Weaponizing settler slogans to mandate colonial school policy in the Americas: Transformation through Indigenous futurity

Forcible colonial schooling in the US

In 1869, when Republican Ulysses Grant became US president, settlers and tribes were clashing in the American West. Responding with Grant’s Peace Policy, Indigenous tribes were forced into reservations as a strategy for assimilating them into white society and making way for settlement and development. In the educational realm, Grant’s initiative led to the “boarding school system,” overseen by Christian missionaries (Smith, 2009, p. 5). From 1878 to 1918, this off-reservation Indian school system operated with federal policy sponsorship. Carlisle Indian School founder Brigadier General Richard Pratt (1840–1924) coined “kill the Indian in him, and save the man” in his 1892 convention speech (see Pratt, 1973) and frequently used the mantra thereafter.

Under the influence of Grant and Pratt, among other American political and military leaders, the US government removed children from their families and placed them into 357 Native American boarding schools: “For decades, the US took thousands of Native American children and enrolled them in [schools where they] were systematically stripped of their languages, customs, and culture.” Despite “accounts of neglect, abuse, and death,” these schools “became a blueprint for how the US government could forcibly assimilate native people into white America” (Chakraborty, 2019; Churchill, 2004).

Made to attend Indian Residential Schools, Indigenous children were indoctrinated with Christianity and “White cultural values.” Trained for “manual labor” and “domestic work,” they were deliberately “assimilated into the bottom of the socio-economic ladder,” and females were socialized to “lose” their leadership place “in Native communities” (Smith, 2009, pp. 5–6). Starving and imprisoned, the children labored under inhumane conditions (Dejong, 2007; Mullen, 2021). If caught speaking their native language or practicing their faith, they were beaten; many were raped by those in charge (Dejong, 2007; Smith, 2009).

Epidemics struck dozens of boarding schools—many died while in custody, away from their homelands. The great influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 hit the Native American population “hard” (Brady and Bahr, 2014; Child, 2000). “Thousands of children died in these schools” due to poor sanitary conditions, overcrowding, abuse, malnutrition, weakness from manual work programs, medical neglect, and suicide (Dejong, 2007; Smith, 2009, p. 7). Indigenous students’ death rates were over six times higher than other ethnic groups (Witte and Mero, 2008).

What was deemed an “‘Indian problem’ of sufficient magnitude to warrant a federal system of education to solve” (Dejong, 2007, p. 257) became “The Problem of Indian Administration” with the 1928 Meriam Report. It verified that “federal policies had been a disaster, [especially in] education” (Witte and Mero, p. 258). Following this report, tribes initiated Indian education reform recognizing their “inherent rights . . . to lay claim to their tribal and personal histories” (Native American Rights Fund, 2019, p. 17).

Weaponizing rhetoric of killing and saving

Pratt’s (1973) slogan was a rallying cry for white settlers. His paper spotlighted “pragmatic and frequently brutal methods for ‘civilizing’ the ‘savages’” and drew “analogies to the education and ‘civilizing’ of African Americans,” out of which an enslaved labor force advanced white society (American Social History Project, 2018). Throughout the 1880s, Pratt argued vehemently against the existence of tribal schools and native sovereignty in education that, as he put it, preyed upon the government for financial support for life in a chronic state of “helplessness.” He presented his Carlisle system and its “intelligent and industrious” schools as the nation’s charitable solution to “Americanizing the Indian” (in contrast with “purely Indian schools” that resist integration into American society).

The harmful refrain “KILL the Indian” was repeated by Pratt to legitimate robbing the original descendants of their dignity and aspirations and destroying any inclination to claim an inherent right to land and resources. The word “kill” implied that violence could achieve this goal. “SAVE the man,” also strategic, manipulated an uninformed public into thinking that Indigenous Americans were savages, and that the boarding schools were granting them a life and future by integrating and saving them (Heath, 2017). Thus, the public was led to believe that Indigenous children were being transformed into better people and that through proper, disciplined education and religious training they had prospects in life.

Quite possibly, the 1776 Declaration of Independence buoyed the slogan. In this cherished founding document, the violent phrase “merciless Indian savages” follows the famously inclusive statement, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” “Merciless Indian savages” may have been among the influences emboldening Pratt’s murder chant. According to Charles (2018), many people today are likely unaware of this white supremacist thinking in the Declaration, yet “Indian savages” remains a long-standing cliché.

