An Introduction to the Problem

Abstract

The history of the education of Native Americans at the hands of European conquerors, settlers, and governments, has been a story of oppression and cultural genocide. Education has been used to reproduce the ideology of the dominant culture and to inculcate all recipients into submissiveness involving that all-pervasive ideology (Adams, 1995; Spring, 1997; Reyhner & Eder, 2006). A primary aspect of the subjugation of Native Americans, as with other colonized peoples, has been destruction of Indigenous culture. As has been the case with other minority populations, education has been used to deculturalize, acculturate, and subjugate the Native American (Deloria, 1994; Adams, 1995; Maybury-Lewis, 1997). US education leaders established and used schools in accordance with the phenomena that have been identified and defined by the Functionalist perspective in sociology (Lindsey & Beach, 2000). As such, one of the primary objectives of education has been to minimize dissenting ideas, and indeed any that conflict with the dominant worldview, through socialization and forced compliance with the dominant ideology (Adams, 1995; Spring, 1997).