Lessons in relationality: reconsidering the history of education in North America

ABSTRACT

This article offers a sampling and critique of the history of education in North America, including Canada, the United States and Mexico. Being Black and Indigenous academics, respectively, the authors’ scholarship centres on community relationships, considering activism around #BlackLivesMatter and Indigenous Peoples, especially with the news of thousands of unmarked graves at former Indian Residential Schools in Canada. Amidst increasing global calls for decolonisation, social justice and accountability, we ask: how should one consider the history of education in North America amidst social unrest, climate change, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, ongoing colonialisms, gender inequities, police violence against Black bodies and unmarked graves of Indigenous children? This paper traces histories of Indian Residential Schools, explores schooling structures and emerging settler states, and examines the growing focus on local histories to offer new directions in the history of education that challenge antiquated national narratives.

KEYWORDS:

• History of education and schooling
• North America
• Canada
• United States
• Mexico
• critical race studies
• historical methodologies
• Indian Residential Schools
• anti-Black racism

Introduction

During the writing of this article in 2021, Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc announced on 27 May that subsurface anomalies that could be the unmarked graves of approximately 215 Indigenous children had been located on the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. This was not a shock or a surprise to Indigenous communities and Survivors, but rather to settler Canadians who had long ignored such histories. The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc news was the first of many announcements from Indigenous communities sharing details regarding thousands more residential school unmarked graves. Additionally, the next 14 months were characterised by Canada Day celebrations being called into question, the Canadian Government implementing a few more of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s 94 Calls to Action including the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation,¹ and demands for a formal apology from Pope Francis. The revelation of unmarked graves came shortly after the summer of ‘racial reckoning’ in Canada, the United States and parts of Latin America calling for the review of anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence against persons of African descent across North America. Building on a long-standing tradition of Indigenous and Black activisms, these contemporary conversations, most reflected in broader social movements including #IdleNoMore, #LandBack and #BlackLivesMatter, pushed demands for accountability and reckoned with educational injustices of the past and their legacies in the present. As such, contemporary conversations concerning the role of schooling and education² in building a just and democratic society have taken centre stage. The current era of Reconciliation³ in the settler state of Canada alongside the ongoing search for truth regarding the history of genocide in this country urged us to prioritise and extend related dialogues to highlight the importance of this research, and the dire need to better understand the colonial histories that continue to materialise today.

This article seeks to understand the writing of the history of education in North America amidst increasing global calls for decolonisation, social justice and accountability. As nation states across the world grapple with their own (colonial) histories, the field of the history of education has sought to balance conversations between the local and the national to consider the purpose and outcomes of schooling and education. Although organised church and state schooling in North America has existed for the last five centuries or so, we acknowledge that there were many other diverse forms of education practices within racialised communities and societies.⁴ With this in mind, this article focuses on scholarly literature over the past 45 years (since roughly the mid-1970s), and more recent publications that push the boundaries of the field of history of education. Here, we ask: what does it mean to consider the history of education in North America amidst social unrest, climate change, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, ongoing forms of colonialisms, increasing intrusions on gender rights, police violence against Black bodies and news about the unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the former grounds of Indian Residential Schools? Ultimately, we argue that the history of education offers the potential for a radical rethinking of the role of education and schooling, and perhaps an avenue by which we can consider processes of relationality to situate our roles as scholars and historians writing these stories.

To say that the field of history of education in North America is changing is an understatement. Building on ruptures and revisions in the way history has and is being written, incredible growth and dynamic writing continues to be explored in the field. The works we have highlighted here are some of the many examples of an ever-expanding field and a critique of the challenges that remain. As such, this review is not without its limitations. As scholars whose research and expertise are situated in Canada, we recognise the challenges of telling a comprehensive history of North America that does not consider, in a fulsome way, the written and oral histories of the Mexican and American education systems. While we have tried to connect interrelated concerns and categories in English Canada, the United States and Mexico, much is absent from this discussion when we consider language, gender, class, race and access within the development of education in North America.⁵ Instead, we have sought to flag tensions that exist within the field and consider overarching themes examining the uses of history of education in facilitating a review of our present education systems.

Here, we highlight the importance of positionality in academic research and acknowledge that our ancestries, upbringings, genders and worldviews not only play a role in how we interact with each other and consider our shared experiences, but also reflect how we understand our professional responsibilities and the writing of history of education. Funké Aladejebi (she/her) is a historian of Black Canada deeply invested in the bridging of academic and community knowledges. Her research recognises the long-standing history of Black communities on Turtle Island, but also considers gaps in educational access and knowledge of these histories. By emphasising the necessity of Black Canadian knowledges, largely through oral histories, Funké considers the important avenues by which we can understand and situate advocacy work for persons of African descent within Canadian schooling institutions. Gwichyà Gwich’in historian Crystal Gail Fraser (she/her/hers), who also has Scottish and English ancestry, is an intergenerational Indian Residential School Survivor and is originally from Treaty 11 Territory in the Northwest Territories. She writes as an uninvited guest living on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis Nation. Crystal is passionate about Indigenous research methodologies, community-engaged research and oral histories. Her work focuses on the histories of Indian Residential Schools in Canada but especially the North during the second half of the twentieth century. By practising this transparency and reminding readers that we first come to this work as human beings with community responsibilities and then as academics, we hope to encourage others to reflect on and write about their own positionality and privilege.

This article is divided into four distinct sections. The first seeks to review the writing of Indian Residential Schools in in order to situate how historians have understood the history of child institutionalisation in the name of Euro-Canadian and Christian education. The second section considers these early schooling structures alongside broader national histories as a way of gauging the historiography of the field. Most importantly, we consider the ways Indian Residential Schools, segregated school systems and public schools have been written as separate and distinctive in the history of education in North America. Instead, we position these conversations as layered and connected processes that inform the ways in which educational structures in North America have been constructed and continue to influence present-day notions of education. As a result, these national histories give us a sense of the ways federal policy and political ideologies deeply influenced the development of education in North America. Our third section highlights the increasing emergence of local histories to examine the goals and purpose of education. We argue that the interplay between the local and national remains at the heart of history of education writing in the most recent decades, with localised stories addressing the historical erasure and absence of diverse communities from modern education systems in North America. Finally, we conclude by considering challenges to dominant national narratives and offer possibilities for new directions and dimensions in the history of education in North America.

The institutionalisation of Indigenous children: Indian Residential Schools

Given the public and academic outcry to better understand the histories of Indian Residential Schooling and genocide in Canada, this section provides a critical scan of Indian Residential Schooling historiography published in English beginning in the late 1970s.⁶ It is important to note that there are many other historical developments that contributed to oppression, violence and genocide in Canada, including: widespread disease and illnesses, the overhunting of buffalo herds, the Indian Act of 1876 (ongoing federal legislation, today), forced sterilisations, violence and crimes against Indigenous women and girls, the Sixties Scoop,⁷ forced relocations, and the utter failure of the Canadian settler state to uphold treaties.⁸ Some of these injustices continue today. As historian Derek Smith notes, Indian Residential Schools were ‘one part of a complex array of state-building and state-linked governance enterprises of educating and civilizing on this continent which sought to govern and regulate populations’.⁹

The historiography of Indian Schooling systems documents the complex connections between government and church policies, the intent and design of the system, and how these schools operated. This scholarship overwhelmingly focuses on Indian Residential Schools between 1879 and 1975 and is often contextualised as studies of ‘native–newcomer relations’.¹⁰ These scholars primarily use archival sources and offer crucial arguments that advance our knowledge of colonialism, policy and state agendas. Nevertheless, the historiography largely focuses on the history of government policies and the apparent success or failure of Indigenous Peoples in responding to colonial agendas. Although these contributions remain valuable, the voices of Indigenous Peoples, Indian Residential School Survivors and Knowledge Keepers are largely excluded from these earlier historical writings. Scholars, too, have underestimated the severity and carceral nature of this genocidal system.

The shift towards examining the experiences of Indigenous Peoples institutionalised at Indian Residential Schools, through their own words, as interpreted by Indigenous scholars has only come of late, after Indigenous Peoples began to tell their stories, often as memoirs.¹¹ Māori education scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes that although Indigenous Peoples’ stories ‘may be spaces of marginalization … they also have become spaces of resistance and hope’.¹² The best histories of resistance and hope for Indigenous Peoples are those that reflect and reveal their philosophies, cultures and story-telling traditions. Regarding histories of ‘Indian Schooling’, and thereby colonial education, a movement towards ethically centring and including oral evidence in histories concerning Indigenous Peoples serves as one of the most powerful, accurate, inclusive and respectful scholarly practices.

From the early historiographical representations of Indian Residential Schools during the mid-1970s through to contemporary historical interpretations, there have been those who have adopted what historian Scott Trevithick calls the ‘traditionalist’ approach, which ‘posits a mix of cynical and humanitarian motives’ and includes theories of a benevolent government and the tendency to ‘emphasize the altruistic (if terribly misguided) intentions of policy makers to a greater extent’.¹³ While there is a growing body of scholarly literature pointing to this, we highlight a few examples to position the shifting nature of writing on Indian Residential schools. In an early watershed piece from 1975, historian Jacqueline Gresko analysed the Qu’Appelle Indian Residential School on the Wa-Pii Moos-toosis Indian Reserve in Saskatchewan between the 1880s and 1940s and argues that

efforts to transform western Indians into civilized Christians through educational programs did not halt but encouraged native involvement in traditional social and religious institutions, stimulated resistance to the assimilative efforts of white government and missionaries, and encouraged the generation of modern Indian rights movement.¹⁴

Teetering on a dangerous argument that highlighted Indian Residential Schooling as positive, Gresko suggested that removing children from their communities, subjecting them to austere conditions and inculcating them with a Euro-Canadian education contributed to their desire to ‘resist the industrial schools’ programs with their own educative program’ and equipped them with the ability to become ‘trained and politicized personnel for modern Indian-rights movements’.¹⁵ For Gresko, a conversation regarding the perceived benefits of institutionalisation trumped the trauma and lasting implications of the system. Gresko’s scholarly contribution, however, lay in her assertion that Indigenous Peoples did not passively respond to government and church initiatives, but remained committed child advocates.¹⁶

In 1986, historian Jean Barman, education scholar Yvonne Hébert and anthropologist Don McCaskill produced a two-volume edited collection that examined Indian schooling policies, seeking to initiate conversations among educational planners, teachers, students and the public.¹⁷ The first volume argued that while Indigenous reactions to residential schooling were varied, Indigenous Peoples overwhelmingly took control of their lives.¹⁸ The second volume focused on post-1973 developments after the adoption of new federal policy that provided Indigenous Peoples with greater autonomy over education. The editors drew on the work of Indigenous scholars from various Nations including Mi’kmaq educational studies scholar Marie Battiste, Lakota anthropologist Beatrice Medicine and Mohawk author Diane Longboat. Yet, the work was far from reaching an equitable interpretation of the past.

