This conceptual paper examines the colonial conditions of possibility for a formative moment of US public higher education, the Morrill Act of 1862, and considers how these conditions continue to shape the present. The federal government's accumulation of Indigenous lands in the nineteenth century helped provide the material base for land-grant…

The 2023 Tribal Leaders qualitative study is an emergent perspective from twelve Tribal leaders on education, Tribal sovereignty, leadership, and change presented as a poster session at the 2023 NRMERA conference in Omaha, Nebraska. This conceptual paper presents a review of literature acknowledging a lack of research inclusive of the voice of…

Land-grant colleges were created in the mid-nineteenth century when the federal government sold off public lands and allowed states to use that money to create colleges. The land that was sold to support colleges was available because of a deliberate project to dispossess American Indians of land they inhabited. By encouraging westward migration,…

Discussions about migration, geography, and Indigenous language use are key ways that community members perform, negotiate, and contest identities and politics in multilingual Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, a federally-recognized Native nation located within the city of El Paso, Texas. This linguistic anthropological piece illustrates how tribal members…

This paper examines the way the term "self-determination" is used in the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975. Its main thesis is that the Act does not in fact offer tribal governments self-determination, but instead reaffirms old power configurations that go back to the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934.…

This qualitative study examined the role of Native Lifeways in tribal colleges as perceived by their presidents and other influential leaders on the campuses of three tribal colleges. Tribal colleges were founded in part to support and promote Native Lifeways, as demonstrated within their respective mission statements. Given the fact that TCUs are…

This essay examines the depiction of Native Americans by the US Information Agency (USIA), the bureau charged with explaining American politics to the international public during the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, the USIA broadcast the message that Americans had begun to acknowledge their nation's history of conquest and were working to…

Indian orators have been saying good-bye for more than three hundred years. John Eliot's "Dying Speeches of Several Indians" (1685), as David Murray notes, inaugurates a long textual history in which "Indians... are most useful dying," or, as in a number of speeches, bidding the world farewell as they embrace an undesired but…

The presumption of American's noble savage provides the foundation for the creation of one of the world's most recognizable stereotypes--the American Indian. The stereotype, lodged in the minds of most Americans as the Plains Indian warrior, contributed to decades of misunderstanding about leadership in traditional American Indian societies and…

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's election to the presidency in 1932 signaled a mandate for sweeping reform at the federal level to lift the nation out of the economic turbulence of the Great Depression. Under Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) joined other agencies in launching policies to rebuild economic…

As of December 2010, the US Congress had enacted more than twenty major community-specific Native water-rights settlements, and the state of Arizona had more of these settlements (eight) than any other US state. This unique situation has invited voluminous studies on Arizona's Native water-rights settlements. Although these studies have clarified…

This article examines the ways American Indian authors, particularly three contemporary Anishinaabeg writers, engaged with the question of Native American origins during the racially polarized project of "imagining" the nation of the United States throughout the 19th century. In this article, the author argues that American Indian…

This essay examines nineteenth-century Native resistance to the American Indian removal policy as a strategy of decolonization. Attention focuses in particular on the tactics of decolonization employed in the rhetoric of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations as it functioned to expose the dilemmas and hypocrisies of U.S. government…

This article seeks to explain the nature of the arguments the Iroquois presented to the US government in trying to prevent their removal. In the letters they wrote to the federal government from the 1830s to the 1850s they emphasized their own law as well as that of the United States. They drew on whatever perception of law they deemed was best…

This article discusses Chief Joseph's surrender that marked the beginning of his diplomatic stand for justice in Indian Territory, where his tribe was forcibly exiled in accordance with American Indian policy of the time. Joseph battled for the repatriation of the Nez Perce through protests and other legal means, winning the support of the growing…