Decolonizing Indigenous Education in the US

Interrogates the impacts of assimilation policy and the phenomenon of Americanization in education for Indigenous peoples while proposing a countering framework for decolonizing Indigenous education.

Over more than a century of failed education policy, Indigenous peoples have yet to witness a comprehensive Indigenous education program that fundamentally honors the federal trust responsibility of the United States government. This book proposes a distinctly Indigenous framework that demands the expansion of the curricular canon and invites and empowers the Indigenous voice as a powerful entity capable of bridging epistemological divides toward true emancipation within education and learning community contexts. It provides an overview of the history of settler-colonial educational practices in the United States, followed by a specific methodology of five principles that assist educators and educational institutions to respond to these histories and build new, decolonial, Indigenous educational practices. Grounded in Darder’s critical bicultural theory, Santos’ epistemologies of the South and Paraskeva's itinerant curriculum theory, Torres argues for a counterhegemonic vocabulary and practice that favors learning for collective liberation. The book includes a dialogue with Marcos Aguilar, Executive Director and Co-Head of School, Anahuacalmecac International University, USA, which covers the practical applications of the framework in a school setting.