Featured website: National Indian Education Association

Residing on a fraction of their original land, American Indians and Alaska Natives live like conquered people, dependent upon the federal government, in what was once their own country. Not only have they consistently been at the mercy of the racism and greed of the later Americans, but the life of American Indians and Alaska Natives has also been affected by shifting federal relationships with the tribes. The United States government has been unaccountable for violations of treaties made with the tribes-there are hundreds of broken treaties-and the federal government has been free to reduce the size of the reservations to which it consigned the people after having taken away their land.

What is called Indian education is a mirror of the shifting federal-tribal relationship. Begun in the nineteenth century, Indian education was seen as a device for forcing the assimilation of Indian children into the majority's social system. It was also a means of changing Indian adults from hunters to farmers on small land plots set aside by the federal government, thus providing greater areas for the influx of non-Indians moving westward. The original mission schools, supported by European companies, philanthropists, religious groups, and the federal government were later joined by a network of industrial boarding schools whose purpose was to separate children from their cultural background and force them into America's mainstream. The schools provided scant rudiments of the majority culture's education, focusing primarily on agrarian training.

In 1928, a study by the Brookings Institution of public and Bureau of Indian Affairs (government) schools brought to the attention of the federal government the deprivation and abuse of Indian children attending those schools. The study, which came to be called the Meriam Report, had a significant impact upon governmental policy. Resulting in the authorization of programs for improving the education of Indians, it brought about a period of change known as the Indian New Deal. Federal financial aid was provided to local districts, reservation day schools, and public schools which had been established on Indian trust lands.

The period of termination, which came a brief twenty years after the Indian New Deal, resulted in the termination of the federal relationship with many tribes. Many schools previously supported by federal funds were closed. American Indian and Alaska f Native children as well as adults suffered yet another downward swing. Education and culture once again suffered. Following the civil rights movement and a decade of Indian activism, Indian education in the 1970s became the beneficiary of a national interest in ethnicity and an expanded funding of various educational programs. Unfortunately, under the Reagan Administration, the duration of this latest period of reform is nearing its demise.

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