The first hints at a movement to consider community engagement and the inclusion of Indigenous voices and experiences was anthropologist Celia Haig-Brown’s ethnography on the Kamloops Indian Residential School, Resistance and Renewal.¹⁹ Based on 13 interviews with Survivors, Haig-Brown’s interpretation added a fresh perspective to the historical literature and emphasised the loss of Indigenous culture as a result of Indian Residential Schools, while rendering a ‘picture of strong individuals and strong culture growing, adapting, and surviving’.²⁰ At the time, scholars failed to see the value of this work, criticising Haig-Brown for failing to provide a balanced historical interpretation.²¹ Today, this approach is highly valued and still very much needed as we seek to better understand how Indigenous children experienced and responded to the carcerality of being institutionalised.

In 1990, historian J. R. Miller called into question the effectiveness of Indian Residential Schools and argued that cultural change, as a result of schooling policies, ‘was much less effective than generally thought’ and that the ‘conventional picture of residential schools as totalitarian institutions run arbitrarily by all-powerful missionaries and bureaucrats is also not universally accurate’.²² Miller argued that these institutions ‘never reached more than a minority’ of Indigenous children and oppressive measures related to institutionalisation had been exaggerated.²³ Like other settler scholars, he sympathised with early colonial policy-makers, emphasising benevolence and Indigenous success because of residential schooling and not in spite of it. Six years later, in Shingwauk’s Vision, Miller admitted that there were oppressive colonial forces shaping the system, but that these processes generally failed, despite the abhorrent ways in which missionaries and staff treated Indigenous students.²⁴

In 1995, the Cariboo Tribal Council commissioned anthropologist Elizabeth Furniss to examine the effects of the Williams Lake Indian Residential School.²⁵ Furniss relied on archival documents instead of undertaking interviews, claiming that these records were ‘unusual in that Native voices have been very well documented in the form of affidavits and letters’.²⁶ Furniss’s analysis was based on an unusually small sample of primary sources – two files in the archival records of the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) – and she found that the Oblates of St Joseph’s Mission and the federal government instilled a ‘grandiose and fatal plan’²⁷ of what was historically called assimilation. For Furniss, Indigenous parents actively protested the ‘care’ that their children received while institutionalised but the DIA blamed students for their supposed lack of discipline and the Oblates continued with ‘deliberate steps to intimidate the local Native people into silence’.²⁸

In A National Crime, historian John Milloy presented a comprehensive history of residential schools and, diverging from Miller, squarely focused on the Canadian government’s role in establishing and maintaining the system.²⁹ Based on research for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,³⁰ Milloy considered the national context of schooling policies, but also explored how they were executed regionally, how the system changed over time and the nation state’s goal to ‘kill the Indian in the child’.³¹ Although Milloy’s focus on archival records failed to adequately capture Indigenous voices, the work also acknowledged ‘that the future must include making a place for those who have been affected by the schools to stand in dignity, to remember, to voice their sorrow and anger, and to be listened to with respect’.³²

The work of Gresko, Barman et al., Miller, Furniss and Milloy adds to our understanding of the histories of Indian Residential Schooling in what is now known as Canada. They analysed, in different ways, the formation of church and state policy, the so-called ‘benevolent’ intentions that guided the system, and how Indigenous Peoples emerged as resilient and respondent. All, however, ignore the fact that these oppressive, carceral institutions continued to operate until the late twentieth century (the final two institutions closed in Canada in 1996), as they carried out and published their research. These works also did little to acknowledge the fact that, given the absence of sustained discussion around student death, starvation policies, sterilisations and violence against children, the residential schooling system in Canada was genocide.³³

There are dozens of book chapters and articles that provide compelling histories of Indian Residential schooling policies. Particularly convincing arguments within these analyses are the ways Indigenous bodies were constituted, investigated and regarded by state officials via schooling institutions. Just over 20 years ago, historian Mary-Ellen Kelm explored the re-shaping of Indigenous bodies through the ‘colonization of bodies’ and Canadian Indian policy, noting that ‘ill-health was created not just by faceless pathogens but by the colonial policies and practices of the Canadian government’.³⁴ Outlining the federal government’s desire to train workers, Kelm found that children were instead weakened, became ill and were plagued by persisting health problems while institutionalised at Indian Residential Schools. Two years later in 2001, historian Maureen Lux published Medicine That Walks, where she investigated health policies in relation to racialised ideologies regarding ‘backwards’ Indigenous cultures on the Plains and identified these as the root of federal Indian approaches.³⁵ Like Kelm, Lux demonstrates that residential schools provided ‘fertile space for disease’ and thereby death.³⁶ In his 2013 article, historian Ian Mosby analysed the problems of hunger and malnutrition during the war and post-war period, concluding that bureaucrats, doctors and scientists used Indigenous children, institutionalised at Indian Residential Schools, to advance their professional and political interests through nutritional experiments.³⁷ Noting the connections between the state and school, these historians highlight the intersections between health and institutionalisation, now a very timely scholarly question.³⁸

Despite assumptions made regarding Indigenous populations during this period, historiography has also considered the resistive practices enacted by Indigenous parents and children. In 1994, Indigenous Studies scholar K. Tsianina Lomawaima examined power relations among the student body at the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma, United States and how children ‘created a school culture influenced but not determined by the bounds of federal control’.³⁹ Lomawaima broadened our understanding of how subversion and resistance were entwined with children’s responses to institutionalisation. Métis interdisciplinary scholar Sherry Farrell Racette has incorporated cultural theories of subjugated bodies in her analysis of the ‘photographic archive’, which contained images that were taken by students at the Spanish Indian Residential School during the 1950s.⁴⁰ She emphasised the carceral nature of these institutions by teasing apart the disciplinary tactics, punishment and surveillance that dictated the lives of Indigenous children, concluding that ‘although silent, photographs of First Nation children in residential schools have given voice to children who were forced to participate in a disastrous social experiment’.⁴¹

Most recently, as seen with Farrell Racette’s work, scholars are increasingly using theory to better contextualise the social and political implications of Indian Residential Schools. In her comparative study, American historian Margaret D. Jacobs examines the insidious role of white women in assimilationist and genocidal policies in the United States and Australia.⁴² Turning to anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of ‘intimacies of empire’ in a transnational context,⁴³ Jacobs dissects the connections between colonialism and gender, specifically how white women are implicated in forcibly removing Indigenous children from their families in the name of ‘progress’. Sociologist Andrew Woolford provides an exemplary comparative study of Indian Residential Schooling in Canada and the United States, with close attention given to what he calls the ‘settler colonial mesh’.⁴⁴ Woolford

conceptualizes settler colonial practices of assimilative education as a series of nets that operate at macro-, meso-, and microsocietal levels. These nets tighten or slacken as they stretch across space and time, and when brought together, one on top of the other, they form a settler colonial mesh, which operates to entrap Indigenous peoples within the settler colonial assimilative project.⁴⁵

Woolford contends the settler colonial mesh helps scholars to avoid ‘oversimplifying the boarding school experience in North America, which is always a risk when one reduces it to distinctly national (i.e. Canadian and American) patterns’.⁴⁶

Indigenous scholars in Canada are increasingly working with communities on research that is both necessary and timely.⁴⁷ Path-breaking work among scholars in Canada examines the histories of Indian Residential Schooling and institutionalisation. Crystal Gail Fraser’s award-winning PhD dissertation provides the most comprehensive historical study of residential schooling during the post-war years, focusing exclusively on the Canadian Arctic.⁴⁸ Drawing upon community relationships and extensive oral histories, Gwichyà Gwich’in concepts of strength and resilience, and the experiences of Indigenous children at Grollier and Stringer Halls in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Fraser brings a unique perspective and methodology that advances our historical understanding of how Indigenous children grappled with lived colonial realities. Did You See Us? Reunion, Remembrance, and Reclamation at an Urban Indian Residential School demonstrates the persistence of the residential schooling system into the second half of the twentieth century, but also how a collaborative model between community and academia can result in an Indigenous-driven research project.⁴⁹ Furthermore, historian Mary Jane McCallum’s book Nii Ndahlohke⁵⁰ for middle school children demonstrates the ways in which histories of colonial trauma can be presented to youth to advance a collective understanding of the history of education.

Although the writing of Indian Residential Schooling is flourishing, there is a continued need for this scholarship and recognition of its potential to affect the lives and futures of Indigenous Peoples. Questions persist regarding residential school curriculum, gender relations, questions of the body, sport and recreation, how children from different Nations and regions experienced the system differently, Indigenous forms of spirituality, Indigenous queerness, and Indigenous strength and resilience.⁵¹ Additionally, there is a need for more nuanced conversations concerning the intersections of race and colonialism within Indian Residential School systems. For example, there were other racialised children (for instance, children from Black and Caribbean communities) who were institutionalised at Indian Residential Schools in Canada, yet these cases have not been explored within the field. Although an exception to the broader work of the Indian Residential Schooling system, this example and others deserve further unpacking and will contribute to our understanding of colonial histories in North America.

Day schooling in colonial North America

Although Indian Residential Schools have often been written as separate from broader historical studies on education and schooling in North America, some scholarship responded to an absence within historical literature to instead consider the goals of schools, and in turn revisit the silences within historical writing. The early works of Nehiyawak politician and lawyer Harold Cardinal in The Unjust Society and The Rebirth of Canada’s Indians, Robin Winks’s The Blacks in Canada, as well as Vincent D’Oyley and Harold Silverman’s edited collection Black Students in Urban Canada, for instance, not only demonstrated how racism and schooling intersected but also responded to an absence in historical scholarship regarding Indigenous and Black communities in Canada.⁵² These scholars joined a growing movement in the history of education shifting away from the writing of educational policy and the individual people who crafted them, to the ‘revisionist historiographical school’, which sought to reconsider the place of social history, and indeed structures of power, to question inequities in educational experiences of diverse communities of people.⁵³ While much scholarship prior to the 1980s sought to demonstrate how schooling and education was structured, a recognition of the importance of socio-political contexts ushered in a new wave of writing that expanded the frameworks of educational institutions across North America. Scholars such as Hilda Neatby (1953), Charles N. Myers (1965), Marvin Lazerson (1971), Michael B. Katz (1971), Alison Prentice (1977), Martha Robles (1977), Paul Axelrod (1982), Bruce Curtis (1988) and others documented the ways in which localised structures of education both responded to national expectations and crafted specific goals not only for young pupils, but also for broader society.⁵⁴ In much the same way that the scholarship on Indian Residential Schools has considered the multiple goals and legacies of schooling institutions, more recent historical writing has attempted to understand the regional, class-based, gender and racial influences within education structures. Ultimately, the revisionist foundations of the late 1970s facilitated an expansion of the field and created growing responses to critiques concerning who gets excluded from the history of education in North America.