Contemporary scholars describe Pratt’s motivation as wanting to erode Indigenous communities and culture and, through widespread educational intervention, engineering America’s great social experiment (Churchill, 2004; Smith, 2009). His slogan was used to rationalize assimilationist policy and practice, thereby legalizing and validating settler state colonialism and its ravages (Churchill, 2004). To Bowes (2018), Pratt’s phrase ominously “asserted the figurative death of Indians through civilization” (p. 3), which has been deemed culturicide in its destructive repercussions (Coulthard, 2014; Dejong, 2007; Smith, 2009).

Cultural genocide of indigenous communities

The influential campaign led by Pratt did in fact establish the conditions for cultural genocide and promote the effects. A particularly egregious form of “colonizing legacy,” “boarding school policies directed at Indigenous peoples globally have infringed upon [their] right to self-determination” (Khalifa et al., 2019; Smith, 2009, p: 48). The government-sanctioned policy crusade birthed a settler system that enlisted leaders in the “educational subjugation of all tribes” (Witte and Mero, 2008: p: 208). Pratt was convinced “that Indian children were the key to controlling the permanent future of Indian relations and to making a so-called primitive people ‘productive’ [during America’s] Industrial Revolution” (p. 208). This logic sustained suffering, exposure to “deadly contagious diseases” (p. 257), and many children’s deaths (Witte and Mero, 2008).

Because physical genocide would cost more, cultural genocide was preferred (Coulthard, 2014; Dejong, 2007; Smith, 2009). Cultural genocide of Indigenous communities—flourishing in this colonial period—is recognized as wholesale targeted annihilation (Chakraborty, 2019; Child, 2000; Churchill, 2004; Coulthard, 2014; Dejong, 2007; Mullen, 2021; Smith, 2006, 2009; Witte and Mero, 2008). Catalysts at the time included settler philosophies and ambitions, federal policies, leadership campaigns, church-run schools, and public ignorance.

Dissolving Indigenous ties by breaking up families was one systemic consequence. Other ongoing genocidal effects are (a) disbanded native cultural practices and languages and fractured identities; (b) sabotaged rights and responsibilities of Indigenous sovereignty over territories and on behalf of the upbringing, training, education, and wellbeing of their children; (c) educational inequality, racism, and marginalization encountered by Indigenous students in mainstream schools; and (d) disengagement, withdrawal, and attrition from high schools harboring racist attitudes and discrimination (Chakraborty, 2019; Child, 2000; Coulthard, 2014; Hare and Pidgeon, 2011).

It should not go unnoticed that the kill-and-save ethic of American colonial school policy had globalizing impacts in Canada. A government official advocated for Canada to “adopt a similar system to that of the United States’ founded upon Pratt” (Smith, 2009: p: 7). From 1879 to 1996 (with mandatory attendance from 1894 to 1947), the Canadian Indian residential school system enrolled 86,000 Indigenous children (McGregor, 2018). The goal was to “erase and replace” native culture and destroy Indigenous life (Coulthard, 2014).

Canadian residential school policy legitimated these children’s extraction from their families and placement in nationwide residential schools. In 1883, the Public Works Minister declared, “In order to educate the children properly, we must separate them from their families. Some people may say that this is hard but if we want to civilize them we must do that” (as cited in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada [TRC], 2012). Following the US, the Canadian government funded this systemic racist program, administering it through Christian churches, in order to displace Indigenous communities and appropriate their lands; “Aboriginal policies” were used to dispose of the “Indian problem” (TRC, 2015). In Canada, abuse was reported as high as 100% in “some schools,” with a “death rate” of 24% among Indigenous children (Smith, 2009, p: 8), which amounted to 1 in 25 (6000) dying from the mandatory relocation (TRC, 2012).

Survivors of government programs

The governments’ compulsory assimilationist education programs in North America dispossessed Indigenous children for five generations (1880–1980). Half did not survive the boarding school experience, and those who did were forever scarred (Churchill, 2004). While the attempt to “civilize” the children was outlasted by tribes, 574 of which are now “federally recognized” in the US (Biden–Harris, 2021), genocidal effects linger. Survivors are “marked by trauma,” and successive generations live with racism and distrust federal governments and education systems (Churchill, 2004; Coulthard, 2014; Little, 2018).

Alcoholism, suicide, and transmission of trauma to children have led to social disintegration with genocidal consequences (Coulthard, 2014; Henderson and Wakeham, 2009; Sinclair et al., 2015; Smith, 2009). In addition, “racially-biased perceptions of Native families” contribute to children’s “separation” from parents through “child welfare services” and students’ “significant educational inequities” (Little, 2018).

Survivors call for “apology, compensation, healing, and reconciliation” (Henderson and Wakeham, 2009, pp: 5–6, 8). These long-awaited apologies for genocidal acts have made history when announced. In 2009, a US bill was passed constituting the federal government’s official apology to “all Native Peoples” (US Government, 2009, p: 1). However, too few countries have followed suit.

