I recently published my first book, On Our Own Terms: Indigenous Histories of School Funding and Policy, with the University of Nebraska Press!
On Our Own Terms contextualizes recent federal education legislation against two hundred years of education funding and policy to explore two critical themes: the racial and settler colonial dynamics that have shaped Indian education and the equally long and persistent tradition of Indigenous peoples engaging schools, funding, and policy on their own terms. Focusing primarily on the years 1819 to 2018, it shows some of the diverse strategies families, educators, and other community members have used to creatively navigate schooling. These stories of strategic engagement with schools, funding, and policy embody what Gerald Vizenor has termed survivance, an insistence of Indigenous presence, trickster humor, and ironic engagement with settler structures. By gathering these stories together into an archive of survivance stories in education, the book invites us to consider ongoing patterns of Indigenous resistance and the possibilities for bending federal systems toward community well-being.