Perhaps more pointed in these revisionist works are the ways in which scholars of the history of education have shied away from theoretical underpinnings and decolonial frameworks in the historical writing of North American education. As post-colonial, subaltern and cultural studies gained legitimacy, more recent scholarship embraced theory within educational literature to better understand the motives and rationales of early school promoters. In our assessment, we pay particular attention to the field’s evolution because of increasing debates around critical race theory in education and decolonial theory in educational praxis. Scholarship on education and critical race theory lends much to the critiques of Gloria Ladson-Billings and William F. Tate IV, whose seminal work on Critical Race Theory and Education reviewed race as an analytical tool for understanding school inequality.⁵⁵ Although often not taken up by the field of history of education, they tracked the historical roots and legacies of civil rights law and legislation, including Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas to centre race within educational policy and teaching. Here, Ladson-Billings and Tate considered the impact of school desegregation and the ways it contributed to white flight, ‘along with a loss of African American teaching and administrative positions’.⁵⁶ To a great degree, Ladson-Billings and Tate considered the trajectory of the history of education in ways that have not (always) been embraced by the field. However, they not only explored the history of education in the US context, but also utilised storytelling (and its history) as a way to heal the wounds of racial oppression found within educational institutions. Their scholarship presents an opening to consider the possibilities of including the voices of those who experience marginalisation within schooling structures to better understand ongoing social inequities. Within these dialogues, we situate the histories of Indian Residential Schools, segregated school systems and public schools as colonial institutions that embedded anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racisms into their educational foundations in ways that continue to impact the writing of the history of education.

To this end, Jarvis R. Givens’ analysis in Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching intersects history, cultural theory and pedagogical insight to reconsider the place of Black educators within the history of education.⁵⁷ Offering a meticulous review of Carter G. Woodson’s life, Black segregated schools and the evolution of fugitive pedagogies enacted by Black teachers and students in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Givens considers the role of African American educators as both a historical and ongoing reality. For Givens, ‘fugitive pedagogy accounts for the physical and intellectual acts of subversion engaged in by black people over the course of their educational strivings’.⁵⁸ Positioning fugitivity (and fugitive pedagogy) as the metanarrative of Black educational history, Givens not only documents the historical connections of Black learning and teaching from slavery to post-Emancipation, through to the Jim Crow era and beyond, but he also provides the language by which to understand the political commitments and visions for social transformation enacted by Black Americans in historical and contemporary contexts. Givens’s critical work stands at the forefront of history of education writing and asks us to rethink the uses of history for its transformative potential, particularly to consider the spaces created by Black teachers and Black studies in facilitating innovations in education in the United States.

In a similar fashion, cultural historians consider the place of history of education in producing subjects. For example, scholars in Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling ask how the field of history of education can rethink the problem of social change.⁵⁹ Popkewitz, Franklin and Pereyra bring together ‘cultural, social, and historical theories into a conversation about the politics of schooling, teaching, and knowledge’.⁶⁰ These scholars ask us to think about how interdisciplinary approaches can help expand the field and potential of history of education. Studying the cultural history of education, contributors examine strategies and methodologies within the field to move across the thematic and geographic landscapes of educational research in Europe, Latin America and North America. Ultimately, the volume highlights a transnational focus to rethink historical studies in education, merging the past and present, as well as varied intellectual approaches contributing to the study of history of education. While Cultural History and Education goes as far as to insert the place of postmodernism in educational history, for the purposes of this review we consider its disruption of rigid disciplinary boundaries and practices to assess how diverse fields inform one another, and the writing of history of education.⁶¹ As our own work interrogates educational frameworks crafted by and within Indigenous and Black communities, disciplinary boundaries have always been less defined as we search for ways to best tell stories of historical erasure amidst ongoing legacies of colonialism and enslavement. It is within this framework that we see a growing shift in the writing of history of education: one that utilises interdisciplinary approaches to present a more expansive review of education in North America.

To document this shift, Schooling in Transition: readings in Canadian History of Education charts two centuries of development in the field of history of education to describe the ways in which interdisciplinarity and diversity have since characterised the evolution and expansion of the field.⁶² Schooling in Transition documents the increasing interests of scholars who prioritise categories of race, gender and language in the delivery of public education in Canada.⁶³ Here, we see exciting possibilities and alternative methods in the development of the field of the history of education in North America. As noted by the editors of Cultural History and Education, history of education examines the ways present structures of education can be understood through an examination of the past.⁶⁴ These important interventions shift the gaze of knowledge production away from schooling structures and extend the focus towards historical actors and the ways in which history of education can inform contemporary activisms and calls to action.

Although persons of African descent were continuously excluded from nationalist projects and considered non-citizens in Canada and the United States, ongoing scholarship in the history of education continues to destabilise this notion and highlight the ways processes of racialisation became ‘embedded within the very notions of childhood, womanhood, manhood, education and citizenship’.⁶⁵ Kabria Baumgartner’s award-winning work, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America, explores the place of African American women’s and girls’ activism in the antebellum Northeast United States. Examining the place of Black women and girls in the quest to create more inclusive schooling models in the Northern United States, Baumgartner reviews private seminaries and academies, dairies, letters and essays written by young African American women to tell a different story of Black education in the United States. Most pointed in Baumgartner’s critique is her insertion of Black girlhood within the history of education. Baumgartner argues, ‘Amid this surge of activism, the African American girl became the face of the equal school rights campaign in antebellum Boston’.⁶⁶Centring African American girls (and women) in her discussion of educational inclusion in the United States, Baumgartner’s intersection of religion, race, class and gender documents a more fulsome story of education (inside communities, classrooms and courtrooms) that considers hyperlocal historical contexts, as well as the educational aspirations and grassroots activism of African American communities in the nineteenth century.

Within this scholarship on the history of Black education in the United States is an increasing shift away from simply charting the social and material disparities in predominantly Black schools to writing critical assessments of the role and significance of Black educational institutions in supporting Black leadership and cultural survival. To this end, Adam Fairclough chronicles the history of Black educators from the period of emancipation (1865) to integration (1954) in the southern United States. In A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South, Fairclough positions the long history of Black educational initiative in the United States and situates Black teachers’ participation in and facilitation of a rising political Black consciousness in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁶⁷ Most pointed in Fairclough’s argument is that African Americans ‘did not regard education as a distinct category’.⁶⁸ Instead, education became a fundamental and integral part of Black community formation and life. With this assessment, Fairclough grapples with the paradox of Black education before and after integration in the South. He argues that although the deep structure of racial segregation in the southern United States created tens of thousands of jobs for Black teachers, it also placed severe limitations on what Black educators could do and achieve. Concomitantly, desegregation disproportionally affected Black teachers and ‘not only removed black principals but also displaced other symbols of black authority such as counselors, coaches, and band directors’,⁶⁹ deeply damaging the social fabric of African American communities. Although Fairclough gives equal weight to the triumphs and failures of Black education in this period, he clearly positions the significance of Black educators in the South who helped to weaken the legal foundations of white supremacy and ushered in a wave of civil rights activism.

As such, an increasing body of scholarship highlights the interdisciplinarity of the field alongside its growing expansion in North America. As Rebecca Swartz’s article in this collection argues, reviewing non-traditional sources when writing the histories of education offers a wealth of possibilities looking beyond structures of education shaped by colonialism.⁷⁰ We agree with this assessment and have found that scholarship which uses non-traditional sources prioritises the lived experiences of marginalised communities in ways that seek to correct the erasures of the past and document the radical potential of resistance and resurgence enacted by diverse communities of people. In Schooling the System: A History of Black Women Teachers,⁷¹ for example, Funké Aladejebi features the oral histories of Black women teachers to document the intersections of race and gender in Canadian education systems between the 1940s and 1980s. At a time when education systems crafted the quintessential educator as White, the oral histories of Black women teachers created a counter-narrative and articulated the ways in which Black educators implemented anti-racist programming within their individual schools and disrupted Eurocentric curriculum models and teaching mandates. Situating the oral histories alongside school board minutes, newspapers, yearbooks and community records, Schooling the System contends that Black women educators’ sense of belonging in the professional sphere circumvented subtle and overt forms of racial and social exclusion in Canadian schools.

And yet, within this ever-expanding field stands a hesitance and limited approach to exploring discussions of sex and sexuality in history of education, particularly as it relates to racialised communities. This absence, as Ashley N. Woodson argues, contributes to ‘discourses of invisibility’ in history and history education, making it difficult to locate Black queerness in historical writing across North America.⁷² Woodson’s review of Black lesbian women in history teacher education reflects the disconnect between history of education and Queer history more broadly, despite the growth of critical scholarship on 2SLGBTQIA+ histories in the last 40 years.⁷³ More telling is the inability of these disciplines to speak to one another in a sustained and continuous way. For example, where are the Black lesbian teachers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? Why have their stories been so difficult to recover and tell? Although Woodson’s focus is on education classrooms and the ways in which history is taught, the place and position of lesbian and emancipatory historiographies within her work is worth considering when reading and writing historical scholarship on education, namely for its ability to unearth ‘recurring patterns in the identification, social statuses, behaviors and meanings of women who erotically desired other women across large spans of time’.⁷⁴

Historian Jackie Blount, in Fit to Teach, examines the history of teachers and administrators who had same-sex desires in twentieth-century America by demonstrating how understandings of sexuality and desire have changed over time, as well as how homo- and transphobia have been historically concentrated in schools and approaches to schooling.⁷⁵ An analysis of race, class and other forms of gender fluidity are missing from the book though, making the historical picture incomplete. Karen Graves similarly demonstrates that in Florida, ‘no profession was more critical to the state’s ill-conceived efforts to eliminate homosexuality from American culture than teaching’⁷⁶ but uses both race and gender to analyse oppressive policies. Both Blount and Graves were early leaders in signalling the links between historical and contemporary conditions.⁷⁷