In 2007, the Canadian government’s Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) recognized that the nation was still enduring its residential school legacy. It was also a public apology “to former boarding-school students and [payment of] reparations to survivors” (Sinclair et al., 2015). Ostensibly, the class action suit compensated former residents for damages incurred. Founded in 2008 by the IRSSA, the TRC of Canada (since defunct) shared survivors’ stories so the painful legacy would not be forgotten.

Kill-and-save slogan and policy repercussions

Pratt’s slogan has policy repercussions in education today. To Battiste (2008), a Mi’kmaw educator, Canadian “policies built on the supremacy of European heritages have left a legacy of trauma [in] an education system meant to ‘kill the Indian in the child’” (p: 1). Policy and legislative changes could be viewed by critics and allies as extremely delayed and overly cautious, as instruments of settler rhetoric, or as signs of reform, such as with respect to Canada’s 1982 constitution, which acknowledges reconciliation in the education of Indigenous peoples. This landmark Act “affirms Aboriginal and treaty rights” and governments’ and First Nations’ shared responsibility “to promote the distinct knowledge, traditions, and cultures” (Battiste, 2008, p: 81), yet Indigenous rights are not self-evident. They necessitate negotiation and agreements between tribes and the Government of Canada.

Critical Indigenous thought recognizes attitudes in education policy and dismissiveness of “a postcolonial agenda for transforming the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and Canadians” (Battiste, 2017). Continuing, Battiste pointed to Canada’s 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ study documenting “massive damages” to tribes—“major global losses in Indigenous languages and knowledge,” “persistent poverty,” and “low education,” with a bearing on employment.

In Canada, the TRC found that residential schooling’s protraction shows up as “significant disparities in education, income, and health between Aboriginal people and other Canadians,” condemning Indigenous communities to “troubled lives.” “Intense racism” and “systemic discrimination” are still realities, and the “beliefs and attitudes” justifying residential schooling continue to “animate official Aboriginal policy” (Sinclair et al., 2015).

Educational trends indicate perpetual disparity and low academic attainment in the US and Canada for Indigenous students (Faircloth and Tippeconnic, 2013; Gordon and White, 2014; Little, 2018; Mullen, 2021; United Nations, 2017), including:

1. A large achievement gap in educational levels (Indigenous school enrollments, performance, and literacy levels are all low while attrition is high.)

A calamity of colonialism is the failure to equitably serve Indigenous students (Castagno and Brayboy, 2008; Hare and Pidgeon, 2011). High-stakes testing in North America has neither improved Indigenous academic achievement nor bolstered students’ cultural knowledge, identity, capital, and opportunities (McCarty, 2018). Low-income Indigenous youth struggle to gain postsecondary qualifications. Moreover, tribes face compounding barriers—low self-confidence, poor academic preparation, scarce financial resources, absence of educated role models, and campus racism—to accessing and completing education (secondary and postsecondary). Education, “child welfare, health, and justice systems have failed Aboriginal peoples profoundly” (McGregor, 2018, p: 813).

Widespread exclusionary and inappropriate schooling is common for Indigenous communities (Faircloth, 2020–2021), necessitating a reimagined development of leaders and teachers serving Native American students (Faircloth and Tippeconnic, 2015). The dropout of this ethnic group from secondary school remains high, and children’s reading and math proficiency scores are lower than national averages (NSBA, 2020). Also, severe penalties are experienced by them in chronically underfunded schools on and off reservations. Indigenous (“American Indian”) secondary students in the US are almost twice as likely to leave or not graduate on time than the national average (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2020). Disproportionate failure and dropout rates for Canadian Indigenous students are similarly dismal. Boarding/residential schools failed to “kill the Indian” through coercive assimilation (Little, 2018) yet managed to design schooling cultures that silence and exclude.

The Americas’ First Peoples are its last in the punishing culture of high-stakes testing. The effects further demoralize the sporadic “culturally responsive educational efforts” made on behalf of Indigenous students (Battiste, 2017; Castagno and Brayboy, 2008, p: 942). Homogenizing cultural groups, test-centrism masks assimilation in education and defeats program capacity for meeting Indigenous peoples’ unique interests and needs. Falling under federal governments’ control, high-stakes testing jeopardizes tribal nations’ sovereignty over education and strains optimism for a better future (Castagno and Brayboy, 2008; McCarty, 2018). With the intensification of colonial paradigms of knowledge, culturally appropriate curricula and classroom approaches that honor distinct cultures become more remote. Schools’ capacity for delivering quality instruction is being stretched by the demands of not only test-heavy expectations but also increasingly diverse enrollments (Khalifa et al., 2019).

