What has the term Indian Education meant historically?
Well, I think when people talk about Indian education, they use this term “Indian Education,” which has a very long history, colonial history, and I think it’s important to specify that we’re talking about colonial education for Indians because, until recently, Indian education has not meant Indian people educating their own: it’s meant others. It’s about a transformation of life, conversion to Christianity, whatever denomination, becoming civilized, and of course those two things in the colonial era were, were seen as the same thing, two sides of the same coin perhaps. Transforming people’s lives and almost sometimes very secondary to that is what we might think of as education today — reading, writing academic subjects. It was much more immersion in a completely new life style. Q: What was the common perception of Native American societies by white people? I think a very common European and then later American view of native societies was that they were deficient in many ways. The A