C. Riley Snorton’s work, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, expands on these possibilities. Even though Snorton is reluctant to call Black on Both Sides a history of Black transness, he offers a set of ‘theories of history’ that history of education scholars might scrutinise as the field stretches its disciplinary boundaries. Snorton utilises ‘mid-nineteenth and twentieth-century medical illustrations, pickup notices, fugitive slave narratives, Afromodernist literature, twentieth century journalistic accounts of black people “exposed” as living in/as different genders, true crime books, documentary film, and poetry’ as a way to reconstitute the historical archive.⁷⁸ Moreover, Snorton is forthcoming about the (un)intentional failures of writing Blackness and transness within the historical narrative and instead offers a space for theoretical framings and historical trajectories that ‘further imaginative capacities to construct more livable black and trans worlds’.⁷⁹ Although there is only one mention of an educator in Black on Both Sides, Snorton uses this example to better understand constructions of Blackness within the political and social order of nineteenth-century Georgia.⁸⁰ Perhaps, what Snorton and others offer us is an opening within history of education to interrupt dominant discourses and instead employ a ‘queer of color analysis’, as Lance McCready contends, to question normative assumptions within the field and offer alternative forms of reading our sources.⁸¹

Connected to these silences is a recognition that there are fewer studies related to what federal governments have called ‘Indian schooling’ in Canada and the United States, apart from Indian Residential Schooling histories. With the Federal Indian Day School Class Action settlement, there is increasing interest in the history of Indian Day Schools⁸² and related historiographies.⁸³ Historian Jean Barman examines how Indigenous children in British Columbia (BC) had the option of public day schooling until the nineteenth century,⁸⁴ but Sean Carleton refutes Barman’s timeline and demonstrates that Indigenous children had access to and attended day schooling in BC until the end of the first quarter of the twentieth century.⁸⁵ Carleton explains that there were a number of reasons why Indigenous children avoided institutionalisation at an Indian Residential School: residential schools were at capacity, on-reserve day schooling was unavailable and Indigenous parents sometimes withdrew their children from residential schools after learning about abuse and other crimes. In his doctoral dissertation, Anishinaabe historian Jackson Pind demonstrates the negligent and criminal nature of the Indian Day Schooling System in Ontario between 1899 and 1978 but also proposes an alternative way to understand and access the vast and infamous Indian Affairs ‘RG 10’ archival collection.⁸⁶ Finally, there were several other places where Indigenous children were ‘educated’ and institutionalised that we are unable to include here, due to little or no scholarship on the subjects. Institutions such as Indian Sanitoria, receiving homes, small cottage hostels, separate schools, hospital schools, seasonal schools, group homes and orphanages are among the mix, but the ways in which racialised children and young adults were subjected to state and church education is also neglected in scholarly literature.⁸⁷ These spaces include forced domestic service work, home-management programmes and prison programmes.

Interrogating the educational ‘character’ of the nation

Alongside growing interventions that review non-traditional sources in the history of education in North America are examinations of national histories that complicate the ways education was used both to perpetuate and to disrupt concepts of modernity and progress. Here scholars interrogate the ways in which nation-states used education to mould constructions of the ideal citizen. In How Schools Worked: Education in English Canada, 1900–1940, R. D. Gidney and W. P. J. Millar contend that despite provincial shifts and changes in the ways schools operated at the local level, there were indeed broader moments of connectedness across English Canada.⁸⁸ Pushing against the tendency to write about education through distinctive provincial boundaries, Gidney and Millar instead highlight the ways in which these provincial school systems resembled one another. Gidney and Millar flag this fracture within history of education, arguing, ‘All we want to suggest is that for many pertinent issues there are more fundamental categories of analysis, that there are national patterns that transcend provincial ones, and that provincial comparisons may mask more than they illuminate’.⁸⁹ A critical example of this is best demonstrated by the ways Gidney and Millar reconsider urban and rural school contexts. Situating the character of Canadian society before the 1950s, Gidney and Millar ask us to shift definitions of the rural and urban to think through the ways population density, climate and economic circumstances contributed to definitions of the rural and urban. Although the authors do not highlight schooling experiences for Indigenous or francophone children in their analysis, their meticulous examination of archival evidence and quantitative data foregrounds the impact of school attendance, school expenditure and course enrolments to document the inner workings of Canadian education systems. Gidney and Millar make space for convergence to think through where ‘common ground existed for educational law and policy across Canada’.⁹⁰

Whereas Gidney and Millar seek to better understand how central (largely through federal policy) and local (read as provincial) jurisdictions shared responsibility in creating Canada’s modern system of public education, Wayne J. Urban and Jennings L. Waggoner Jr’s comprehensive examination of American education has gone through numerous editions, providing the context for the development of education in the United States. Acknowledging that there is no single narrative of history, the authors push against linear notions around discussions of progressive education and resist Eurocentric assumptions that position the place of knowledge production and education in North America as transplanted by ‘Englishmen’.⁹¹ Urban and Waggoner Jr consider how European settler colonists both depended on and recast Indigenous children as ‘learners’. The authors take on the daunting task of charting regional differences to include education in New England, the backcountry settlements of the South, and the colonial South. Grounded in these foundations, Urban and Waggoner Jr acknowledge that the creation of American educational institutions was ‘hierarchical, class bound, and markedly uneven in terms of opportunity’.⁹² Whereas Gidney and Millar found moments of convergence in education systems across Canada, Urban and Waggoner situate these regional differences at the centre of schooling foundations. Take, for example, their discussion of common schools. While they were adopted in New England to consider the ways in which schools could foster ideas of public good and prepare pupils for life, regions in the American South and Midwest viewed common school ideals with suspicion.⁹³ Urban and Waggoner Jr conclude their review of education in the United States to situate the increasing presence and dominance of politics in individual schools. While they argue that America’s public school system was built on compromise and coalition, its review of racial minorities including Mexican and Chinese Americans is largely understated and relegated to discussions of bilingualism and language within school systems in the United States.

Although Urban and Waggoner Jr pay particular attention to the ways education in the United States was fractured along the lines of race and language, Victoria-María MacDonald’s work firmly placed the role of education alongside histories of American imperialism, capitalism and colonisation.⁹⁴ Reviewing the education of peoples of Hispanic descent in the United States, Latino Education in the United States: A Narrated History From 1513–2000 presents a heterogeneous account of diverse Latinx communities to account for class, nationalist identities, Spanish language variation and generational difference.⁹⁵ While much of the historical studies reviewing Latinx education in the United States is situated around localised historical studies and the impact of linguistic and government policies on Latinx children, MacDonald extends this conversation to examine the colonial era of schooling under Spanish rule. Though the boundaries of the United States had not yet extended in the sixteenth century, MacDonald considers the roots of Hispanic American identities alongside the role of Catholicism in the formation of early educational structures in the United States. MacDonald’s work is rich in primary source detail offering a critique of the ways in which the history of education in the United States has been written, but also firmly contextualises how language, colonial conquest and settlement remained at the heart of the development of education systems in the United States.

As with a growing number of scholars examining the colonial structures of education in North America, MacDonald engages in a massive undertaking tracking the place of Spanish political history, Christianisation and Hispanicisation of Indigenous peoples, and modern segregated school systems’ effects on Hispanic Americans. MacDonald is also careful to consider the historical birth of Puerto Rico and Cuba, the transfer of colonial power and their connections to the experiences of Indigenous, Mexican and African American populations. For MacDonald, the complexity of Latinx educational encounters in American history was not simply a recent twentieth-century construction, but rather a had longer roots in the creation and development of Latinx communities across the nation. In much the same ways that Urban and Waggoner Jr allude to towards the end of their work, MacDonald situates education and the politics of the nation, capitalist interests and racial hierarchies at the centre of Latinx education in America. Considering the limitations of our own review of the history of education in North America through English-language texts, MacDonald cautions on the missed opportunities and expansive potential of reviewing non-English primary sources for historical analysis.

Perhaps works such as Mirelsie Velázquez’s Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940–1977 offer a way forward to extend discussions of coloniality when considering the politics of place within education systems.⁹⁶ In her review of the everyday treatment of Puerto Ricans in Chicago in the mid-twentieth century, Velázquez intricately charts the ways in which school agents not only transplanted imperial intentions through their educational projects beginning in 1898, but also shifted their goals based on the local conditions of post-Second-World-War Chicago. Mapping this discussion alongside the schooling experiences of other marginalised groups including Indigenous and African American populations, Velázquez provides a historical reading of how Puerto Rican community members challenged and claimed spaces of education in urban Chicago. In Velázquez’s analysist, the city weighs heavily on the educational landscape of the era. She argues that ‘the racialization of Puerto Ricans in Chicago resulted in schooling inequalities and community displacement, forcing the population to respond in various ways in the hope of alleviating concerns’.⁹⁷ Chicago schools were sites of contestation where Puerto Rican residents (alongside other marginalised populations) mobilised to challenge dominant forces in the city. Puerto Rican Chicago makes a compelling argument about the ways in which schools can become sites of reclamation and be transformed into places where belonging is negotiated. Velázquez’s review of the complicated ways in which Puerto Ricans reimagined their sense of home and community within the urban spaces of education illuminates the processes of racialisation in the United States and reconsiders the definitions of citizenship within nation-states. Certainly, ongoing scholarship in the history of education is considering the intersections of colonialism, migration and community formation as central to the story of education in North America.

Examining the goals of education in nation-building projects

Despite the unevenness of education across North America, scholars of history education call attention to nation-building projects in Canada, the United States and Mexico that encouraged an increasing focus on the purpose of schooling itself, and the ways in which schools could serve nation-states. Scholars such as Kristina Llewyellyn consider the ways in which schools rethought the purpose of Canadian citizenship through women teachers. In Democracy’s Angels: The Work of Women Teachers, Llewellyn considers the ways social and political regulators in Canada looked towards post-secondary schools to restore ideals of normativity and whiteness in the post-Second-World-War period. Llewellyn contends that, ‘a gender hierarchy, marked by class, race, and sexuality was an implicit part of the educational agenda for democracy’ as white women teachers were held as the moral gatekeepers for future citizens.⁹⁸ Although positioned as quasi-citizens themselves, white women teachers were held as mothers of the nation, both structurally and symbolically in the post-war period.⁹⁹ Going beyond the traditional discourse of the development of educational progressivism of the period, Llewyellyn makes a case for the contradictions of this era. While the service and labour of white women teachers ultimately left the power of educational democracy to men, it also offered a space by which white women could exercise political participation and citizenship. Evaluating the growing feminisation of teaching and women’s place within post-secondary teaching, Democracy’s Angels tells us of the ways public secondary schools were contested spaces where women’s gender and occupational identities were crafted. However, they were also crafted by the political values and purpose of secondary schooling itself. Within these contradictions, the place of Indigenous and Black educators was erased from the gendered goals of the nation.