While K–12 homogenized classrooms reflect indifference to varying ethnicities, in culturally responsive settings, students’ knowledge, experiences, and performance styles are legitimized and their cultures and communities validated. Learning climates are geared toward engagement, participation, and achievement, without negative teacher bias. These spaces support Native American groups and their identities in strength-based, personalized environments where content and skills cohere with tribal rights, Indigenous worldviews, and learner needs (Castagno and Brayboy, 2008; Faircloth and Tippeconnic, 2013, 2015; Faircloth, 2020–2021). Critical work around settler policy and assumptions is demonstrated by faculty in preservice teacher and leader preparation programs (e.g., Aitken and Radford, 2018; Khalifa et al., 2019).

Indigenous futurity’s resistance to settler futurity

Indigenous futurity resists settler futurity and considers where Indigenous peoples have been and are going (Battiste, 2017; Mankiller, 2008; Tuck and Yang, 2012). As theorized, the future and its “horizon” are constructed in relation to the past, whereas with Indigenous futurity the future is fathomable (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). Not only anticipated, the future is, importantly, acted upon in the present. Imagining and preparing for the future underscore Indigenous futurity as a source of hope, empowerment, and change in the realms of tribal sovereignty, solidarity, truth, reconciliation, and healing.

In colonial nations, Indigenous activists advocate for tribal identities, interests, and needs (Sinclair et al., 2015; Von Der Porten, 2012). Securing resources to uphold “fundamental rights” for advancing tribal control of education is a key area of Indigenous futurity that calls for “measures” by governments, Indigenous parents, and other parties. This statement of action, continued Battiste (2017), is consistent with the UN’s declarations directing Indigenous children’s education in global contexts around having respect for parents and their own culture’s identity, language, and values within environments protecting them against exclusion and discrimination.

Whether Indigenous scholars use “Indigenous futurity” explicitly (like Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández) or implicitly (like Battiste), it perhaps conveys “wokeness” by demonstrating crucial facts and issues of inequity that affect children’s lives and prospects. Futurity from a critical Indigenous vantage point confronts “cognitive imperialism” from brainwashing and internalizing “forced assimilation,” including the “false assumption of settler superiority” in education policy and curriculum; nationalism and market-based economies are values permeating a settler-imagined world that subjugate Indigenous values (Battiste, 2017). With Indigenous futurity, the future is anticipated by “seek[ing] to reconcile contemporary education” with the past and present and by countering “Eurocentric education” so that Indigenous peoples can “build their own present with their own agency and power intact” (Battiste, 2017; Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013).

Indigenous futurity attempts to decolonize systems and nations, but, globally, tribal authority and rights only recently obtained some degree of recognition. In 2007, at the UN gathering where 143 countries voted in favor of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP, 2007) that endorses tribal sovereignty and decision-making authority over treaty and land rights, the US and Canada were dissenting nations. It was not until 2021 that the Declaration was ratified in Canada (Government of Canada, 2022), 14 years after its vote. The US Senate has yet to fully approve it, despite former President Obama’s announcement in 2011 that supported the Declaration. Recognizing Indigenous aspirations for prosperity and self-determination, and needing to further US policy relative to tribal issues were highlighted in Obama’s statement (US Department of State, 2011). A fundamental requirement within UNDRIP (2007) is that education should be accessible and culturally relevant for Indigenous peoples.

Tyranny disturbs tribal wellbeing, claims, and future and repudiates Indigenous futurity, extending to vision, systems, tenets, claims, policies, and legislation. Grievances of tribal nations include lack of (or insufficient) compensation for forcible Native American removal from homelands, compulsory off-reservation assimilationist education in deplorable conditions, and dispossession by federal governments of Indigenous territories in the name of national sovereignty fanned by the discrediting of tribal nations’ inherent rights.

Historically, national sovereignty guarded colonial settlers’ liberties and legacies by oppressing Indigenous communities. US “Supreme Court decisions from 1810 to 2005” invigorated the Christian European doctrine and system “that whoever discovered lands inhabited by non-Christian peoples would have the exclusive rights to ‘extinguish’ such [Indian] title” (Heath, 2017, pp: 115–117). “Possessory right to soil” casts tribes as wards of Indigenous homelands under government protection, meaning that “right of occupancy,” ruled by the courts and bestowed by the federal government, is “terminated at will” (p. 115).

