Indigenous Children’s Survivance in Public Schools

"Much has been written about Native students, their communities, and their experiences in schools. This book offers us an intimate view on how Native students and their communities experience education, through their eyes. This text disrupts deficit notions of who Native students are and offers teachers concrete tools to understand the unique contours of what this looks like in the context of settler colonial schooling. Moreover it can be used to fill gaps in teacher knowledge around Indigenous studies that is useful for a variety of existing pedagogical practices including place-based education, anti-racist education, multicultural education, and culturally sustaining approaches. More important, it centers Indigenous knowledges and methodologies to paint a picture of not only the enduring legacy of colonial education but also how Indigenous communities resist and flourish, despite it. To do this, Dr. Sabzalian offers us an important tool of survivance storytelling—using Vizenor’s notion of survivance and Brayboy’s contribution of TribalCrit—that "specifically foregrounds colonization and aims to further Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty." In sum, this book represents the first serious examination of the schooling of Indigenous peoples using the literatures of critical Indigenous studies and settler colonialism, alongside the existing and numerable works produced within the field of education on Indigenous/American Indian/Alaska Native education. It is accessible, powerful, and should be on every educator’s desk."

—Dolores Calderon, J.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor of Youth Society and Justice, Western Washington University