Although turning his attention away from individual educators to the institution of higher education, Christopher P. Loss posits that the role of higher education increased rapidly after the Second World War.¹⁰⁰ In his analysis, Loss tracks the progress and increasing access that the state had to higher education institutions and the emergence of higher education’s role in helping the state to manage societal relationships. Rather than assume higher education’s implicit role in managing state–society relationships, Loss instead charts the trajectory and eventual emergence of American higher education as a parastate. Loss’s analysis of the twentieth-century socio-political conditions makes for a rich analysis rooted in ideas of democratic citizenship, much like Llewellyn’s work. Loss also insists on historical context, not simply to map the chronological development of higher education, but to make a broader argument regarding the goals of higher education in shaping and educating American citizens for life in a democracy. Loss weaves the international and national, state and local, as well as the institutional and personal to consider the politics of higher education. Ultimately, Loss positions an examination of the history of education to describe shifts in the role of higher education and its ability to ‘mediate relationships between citizens and the state’ for centuries.¹⁰¹ Works produced by Llewellyn and Loss indicate a growing body of literature examining the goals of education in North America as directly intertwined with the values of nation-states, ultimately impacting who was constructed as a democratic citizen and who was not.

Other scholars have taken a similar but varied approach in their review of educational citizenship in the history of education. Robert Vipond’s analysis in Making a Global City: How One Toronto School Embraced Diversity, for example, considers the ways in which the politics of multicultural citizenship were negotiated within individual schools like the Clinton Street Public School. Standing as a microhistory and part biography of Clinton Street Public school in Toronto, Vipond considers the debates and practices of citizenship formation through a layered examination of Toronto’s immigrant community. As post-Second-World-War Canada negotiated its rising immigrant population, so too did school administrators’ desire to better shape and prepare new Canadians for citizenship in a liberal democracy.¹⁰² It is here that Vipond, and an increasing list of scholars reviewing the history of education, considers the meaning of citizenship and the role of schools in constructing citizenship over time. Although Vipond makes claims for the restoration of ‘the Clinton model of citizenship’ and categorises Clinton’s school based on its ethnic and immigrant populations in ways that need to be troubled, his arguments position the place (and potential) of institutional biographies within history of education.¹⁰³ Perhaps the takeaway from Vipond’s work is that although multicultural citizenship remained firmly grounded in Canadian political discourse on a national level, it was first negotiated within individual schools across Canada.¹⁰⁴

This growing push to consider the national–local goals of education continues to inform the writing and development of history of education across North America. Maria Adelina Arredondo López, for example, uses a case study of Chihuahua, Mexico, to understand the ways in which formal education programmes that developed along the frontier of northern Mexico facilitated a culture of ‘uniformity’ and intolerance in the nineteenth century.¹⁰⁵ Here, Arredondo López charts how structures of Spanish colonialism remained embedded in the goals of public education before and after Mexican independence. She argues that ‘schooling began to determine social rank in those border regions where, apparently, social or economic distinctions were not as marked as in central and southern Mexico’.¹⁰⁶ As a result, Indigenous and Mestizo children learned that in order to be part of a ‘unified’ dominant Mexican identity, they needed to shed their own cultures, adopting different styles of language, manners and etiquette. Utilising textbooks and literature produced in the era, Arredondo López charts the subtle and overt ways dichotomous categories between ‘barbarians’ and ‘civilised persons’ were used in the curriculum to distinguish and isolate diverse populations in northern Mexico. The result was an increasing state of violence and abuse, which became a necessary part of assimilation after Mexican independence. Ultimately, Arredondo López asserts that ‘school lessons transcended school walls; they spilled over into the streets, markets and workplaces’ leaving devastating effects in Chihuahua.¹⁰⁷

In From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista Mexico, 1924–1935, Andrae Marak grapples with similar concerns to outline the place of education and citizenship in post-revolutionary Mexico.¹⁰⁸ Making a concerted effort to focus on the development of education under Plutarco Elías Calles’s rule, Marak contends that the nation-building project after the Mexican revolution was deeply rooted in educational citizenship as a way to unify and centralise Mexican society. Between 1924 and 1935, the Mexican government sought to shift the political and economic goals of society through educational policies and institutions. Marak’s interventions use an important regional analysis of Mexico’s northern frontier, including areas such as Chihuahua, Sonora and Coahuila, to consider the ways the educational nation-building project viewed the Mexican countryside. Shifting the gaze away from urban centres, Marak’s analysis reviews not only the ways in which federal goals for educational assimilation viewed Indigenous Peoples as recipients of a ‘modernised’ education system in their quest to create good Mexican citizens and workers, but also that these same communities circumvented and used federal programmes to advance their own goals for access and land ownership. According to Marak, ‘indigenous people were interested in harnessing the federal government in an attempt to protect their access to and ownership over land and other social, economic, and cultural resources’.¹⁰⁹ Ultimately, Marak charts a story of thwarted attempts by local, state and federal officials to absorb Indigenous populations in Mexico through educational assimilation. He weaves a complex story of Mexican patriotism, resistance to US cultural imperialism along the Mexican–US border and federal desires to create a unified Mexican culture through education. His work considers how the creation of a federally sponsored school system both aided in the federal desires for modernisation and reflected the political motives and desires of state leaders.

Conclusion: new directions when connecting the past and the present

After having reviewed several decades of historiography related to education and schooling in North America, this section closes with some recommendations and hopes for the field. Perhaps as a reflection of the limitations within this analysis, we call for more in-depth and nuanced approaches to Black, Indigenous and Latinx histories. Geographer Alison Mountz and others develop a ‘feminist care ethics’ that offers a ‘cultivating space to care for ourselves, our colleagues, and our students’, which they describe as a ‘political activity’ because those practices do not align with current neoliberal university practices.¹¹⁰ In doing so, we are growing the movement of ‘slow scholarship’, which has the potential to improve ‘academic cultures and processes’.¹¹¹ What is missing here, however, is the health and wellness of the broader community, outside academic institutions. For centuries, western research was – and arguably continues to be – based on imperial and colonial discourses, methodologies and praxes. Māori education scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith highlights theorist Albert Memmi’s concept of ‘a series of negations’, which described racialised societies as such: ‘they were not fully human, they were not civilized enough to have systems, they were not literate, their languages and modes of thought were inadequate’.¹¹² Indeed, scholars and academics embraced this thinking too; one does not have to look far into the past to see the ways in which scientists, anthropologists, historians, medical professionals and others have exploited and harmed racialised communities. By embodying the practice of slow scholarship, we shall learn how to better consult the people who are connected to our work, craft and grow research projects that will help instead of hinder people, develop new ethical models of care and praxis, and support racialised communities in their assertion of autonomy, self-determination and sovereignty.

We encourage education scholars of all backgrounds to deeply consider and contend with the work that has already been done by Black, Indigenous and Latinx academics, and others who come from and work with marginalised communities. Although our histories are connected by oppression, colonialism, enslavement and genocide, our communities do not necessarily want to be defined by this violence and resulting trauma. In 2009, Unangax Education scholar Eve Tuck highlighted the vexed and troubled relationships between Indigenous Peoples and (often) non-Indigenous researchers, writing that ‘historical exploitation and mistreatment of people and material’¹¹³ resulted in ‘damage-centered research’, where privileged scholars focus on ‘documenting the pain or loss in an individual, community, or tribe’.¹¹⁴ Historically, racialised and marginalised communities have found themselves at the centre of academic research, but excluded from decision-making processes related to which questions to ask, how to frame arguments and what kind of evidence to draw upon. As such, Tuck invites us to revise ‘research in our communities not only to recognize the need to document the effects of oppression on our communities but also to consider the long-term repercussions of thinking of ourselves as broken’ and calls for a moratorium on damage-centred research.¹¹⁵ If unsure, however, it is best practice to cultivate and grow relationships with communities that will provide tangible benefits, rather than deciding for oneself or working independently.

Critical race theorists support Tuck’s call and insist on a push towards developing counter-stories to shift attention away from ‘deficit-informed research’ and provide mechanisms to disrupt dominant narratives regarding racialised populations.¹¹⁶ Such counter-stories offer theoretical, methodological and pedagogical tools that challenge forms of racism in North American society and elsewhere, while also positioning the voices and experiential knowledge of racialised communities as central to social justice research. Importantly, Tuck’s work does not reject the historical injustices and deep-seated trauma that racialised communities and peoples have endured for centuries. Rather, her work encourages us to consider that ‘even when communities are broken and conquered, they are so much more than that – so much more that this incomplete story is an act of aggression’.¹¹⁷

We wonder about turning our attention to the histories of curriculum in North America to consider questions concerning how anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism and White supremacy affected curriculum in colonial day schools, as well as in Indian Residential Schools and segregated school structures. Despite more recent publications including Catherine Larochelle’s L’école du racisme: La construction de l’altérité à l’école québécoise (1830–1915), scholarly literature on the history of education in North America currently does not adequately grapple with the many questions we have about race, racialised teachings and the effects of racism on children.¹¹⁸ We suspect this will change as more Black, Indigenous and other racialised scholars are trained and as institutions better fund these projects. For example, Fraser’s research on the history of Indigenous children’s experiences while institutionalised at Indian Residential Schools during the second half of the twentieth century in the Northwest Territories has found that Indigenous children were taught about, and internalised, racialised assumptions and stereotypes concerning their Indigeneity, and concerning persons of African descent. Through working with yearbooks published at Day and Indian Residential Schools, Fraser found that Indigenous children were taught to perform Blackface minstrelsy at northern institutions.¹¹⁹ Despite clear archival evidence highlighting the complex social relationships negotiated within school systems, there is no scholarly literature documenting how anti-Black racism was embedded in Euro-Canadian programming for Indigenous Peoples in what is now known as Canada or how it was a part of Indian Day and Residential schooling curriculum. Records like these are abundant in archives, which prompts us to ask: why are scholars not giving these topics the attention they deserve?

We also know that histories of imperialism, colonialism, racism and ongoing violence are not limited to North America. There has been little advancement in our understanding of how these histories are part of the larger transnational experience of education and schooling. Early missionaries, explorers and fur traders travelled the globe – from the Arctic to Africa to the Caribbean to Aotearoa – and were often the first to implement early forms of colonial schooling among First Peoples. Edited by Stephen Minton, there is but one collection that elaborates on the removal of Indigenous children from their families and their subsequent institutionalisation at an educational facility in an international context but it excludes Canadian and South Asian contexts.¹²⁰ Part of this absence, we contend, is because the history of education seems to be siloed not only in the way it approaches the content but also in how educational historians and scholars critique the discipline. We encourage broader collaboration reviewing time-period, geography and disciplinary approaches.

Histories and historiographies of education are deeply important today and continue to resonate across communities in North America. As questions concerning childhood, schooling and education continue to make headlines around the world, the ongoing lived realities of Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities within the colonial geopolitical boundaries of North America suggest that much work remains in designing learning systems and training educators and staff to deliver equitable material for diverse communities. In addition, public education about these topics is sorely needed. The ways in which international communities have expressed deep-seated shock and outrage (and, in some cases, denial) of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the former sites of Indian Residential Schools in Canada is one indicator of both the unfamiliarity with and rejection of colonial histories. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, a federal commission, brought Survivor experiences and residential school histories to the forefront of public discourse through its national events and conversations. The Commission also published a massive final report in December 2015.¹²¹ Despite our societal knowledge regarding inequitable models and outcomes for racialised students, there remain countless examples of how education and schooling for racialised students remains inequitable, not only in Canada but across North America.