Pratt’s historic slogan invigorates such settler futurity in that this future-oriented vision requires “erasure” of Indigenous cultures, including in school life. Indigenous futurity challenges this stance and its genocidal impact while creating momentum for Native American existence, renewal, and participation in society. Settler futurity seeks to completely eradicate “the original inhabitants of contested land”; in contrast, Indigenous futurity does not reject non-Indigenous peoples’ “inhabitation of Indigenous,” but does exclude “settler colonialism and settler epistemologies” (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013, p: 80).

Despite Indigenous requests for recognition of the injustices, settler colonists claim “innocence” to assuage guilt and wrongdoing while securing their own future (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013). This very dynamic plays out in contexts in which teaching for reconciliation is resisted by, for example, white settler preservice teachers who disavow any responsibility for resolution and healing (Aitken and Radford, 2018). At the macro level, settler futurity depends on a stable sense of nationhood and national sovereignty over land and people. The “controlling nature of state-granted sovereignty” is evidenced by “land claim agreements” that serve state interests (Von Der Porten, 2012, p: 5). In the colonial–settler imagination, Indigenous peoples gave their land to settlers for “safe-keeping,” and they agreed to be moved into permanent settlements (Tuck and Yang, 2012).

Recovering from past trauma, reconnecting to land, and establishing reconciliation galvanize Indigenous futurity. Land and education are cornerstones of reconciliation with society for Indigenous advocacy groups. Perhaps it can be said that education, like land, signifies recognition, fairness, respect, relationship, and opportunity. Indigenous leaders want governments and society to discontinue “justify[ing] European sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples” and “reform those laws [and policies] . . . that continue to rely on such strategies” (TRC, 2015, p: 5). The tribal reference point for education is, inescapably, land, and the framework for both is Indigenous sovereignty.

The creation of a vision for North American Indigenous peoples also incites introspection about what humanity can become, drawing on wisdom from experience. Importantly, vision-building involves what can be imagined, accomplished, and advanced in the present moment to cultivate a desired future. Futurity for Indigenous communities envisions people free to self-govern within cultures that nurture wellness, healing, and success (Mankiller, 2008). Because the meanings are nuanced and complicated among those committed to an “Indigenous future” (Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013), the futurity construct and associated meanings call for thoughtful unpacking beyond this paper.

The hope is that education can help break the cycle of colonialism and promote cultural and planetary sustainability. Persistent accounts of “culturally inappropriate education and poor academic outcomes for Indigenous students,” such as by Faircloth and Tippeconnic (2013), signal the need for systemic reform. They call on leaders and other stakeholders to “mobilize to effectively change the educational system,” and embrace the teaching and preparation of Indigenous students (pp. 484–485).

Indigenous peoples around the globe should have the same right to education as everyone else—free of discrimination and violence—and learning experiences that reflect their culture and respect their sovereignty (Castagno and Brayboy, 2008; UN, 2017). However, the “education sector not only mirrors and condenses the history of abuse and discrimination suffered by Indigenous peoples, but is also a locus of the continuing struggle for equality and respect for their rights” (UN, 2017). Consequently, racial differences in schooling outcomes are stark worldwide: “A significant disparity continues to occur in academic achievement and attainment between Indigenous [and non-Indigenous youth]” (Faircloth and Tippeconnic, 2013; Hare and Pidgeon, 2011, p: 94; NSBA, 2020). Migrant peoples and descendants, historical tribes, and urban Indians all face educational obstacles (UN, 2017).

Global nations carry the sting of tragic human rights abuses spurred by malicious slogans, policies, and programs (Coulthard, 2014; Sardoč, 2021). To advance Indigenous education and empower Native American leaders, teachers, and students, colonial structures of injustice must be systemically eroded. As such, tribal governance in the educational domain not only affirms Indigenous worldviews, knowledges, and values but also endorses tribal nations’ self-determination, human rights, and legitimate claims. As statistics, studies, and testimonials maintain, traditional schooling has not worked for many Indigenous students, who, as previously explained, show significant gaps in achievement and graduation (Faircloth and Tippeconnic, 2013; Gordon and White, 2014; NSBA, 2020). Public schools—lacking Native American Indigenous understandings of the world and worsened by racism (Hare and Pidgeon, 2011)—remain a European settlement walled off from the teachings of elders and village life.

Indigenous futurity is a strategy for altering entrenched patterns and directing the future. It imagines a defunct settler-native-slave relationship and renewed humanity. Tribal justice—a collective global responsibility—inspires introspection about humanity and what it will take for Indigenous futurity to be untangled from colonialism. Unity would result from shared goals, tribal governance, emancipatory vision, and remedied colonial wrongdoing. Educational institutions would profit from embracing Indigenous inclusion, achievement, and leadership at systemic levels. A world community in which tribes live life on their own terms is futurity’s essence (McCarty, 2018; Mullen, 2021).