The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) is a one-of-a-kind college dedicated to contemporary Native American arts and open to all peoples. The curriculum at IAIA includes innovative and integrative approaches to the arts as they connect to culture and science. The celebration of art and cultural identity are included in IAIA's Land-Grant…

Preserving the Navajo language, or "Diné bizaad," is of profound importance for all Indigenous people in the United States, as Navajo is one of the more widely spoken Native languages yet is still facing the early stages of endangerment. Currently, the Navajo Nation, like other tribes, lacks a significant presence of community-based…

Navajo Technical University first opened its doors in 1979 as the Navajo Skills Center with the simple intention of training an unemployed workforce and putting people to work. At the time, the Diné were just a generation removed from attempts at forced assimilation, which included unwarranted military action by the U.S. Cavalry during the Long…

The purpose of my study was to examine how a site reform leader implements the "Native Star" questionnaire at a school for American Indian students and how he describes and experiences school reform efforts at a Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) school in New Mexico. This was accomplished through a qualitative review of how the site…

Fifty years after the U.S. Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA), Native Americans continue to fight for the right "to remain an Indian" (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006) against a backdrop of test-driven language policies that threaten to destabilize proven bilingual programs and violate hard-fought language rights protections…

In the spring of 1540, Francisco Vazquez de Coronado led an "entrada" from present-day Mexico into the region we call New Mexico, where the expedition spent a violent winter among pueblo peoples. The following year, after a long march across the Great Plains, Coronado led an elite group of his men north into present-day Kansas where,…

This study emerges from a professional development workshop the authors conducted with elementary, middle, and high school teachers. The article highlights of responses of workshop participants, particularly their response that the law was about assimilation, in the context of "The General Allotment Act of 1887" and the Hopi Indian…

In the 1700s, the Spaniards of New Mexico ransomed captive Plains Indians enslaved by other tribes, named them "genizaros," and absorbed them into Pueblo-Spanish society. After working off their ransoms, the genizaros became farmers or craftsmen and served as defenders against and traders with Indians. Contains 55 references. (SV)

Explores the educational obstacles faced by Native Americans specific to their sociohistorical contexts. Seven specific obstacles and how they can be overcome through changes to structure, content, and processes are illustrated from work with Zuni students in New Mexico. (SLD)

This textbook for high school, college, or adult readers covers major areas of Navajo history from prehistoric times to 1846 from the Navajo point of view. A brief description of pre-Navajo cultures including the Hohokam, Mogollon, and Anasazi precedes the more detailed history of the arrival of the Navajo and contact with the Pueblo peoples.…

This textbook for high school, college, or adult readers covers the history and culture of the Navajo People from their own perspective from the coming of American control in 1846 until 1978. Topics include the last Navajo war, the Long Walk, the impact of Navajo agents on policy, early traders and flourishing of crafts, settlement of reservation…

Presents a teaching model that allows students to recognize, synthesize, and analyze characteristics and components of colonialism. Identifies and provides examples for five main types of colonial interaction: subjugation, coexistence, extermination, reservation, and combination. Applies this model to the case study of the Spanish in New Mexico.…

This book presents Navajo history in two aspects--traditional stories that describe the ancestors of the Navajo and explain how the Earth-Surface World was changed from monster-filled chaos into the well-ordered world of today, and historical events from 1525 to today after the Navajos had settled in the Southwest. Events described include…

This book and a related museum exhibition grew out of a student oral history project on the history of the Santa Fe Indian School, 1890-1990, and the role of the school in the development of Indian communities in New Mexico. Numerous interview excerpts and photographs portray life at the school during historical periods covered in four chapters:…

On October 27, 2004, the National Education Association (NEA) joined with the National Indian Education Association (NIEA) to host "Moving from Research to Practice: A Summit on Indian Students." Over 100 American Indian and Alaska Native education practitioners and researchers from Alaska to Mississippi gathered to share their knowledge…