Adverse, harmful and even violent experiences continue to mar school programmes and student outcomes in racialised communities. Toronto-based author and scholar Robyn Maynard argues that, for Black students, ‘schools are places where they experience degradation, harm, and physical violence’ and ‘experience schools as carceral places characterized by neglect, heightened surveillance, and arbitrary and often extreme punishment for any perceived disobedience’.¹²² Although anti-Black racism is reflected through distinctive histories in Canada, the United States and Mexico, the colonial foundations of schooling institutions have meant that overt and covert forms of racism practised within school settings continue to deeply affect the material and lived realities of Black, Indigenous and other racialised students.

Recent concerns highlighting the under-representation of Black teachers within schools, Eurocentric curriculum models, more punitive disciplinary actions directed to Black students, high suspension and expulsion rates among Black students, and the over-representation of Black youth in lower-level academic programming indicate that these concerns are not simply issues rooted in the historical past, but articulated in present-day school structures and public discourses.¹²³ The funding inequity between primary and secondary schools that serve Indigenous children on-reserve and provincial schools for Canadian children sits at approximately 30%.¹²⁴ Statistics for on-reservation schooling in the United States are just as bleak. For Indigenous children who attend school off-reserve, there are numerous examples of racism and ignorance not only in the classroom from teachers and fellow students, but also from administrators and school boards.

Some of these anxieties are exemplified in the most recent backlash over the insertion of critical race theory (CRT) in schools across the United States.¹²⁵ Scholars highlight, in much the same ways that we flag the goals of the nation-state within schools in earlier sections of this article, the ways conservative activists launched increasing public critiques concerning the place of CRT in K–12 schools, calling for its ban in the United States. Rooted within these debates were not only misconceptions regarding the uses and implementation of CRT in schools, but the ways in which systemic inequalities and racial inequality continue to reflect unconscious biases, anti-Black racism and overt practices of discrimination in public school systems.¹²⁶

These experiences are not solely related to primary and secondary schooling for racialised communities. For instance, in 2014, 43 Indigenous students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers College in Guerrero, Mexico went missing after their bus was ambushed and attacked during a trip to Mexico City. Latin American journalist Marina Franco writes that this case ‘has become a symbol of the violence, impunity and broken rule of law that plagues Mexico’¹²⁷ and demonstrates the ways in which the lives of Indigenous Peoples in Mexico are similarly threatened by settler colonial states through their educational interactions with it.¹²⁸ Many of the families of these missing post-secondary students are limited in their search for justice: they do not speak Spanish and they live in areas framed as ‘secluded’. Perhaps rooted in the regional differences flagged in Marak’s work, these complexities make interactions with Mexican policing bodies and the settler state even more difficult and inequitable. That the lives of racialised students are threatened and sometimes violently taken reflects the persisting, deeply problematic nature of systemic racism and oppression in schools.

We look to academic institutions to advance these marginalised histories. As scholars of schooling, education and racialised communities in Canada, we ask what academic institutions, departments and disciplinary fields are doing to support the training of Black, Indigenous and other Peoples of Colour to pursue these important and often difficult histories? In the context of Indigenous issues, historians Crystal Gail Fraser and Allyson Stevenson argue that ‘it is the responsibility of all history departments and historians to actively engage in reconciliation by scrutinizing our deep-seated beliefs about what history should be and for whom and consider how these actions relate to our research and teaching’.¹²⁹ Although Truth and Reconciliation in Canada has been framed in the context of First Nations, Métis and Inuit populations, we contend that reconciliatory efforts need to be made towards other racialised communities too. In other words, universities and post-secondary institutions need to mend relationships with communities that they have once exploited, establish good relationships based on reciprocity, and consult with interested and relevant parties on research moving forward. Additionally, there ought to be funding, programmes and supports in place to facilitate and encourage the training of the next generation of racialised scholars across disciplines not only to generate the research capacity needed to examine these sorely needed histories, but to advance the field in a way that is more representative of our lived realities. In doing so, we shall further understand and dismantle structures of White supremacy at the institutional level and better understand the histories of schooling and education of our ancestors.

In this article, we have briefly outlined and discussed the historiography of education in North America, with a particular focus on Canada. We asked: What does it mean to consider the history of education in North America amidst global unrest? We have explored this question through four different sections, touching on the writing of Indian Residential Schools histories, early schooling structures alongside broader national histories as a way of gauging the historiography of the field, and finally considered the challenges to dominant national narratives and offered possibilities for new directions and dimensions in the history of education in North America. In these sections, we argued that the history of education has the potential to be transformative in how we think about the histories of education, schooling, curriculum, gender, racialisation, and children and youth. New directions are already under way and suggest that a radical reimagining of the field and the content can force new methodological approaches in the scholarly literature on the history of education. This is not to say, however, that new methods and creative approaches cannot be improved. Given that the history of schooling continues to have implications for both contemporary issues and schooling systems themselves, focusing on research for equity-seeking groups and learning about anti-racist and decolonial methodologies and practices are timely and sorely needed.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Funké Aladejebi

Funké Aladejebi is a scholar of the twentieth century with a specialisation in Black Canadian history. Her recently published book, Schooling the System: A History of Black Women Teachers, explores the intersections of race, gender and access in Canadian educational institutions. She is the co-editor of Unsettling the Great White North: Black Canadian History, a collection highlighting the diverse experiences of persons of African descent within the chronicles of Canada’s past. Her work explores the importance of Black Canadian women in sustaining their communities and preserving a distinct Black identity within restrictive gender and racial barriers. Funké Aladejebi has been involved in a variety of community engagement and social justice initiatives in Toronto and her research interests are in oral history, the history of education in Canada, Black feminist thought and transnationalism.

Crystal Gail Fraser

Crystal Gail Fraser (she/her/hers) is a Gwichyà Gwich’in and a historian of colonialism and how it relates to Indigenous Peoples in what is now known as Canada. Her PhD research focused on the history of student experiences at Indian Residential Schools in the Inuvik Region (Northwest Territories) between 1959 and 1996. This work, T’aih k’ìighe’ tth’aih zhit dìidìch’ùh or By Strength We Are Still Here, won the 2020 John Bullen Prize from the Canadian Historical Association. Indigenous communities, the North and Indigenous voices and perspectives are at the centre of Crystal’s research. She is a key part of national conversations on Indian Residential Schooling, reconciliation and anti-racist methodologies. In autumn 2022, Crystal was awarded the Distinguished Academic Early Career Award from the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations.

Notes

¹ The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation was formerly known as Orange Shirt Day, which was rooted in Indigenous communities and based on the story of Secwepemc Survivor Phyllis Jack Webstad.

² This article distinguishes the definitions of education and schooling to consider the ways in which education within racialised communities was constructed prior to, and in spite of, colonial systems and processes of schooling. Instead, we contemplate Mwalimu Shujaa’s examination of relations of power embedded within schooling systems and prioritise Indigenous and Black knowledges, expertise, values and traditions as an important form of education that was both connected to, but also stood outside of, formal schooling structures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Mwalimu J. Shujaa, ‘Education and Schooling: You Can Have One without the Other’, Urban Education 27, no. 4 (January 1993): 329.

³ We capitalise certain words to acknowledge their importance. Nehiyawak literary scholar Gregory Younging explains that we use ‘capitals where conventional style does not. It is a deliberate decision’. See Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing by and about Indigenous Peoples (Edmonton, AB: Brush Education, 2018), 77.

⁴ We grappled with the use of language in this article. BIPOC is a familiar yet, in so many ways, unsatisfying term. We settled upon describing Black, Indigenous and Latinx communities as ‘racialised’, but also recognise that this terminology obscures the ways white populations too are racialised (often resulting in privilege over non-white populations). See Linda Peake and Brian Ray, ‘Racializing the Canadian Landscape: Whiteness, Uneven Geographies and Social Justice’, Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 45, no. 1 (2001) 180–186; Alastair Bonnett, White Identities: Historical and International Perspectives (London: Routledge, 2000); Steve Martinot, The Machinery of Whiteness: Studies in the Structure of Racialisation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010); Meera E. Deo, ‘Why BIPOC Fails’, Virginal Law Review Online 107 (June 2021) 115–142; Amy Harmon, ‘BIPOC or POC? Equity or Equality? The Debate Over Language on the Left’, New York Times, November November 1, 2021.

⁵ The scholarly literature we consulted comprises English-language publications. We recognise that we are missing important contributions from other languages spoken in North America. Readers may be interested in Revista Mexicana de Historia de la Educación. Additionally, the Canadian Historical Review and Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation regularly publishes in French. See also Luz Elena Galvân and Susana Quintanilla, Historiografta de la education, Serie La Investigation Educativa en los Ocbenta, Perspectiva para las Noventa. Cuademos de Estados de Conocimiento (Mexico: Segundo Congreso Nacional de Investigaciôn Educativa, 1993), 28; Luz Elena Galvân Lafarga, ‘Un recorrido por la histoiia de la education hoy en dia’, Educar, Nueva época, III (1997); Eugenio Martinez, Politica educativa en el Estado de Mexico, 1910–1950 (Toluca: Universidad Autonoma del Estado de Mexico, 1990); Elvia Montes de Oca, La educaciôn socialista en el Estado de Mexico, 1934–1950 (Zinacantepec: El Colegio Mexiquense, 1998). For Francophone publications, see Paul Aubin, Les communautés religieuses et l’édition du manuel scolaire au Québec, 1765–1964 (Sherbrooke: Ex libris, 2001); Paul Aubin, ed., 300 ans de manuels scolaires au Québec (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2006); Louise Bienvenue, Ollivier Hubert and Christine Hudon, Le collège classique pour garçons: études historiques sur une institution québécoise disparue (Montréal: Fides, 2014); Jean-Pierre Charland, L’entreprise éducative au Québec, 1840–1900 (Sainte-Foy: Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000); Bruce Curtis, Ruling by Schooling Quebec: Conquest to Liberal Governmentality – A Historical Sociology, Ruling by Schooling Quebec (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Andrée Dufour, Histoire de l’éducation au Québec (Montréal: Boréal, 1997); Louis LeVasseur, ‘L’enseignement dans les collèges classiques au XXe siècle: une vision du monde en difficile harmonie avec la modernisation de la société québécoise’, Historical Studies in Education 14, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 35–66.

