Settler Colonial Institutions of Higher Education: Indigenizations, Generations & Warriors (Chasing Butterflies)

Abstract

In 1928 the Meriam Report was released. This report details the devastating state of Indigenous peoples across the nation, specifically in regard to education. The data were presenting horrible living, employment and educational conditions, declaring a state of emergency and action. Over 80 years later, in 2014 President Obama’s Native Youth Report was released, and another “state of emergency” for Indian education in America was declared. These are not two isolated occurrences; between the Meriam Report in 1928 and Obama’s Report in 2014, multiple reports were released presenting concerning data and numbers for the educational standards and status of Indian country. Scholars and Indigenous Warriors (Indigenous Scholars) have documented the experiences of Native American students within higher education for decades, providing recommendations for how to better support and retain Indigenous students within higher education. For change to be effective, this must happen at the systemic level across education. Indigenous youth are continuing to enter colonial spaces based in Eurocentric ideologies and white systems to achieve their education (Brayboy, 2005; Tuck & Yang, 2012); these spaces were designed to assimilate them and must change systemically for the future of our Native students and Native nations. This study collected data on the lived experiences of fourteen storytellers (students) navigating settler colonial institutions (SCI). Additionally, the influence of each student’s college generational status was explored within this study as well. Students whose parents never attained their college are considered first-generation college students in this study. Indigenous methodologies were utilized to assess the students’ stories and glean a more in-depth cultural analysis of the messages emerging. By framing this work in Indigenous epistemologies, it intentionally disrupts and challenges the colonial analysis within academia and begins to decolonize that process (Smith, 2012). The “interviews” were a series of story sessions where the students would offer different chapters or periods of their time within their journey at an SCI. This sharing process was respected as a sacred space and ceremony rather than an exercise in data collection and analysis. The students’ stories offered collective messages or findings that painted a story where Indigenous students’ experiences within settler colonial institutions are dictated less by their generational status and more by the colonial environment they are navigating. Moreover, the story that emerged highlighted students that did not feel institutional representation and had mixed feelings of belonging regarding the institution. Stories of financial burdens and stressors, where their basic life needs were not being met. Stories of colonial constructs influencing how they conceptualized their Indigeneity and the colonial outcomes of broken familial patterns which stem from the historical trauma that systemic colonization continues to feed today (Brayboy, 2005). This study closes with implications for aggressive systemic changes that can be executed to break the damaged cycle of reporting; meaning, the national reports that are published every decade since the 1920’s with Meriam Report, declaring Indian Country in a state of emergency. The implications seek to discontinue the colonial experiments of Indian education that the country has continued to sustain for almost a century now.