History of Native American Education in Kansas

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This article covers a period of recent US history in which Native communities saw significant success in their efforts to advocate for preserving their languages and cultural institutions. The 2006 passage of the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act is also examined against the backdrop of the No Child Left Behind legislation. The article puts Native education policy in the political context of non-Native debates about education.

[Note: This is a chapter in a book.] This author has spent her academic career writing about Native education, in various ways. This chapter encapsulates some of her most influential ideas, one of which is that Native people did not reject Western education, wholesale and categorically. Just like White parents, Indian parents want(ed) success, material comfort, financial independence, and professional fulfillment for their children. Beginning in the mid-19th century, Native people set out to adapt to the Western norms of education in order to help their children succeed. But as Lomawaima explains, abandoning everything that made them Indian was not an option, either. Generations of Indian families did not see the need to choose between their culture and Western "modern" education.