⁶ We are grateful for the recommendations of a French-speaking reviewer to include scholarly literature regarding Indian Residential Schools written in French. See Paul Véronique, ‘La blessure qui dormait à poings fermés: l’héritage des pensionnats autochtones au Québec’, Études d’Histoire Religieuse 87, no. 1/2 (2021) 80–82; Gilles Ottawa, Les pensionnats indiens au Québec. Un double regard (Québec: Éditions Cornac, 2010); Marie-Pierre Bousquet, ‘Êtres libres ou sauvages à civiliser? Revue d’histoire de l’enfance “irrégulière”’, Le Temps de l’histoire 14 (December 30, 2012) 162–192; Marie-Pierre Bousquet, ‘La constitution de la mémoire des pensionnats indiens au Québec: drame collectif autochtone ou histoire commune?’, Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 46, no. 2–3 (2016): 165–176.

⁷ Despite its name, the Sixties Scoop operated from the 1940s to the 1980s. Federal and provincial governments adopted Indigenous children out to non-Indigenous (largely white) Canadian families without the consent of Indigenous parents, severing the connection between children and their families, languages, Land and cultures. See Allyson Stevenson, Intimate Integration: A History of the Sixties Scoop and the Colonisation of Indigenous Kinship (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021).

⁸ For more, see Karen Stote, ‘The Coercive Sterilization of Indigenous Women in Canada’, American Indian Culture & Research Journal 36, no. 3 (2012); James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Indigenous Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2019).

⁹ Derek G. Smith, ‘“The Policy of Aggressive Civilization” and Projects of Governance in Roman Catholic Industrial Schools for Native Peoples in Canada, 1870–95’, Anthropologica 43, no. 2 (2001): 264.

¹⁰ John L. Tobias, ‘Protection, Civilization, Assimilation: An Outline of History of Canada’s Indian Policy’, in Sweet Promises: A Reader on Indian–White Relations in Canada, ed. J. R. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).

¹¹ There are now dozens of Indigenous memoirs published. See Jesse Thistle, From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way (Toronto: Simon & Schuster, 2019); Joseph Auguste Merasty and David Carpenter, The Education of Augie Merasty (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2015); Bev Sellars, They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013); Alice Blondin-Perrin, My Heart Shook Like a Drum: What I Learned at the Indian Mission Schools, Northwest Territories (Ottawa: Borealis Press, 2009); Shirley Stirling, My Name is Seepeetza (Toronto: Douglas & McIntyre, 1997); Basil Johnston, Indian School Days (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1988).

¹² Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed. (London: Zed Books, 2012), 35.

¹³ Scott Trevithick, ‘Native Residential Schooling in Canada: A Review of Literature’, Canadian Journal of Native Studies 18, no. 1 (1998): 52.

¹⁴ Jacqueline Gresko, ‘White “Rites” and Indian “Rites”: Indian Education and Native Responses in the West, 1870–1910’, in Western Canada: Past and Present, ed. Anthony W. Rasporich (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1975), 163.

¹⁵ Ibid., 164, 181.

¹⁶ Ibid., 164.

¹⁷ Jean Barman, Yvonne Hébert and Don McCaskill, ‘The Legacy of the Past: An Overview’, in Indian Education in Canada, Volume I: The Legacy, ed. Jean Barman, Yvonne Hébert and Don McCaskill (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986), xviii.

¹⁸ Ibid., 1.

¹⁹ Celia Haig-Brown, Resistance and Renewal: Surviving the Indian Residential School (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1988).

²⁰ Ibid., 26.

²¹ Jacqueline Gresko, ‘Review’, Canadian Historical Review 70, no. 3 (1989) 453–454; Robert J. Carney, ‘Review’, Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology 5, no. 26 (November 1989), 852–854.

²² J. R. Miller, ‘Owen Glendower, Hotspur, and Canadian Indian Policy’, Ethnohistory 37, no. 4 (Fall 1990), 386–415.

²³ Ibid., 397–8.

²⁴ J. R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 409, 418.

²⁵ Elizabeth Furniss, Victims of Benevolence: The Dark Legacy of the Williams Lake Residential School (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995).

²⁶ Ibid., 10–11.

²⁷ Ibid., 13.

²⁸ Ibid., 105–6.

²⁹ John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 with a foreword by Mary Jane Logan McCallum, 2nd ed. (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2017), ix.

³⁰ Government of Canada, Report on the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1996).

³¹ Stephen Harper, Government of Canada, ‘Statement of Apology – to former students of Indian Residential Schools’, June 11, 2008.

³² Milloy, A National Crime, 305.

³³ The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) called the system ‘cultural genocide’, but the Commission’s own report suggests there is no need for the qualifier ‘cultural’. On 1 July 2021, the Canadian Historical Association–Société historique du Canada ‘recognize[d] that this history fully warrants our use of the word genocide’. See TRC, Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (Ottawa: Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015), 1; Canadian Historical Association–Société historique du Canada, ‘Canada Day Statement: The History of Violence Against Indigenous Peoples Fully Warrants the Use of The Word ‘Genocide,’ July 1, 2021.

³⁴ Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonising Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia, 1900–1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), xix, 57–80.

³⁵ Maureen Lux, ‘“I Was in Darkness”: Schools and Missions’, in Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 103-137.

³⁶ Ibid., 137.

³⁷ Ian Mosby, ‘Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biomedical Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952’, Histoire Sociale/Social History 46, no. 91 (May 2013): 148.

³⁸ To be clear, Indigenous communities and Survivors have been asking these questions for decades. It has only been since the national conversation concerning unmarked graves at the former sites of Indian Residential Schools in Canada that scholars have seriously turned to this historical inquiry.

³⁹ K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), xi.

⁴⁰ Sherry Farrell Racette, ‘Haunted: First Nations Children in Residential School Photography’, in Depicting Canada’s Children, ed. Loren Lerner (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2009), 52. Krista McCracken has also examined Indian archival photographs: ‘Archival Photographs in Perspective: Indian Residential School Images of Health’, British Journal of Canadian Studies 30, no. 2 (2017).

⁴¹ Loren Lerner, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Depicting Canada’s Children, xviii.

⁴² Margaret D. Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1800–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009).

⁴³ Ann Laura Stoler, Intimacies of Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006).

⁴⁴ Andrew Woolford, This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2015), 3.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 2.

⁴⁷ Rob Innes, ‘Introduction: Native Studies & Native Cultural Preservation, Revitalization, and Persistence’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 32, no. 4 (2010).

⁴⁸ Crystal Gail Fraser, ‘T’aih k’ìighe’ tth’aih zhit dìidìch’ùh (By Strength, We Are Still Here): Indigenous Northerners Confronting Hierarchies of Power at Day and Residential Schools in Nanhkak Thak (the Inuvik Region, Northwest Territories), 1959 to 1982’ (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 2019).

⁴⁹ Survivors of the Assiniboia Indian Residential School, Did You See Us?: Reunion, Remembrance, and Reclamation at an Urban Indian Residential School, ed. Andrew Woolford (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2021).

⁵⁰ Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Nii Ndahlohke: Boys’ and Girls’ Work at Mount Elgin Indian Industrial School, 1890–1915 (Winnipeg: Friesen Press, 2022), 103–137.

⁵¹ There are some scholarly contributions that address these subfields, but far more research is needed. See Allan Downey, ‘Colonizing the Creator’s Game in Residential School’, in The Creator’s Game: Lacross, Identity, and Indigenous Nationhood (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2018); Evan J. Habkirk, ‘From Indian Boys to Canadian Men? The Use of Cadet Drill in the Canadian Indian Residential School System’, British Journal of Canadian Studies 30, no. 2 (2017), 227–247; R. James, ‘An Evolution in Queer Indigenous Oral Histories through the Canadian Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement’, International Journal of Human Rights 24, no. 4 (April 2020):335–356; Andrew Woolford, Morgan Fontaine and Theodore Fontaine, Did You See Us?: Reunion, Remembrance, and Reclamation at an Urban Indian Residential School (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2021); TRC, Canada’s Residential Schools: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, (6 vols, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016).

⁵² Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society (Toronto: Douglas & McIntrye, 1999 [1969]); Harold Cardinal, The Rebirth of Canada’s Indians (Edmonton: Hurtig Publishers, 1978); Robin W. Winks, The Blacks in Canada: A History (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971, 1997); Vincent D’Oyley and Harold Silverman, eds., Black Students in Urban Canada (Toronto: Ministry of Culture and Recreation, 1976).

⁵³ Sara Z. Burke and Patrice Milewski, eds., Schooling in Transition: Readings in Canadian History of Education (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 5; Paul Axelrod, ‘Historical Writing and Canadian Education from the 1970s to the 1990s’, History of Education Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 38.

⁵⁴ Hilda Neatby, So Little for the Mind (Toronto: Clarke, Irwin, and Company, 1952); Charles N. Myers, Education and National Development in México (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1965); Marvin Lazerson, Origins of the Urban School: Public Education in Massachusetts, 1870–1915 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Michael B. Katz, Class, Bureaucracy Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America (New York: Praeger, 1971); Alison Prentice, The School Promoters: Education and Social Class in Mid-Nineteenth Century Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1977); Martha Robles, Educación y sociedad en la historia de México (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1977); Paul Axelrod, Scholars and Dollars: Politics, Economics and the Universities of Ontario, 1945–1980 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982, 1986); Bruce Curtis, Building the Educational State: Canada West, 1836–1871 (London: Althouse Press, 1988). See also francophone sources, including Louise Bienvenue and Andréanne Lebrun, ‘Le “boulot”  à Boscoville. Une expérience pédagogique auprès de la jeunesse délinquante au Québec (1949–1980)’, Revue d’histoire de l’enfance ‘irrégulière’ no. 16 (2014): 111–135; Mélanie Lafrance, ‘Appréhender le monde selon la théologie naturelle: l’enseignement des sciences au pensionnat des Ursulines de Québec (1830–1910)’, Historical Studies in Education/Revue d’histoire de l’éducation 32, no. 2 (2020): 27–48; Mélanie Lanouette, ‘Penser l’éducation, dire sa culture : les écoles catholiques anglaises au Québec, 1928–1964’ (PhD diss., Université Laval, 2004); Stéphane-D. Perreault, ‘National Identities on Display: Québec’s Deaf Schools at the World’s Columbian Exposition 1893’, CCHA Historical Studies 75 (2009): 39–61; Stéphane-D. Perreault, ‘Intersecting Discourses : Deaf Institutions and Communities in Montreal, 1850–1920’ (PhD diss., McGill University, 2003); Julie Plourde, ‘Un genre en construction : le théâtre à la Congrégation de Notre-Dame, 1850–1920’ (MA diss., Université de Montréal, 2015); Valérie St-Georges, ‘“La force, la grâce, la souplesse” : l’éducation physique des jeunes filles canadiennes-françaises à Montréal (1860–1920)’ (MA diss., Université de Montréal, 2020).

