique, but overlapping worldviews that situate the values and approaches enacted by Indigenous leaders throughout the globe. Within this second theme, we identify five strands of an Indigenous, Decolonizing School Leadership (IDSL) framework that can contribute to the development and reflection of school leadership scholars and practitioners. Specifically, we found that the five consistent and identifiable strands across IDSL include prioritizing Indigenous ancestral knowledge, enacting self-reflection and self-determination, connecting with and empowering the community, altruism, and spirituality as expressed through servant leadership, and inclusive communication practices. Conclusion: Based on the identified worldviews and values, we conclude by offering insights on the structure and policy of post-colonial schooling, as well as implications for the theory, research and practice needed to reclaim the co-opted contributions of Indigenous leaders in ways that decenter Western colonial approaches to leadership.

Why Don't More Indians Do Better in School? The Battle between U.S. Schooling & American Indian/Alaska Native Education

American Indian/Alaska Native education – the training for life of children, adolescents, and adults – has been locked in battle for centuries with colonial schooling, which continues to the present day. Settler societies have used schools to “civilize” Indigenous peoples and to train Native peoples in subservience while dispossessing them of land. Schools are the battlegrounds of American Indian education in which epistemologies, ontologies, axiologies, pedagogies, and curricula clash. In the last century, Native nations, communities, parents, and students have fought tenaciously to maintain heritage languages and cultures – their ways of being in the world – through Indigenous education and have demanded radical changes in schools. Contemporary models of how educators are braiding together Indigenous education and Indigenous schooling to better serve Native peoples provide dynamic, productive possibilities for the future.

Borderlands, Primary Sources, and the Longue Durée: Contextualizing Colonial Schooling at Odanak, Lorette, and Kahnawake, 1600–1850

ABSTRACT The historiographies of Indigenous engagement with colonial-style schools and colleges in New England, New York, and New France have different trajectories. In New England and New York, as colonial settlers expanded onto their lands over the eighteenth century, members of the Mohegan, Narragansett, Pequot, and Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) nations built schools. In New France — where colonial expansion happened much more slowly — historians suggest that interaction with formal schooling stopped as the demographic balance shifted to favour the French settlers occupying Abenaki, Algonquin, Innu, Kanien'kehá:ka, and Wendat lands. By examining the deployment of colonial schooling over an Indigenous landscape during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this paper makes some tentative arguments about how these divergent historiographies might be stitched together, emphasizing how access to school- ing has been a continuous and central site of contest between Indigenous and colonial societies since the very beginning of the colonization of northeastern North America by England and France. Only in the late eighteenth century—when colonial pressures on land and resources were acutely felt — were these ideas taken up directly within Indigenous communities to such an extent that schools were built and teachers trained. RÉSUMÉ Les historiographies de la relation des Autochtones avec les écoles et collèges coloniaux de la Nouvelle-Angleterre, de New York et de la Nouvelle-France ont emprunté des trajectoires différentes. En Nouvelle-Angleterre et à New York les membres des nations Mohegan, Narragansett, Pequot, et Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) ont construit des écoles au fur et à mesure que les colons empiétaient sur leurs terres au cours du XVIIIe siècle. En Nouvelle-France, où l’expansion coloniale s’est produite beaucoup plus lentement, les historiens suggèrent plutôt que l’interaction avec l’enseignement scolaire s’arrête lorsque l’équilibre démographique bascule en faveur des colons français occupant les territoires des Abénakis, des Algonquins, des Innus, des Kanien'kehá:ka, et des Wendats. En examinant la mise en place de l’école coloniale dans le paysage autochtone au cours des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, cet article propose quelques hypothèses sur la façon dont ces historiographies divergentes pourraient être assemblées, en soulignant comment l’accès à l’enseignement a été un lieu central et continu de contestation entre les sociétés autochtones et coloniales depuis le tout début de la colonisation du nord-est de l’Amérique du Nord par l’Angleterre et la France. C’est seulement vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle — lorsque les pressions coloniales sur le territoire et les ressources ont été vivement ressenties—que ces idées ont été reprises directement par les communautés autochtones, au point que des écoles ont été construites et que des enseignants ont été formés.