⁵⁵ Gloria Ladson-Billing and William F. Tate IV, ‘Towards a Critical Race Theory of Education’, Teachers College Record 97, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 56.

⁵⁶ Ibid.

⁵⁷ Jarvis R. Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2021).

⁵⁸ Ibid., 9–10.

⁵⁹ Thomas S. Popkewitz, Barry M. Franklin and Miguel A. Pereyra, eds., Cultural History and Education: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Schooling (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001).

⁶⁰ Ibid., xii.

⁶¹ Ibid., 33.

⁶² Burke and Milewski, Schooling in Transition.

⁶³ Ibid., 7.

⁶⁴ Popkewitz, Franklin and Pereyra, Cultural History and Education.

⁶⁵ Kabria Baumgartner, In Pursuit of Knowledge: Black Women and Educational Activism in Antebellum America (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 4.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 143.

⁶⁷ Adam Fairclough, A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2009).

⁶⁸ Ibid., 48.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 95, 399.

⁷⁰ Rebecca Swartz, ‘Histories of Empire and Histories of Education’, this issue.

⁷¹ Funké Aladejebi, Schooling the System: A History of Black Women Teachers (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021).

⁷² Ashley N. Woodson, ‘“Less than a Vapor”: Positioning Black Lesbian Women in History Teacher Education’, Journal of Lesbian Studies 21, no. 4 (2017): 470.

⁷³ See Allan Bérubé, John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, Twentieth Anniversary ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Michael Bronski, A Queer History of the United States (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2019); George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Jim Elledge, The Boys of Fairy Town: Sodomites, Female Impersonators, Third-Sexers, Pansies, Queers, and Sex Morons in Chicago’s First Century (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2018); Robert McKee Irwin, Edward J. McCaughan and Michelle Rocío Nasser, eds., The Famous 41: Sexuality and Social Control in Mexico, 1901 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Paul Jackson, One of the Boys: Homosexuality in the Military During World War II (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Patrick E. Johnson, Black. Queer. Southern. Women: An Oral History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018); Gary Kinsman and Patrizia Gentile, The Canadian War on Queers: National Security as Sexual Regulation (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010); Valerie Korniek, Prairie Fairies: A History of Queer Communities and People in Western Canada, 1930–1985 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018); Annick Prieur, Mema’s House, Mexico City: On Transvestites, Queens, and Machos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

⁷⁴ Woodson, ‘“Less than a Vapor”’, 467.

⁷⁵ Jackie M. Blount, Fit to Teach: Same-Sex Desire, Gender and School Work in the Twentieth Century (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005).

⁷⁶ Karen L. Graves, And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 145.

⁷⁷ See also Margaret A. Nash and Jennifer Silverman, ‘“An Indelible Mark”: Gay Purges in Higher Education in the 1940s’, History of Education Quarterly 55, no. 4 (November 2015): 441–459.

⁷⁸ C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), 7.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 14.

⁸⁰ Ibid., 127.

⁸¹ Lance T. McCready, ‘Conclusion to the Special Issue: Queer of Color Analysis: Interruptions and Pedagogic Possibilities’, Curriculum Inquiry 43, no. 4 (2013): 513.

⁸² Although there was no residency requirement per se, Indian Day Schools operated similarly to Indian Residential Schools. They were operated under the Indian Act, were subject to the same oversight by inspectors and Indian Agents, staff sometimes oscillated between day and residential schools, curriculum was similar and the goal was the same at both institutions: to forcibly remove a child’s connection to their Indigeneity (family, culture, language, Land, governance systems, etc.) and effectively train them to enter Canadian society, particularly for immersion into a colonial capitalist society.

⁸³ We are grateful for the recommendations of a French-speaking reviewer to include scholarly literature on Indian Day Schools written in French. See Anny Morissette, ‘“Il connaît le chemin de l’école, il peut y aller s’il veut”  écoles de jour indiennes et vie scolaire chez les Anichinabés de Kitigan Zibi (1853–1958)’, Recherches amérindiennes au Québec 46, no. 2–3 (2016):125–144.

⁸⁴ Jean Barman, ‘Families vs. Schools: Children of Aboriginal Descent in British Columbia Classrooms of the Late Nineteenth Century’, in Family Matters: Papers in Post-Confederation Canadian Family History, ed. Edward Montigny and Lor Chambers (Toronto: Canadian Scholar Press, 1998) 73–89.

⁸⁵ Sean Carleton, ‘“The children show unmistakable signs of Indian blood”: Indigenous Children Attending Public Schools in British Columbia, 1872–1925’, History of Education 50, no. 3 (2021): 313–337.

⁸⁶ Jackson David James Pind, ‘Indian Day Schools in Michi Saagiig Anishinaabeg Territory, 1899–1978’ (PhD diss., Queen’s University, October 2021), 18.

⁸⁷ For a good source on Black separate schools, see K. McLaren, ‘“We had no desire to be set apart”: Forced Segregation of Black Students in Canada West Public Schools and Myths of British Egalitarianism’, Histoire Sociale 37, no. 73 (May 2004): 27–50. Laurie Meijer Drees and Maureen Lux have written about educational programmes at Indian Sanitoria in Canada: L. M. Drees, Healing Histories: Stories from Canada’s Indian Hospitals (Edmonton, AB: University of Alberta Press, 2013); M. Lux, Separate Beds: A History of Indian Hospitals in Canada, 1920–1980s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016).

⁸⁸ R. D. Gidney and W. P. J. Millar, How Schools Worked: Public Education in English Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal and Ithaca, NY: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012).

⁸⁹ Ibid., 7.

⁹⁰ Ibid., 3.

⁹¹ Wayne J. Urban and Jennings L. Waggoner Jr, American Education: A History, 4th ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 1.

⁹² Ibid., 76.

⁹³ Ibid., 136.

⁹⁴ Victoria-María MacDonald, Latino Education in the United States: A Narrated History From 1513–2000 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

⁹⁵ Ibid., 2.

⁹⁶ Mirelsie Veláquez, Puerto Rican Chicago: Schooling the City, 1940–1977 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022).

⁹⁷ Ibid., 4.

⁹⁸ Kristina R. Llewellyn, Democracy’s Angels: The Work of Women Teachers (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), 9.

⁹⁹ Ibid., 11.

¹⁰⁰ Christopher P. Loss, Between Citizens and the State: The Politics of American Higher Education in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012).

¹⁰¹ Ibid., 90.

¹⁰² Robert C. Vipond, Making a Global City: How One Toronto School Embraced Diversity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 2.

¹⁰³ Ibid., 18.

¹⁰⁴ Jean-Philippe Croteau also considers the place of ethnic immigrants within discussions of school integration in his analysis of multiculturalism and francization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through a review of Montreal and Toronto. See Jean-Philippe Croteau, Les commissions scolaires montréalaises et torontoises et les immigrants 1875–1960 (Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2016).

¹⁰⁵ Maria Adelina Arredondo López, ‘Ilustrados and Barbaros: Diversity, Intolerance and Educational Values in Northern Mexico (1831–1854)’, Paedagogica Historica 43, no. 1 (2007): 46.

¹⁰⁶ Ibid., 50.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 59.

¹⁰⁸ Andrae M. Marak, From Many, One: Indians, Peasants, Borders, and Education in Callista Mexico, 1924–1935 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009).

¹⁰⁹ Ibid.

¹¹⁰ Alison Mountz et al., ‘A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University’, ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 4 (2015): 1239.

¹¹¹ Ibid., 1238.

¹¹² Smith, Decolonising Methodologies, 35.

¹¹³ Eve Tuck, ‘Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities’, Harvard Educational Review 79, no. 3 (Fall 2009), 411.

¹¹⁴ Ibid., 413.

¹¹⁵ Ibid., 409.

¹¹⁶ Daniel G. Solórzano and Tara J. Yosso, ‘Critical Race Methodology: Counter-Storytelling as an Analytical Framework for Education Research’, Qualitative Inquiry 8, no. 1 (2002): 30.

¹¹⁷ Tuck, ‘Suspending Damage’, 416.

¹¹⁸ Catherine Larochelle, L’école du racisme. La construction de l’altérité à l’école québécoise (1830–1915) (Montreal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2021). See also Susanne Roethlisberger, ‘Black Slavery, Historians and Textbooks: A Study of the Representation of Enslaved People of African Descent in Quebec’s Historiography and History Rextbooks’ (MA diss., McGill University, 2021); John Willinsky, Learning to Divide the World: Education at Empire’s End (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); Helga Bories-Sawala and Martin Thibault, EUX et NOUS: La place des Autochtones dans l’enseignement de l’histoire nationale du Québec, (3 vols, Brême: Université de Brême, 2020).

¹¹⁹ Fraser’s work on this is ongoing. To learn more about yearbooks at Indian Day and Residential Schools in the Northwest Territories, see: Crystal Gail Fraser and Jessica Dunkin, “This Year Book … has been entirely produced by staff and students”: Indigenous Youth, Indian Residential Schools, and Historical Production in the Northwest Territories, 1959–1971’, Historical Studies in Education, forthcoming Spring 2023..

¹²⁰ Stephen James Minton, ed., Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples: From Genocide via Education to the Possibilities for Processes of Truth, Restitution, Reconciliation, and Reclamation (New York: Routledge, 2020).

¹²¹ TRC, Canada’s Residential Schools.

¹²² Robyn Maynard, ‘Canadian Education is Steeped in Anti-Black Racism’, The Walrus, January 30, 2022.

¹²³ See: Carl E. James, ‘Students “at Risk”: Stereotypes and the Schooling of Black Boys’, Urban Education 47, no. 2 (March 2012): 464–494; Carl E. James, Colour Matters: Essays on Experiences, Education and Pursuits of Black Youth (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021); Henry M Codjoe, ‘Fighting a “Public Enemy” of Black Academic Achievement: The Persistence of Racism and the Schooling Experiences of Black Students in Canada’, Race Ethnicity and Education 4, no. 4 (2001): 343–375; Subini Ancy, Annamma, Yolanda Anyon and Nicole M. Joseph, ‘Black Girls and School Discipline: The Complexities of Being Overrepresented and Understudied’, Urban Education 54, no. 2 (February 2019); Dorothy E. Hines, Mildred Boveda and Endia J. Lindo, eds., Racism by Another Name: Black Students, Overrepresentation, and the Carceral State of Special Education (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, 2021).

¹²⁴ Don Drummond and Ellen Kachuck Rosenbluth, ‘The Debate on First Nations Education Funding: Mind the Gap’ (working paper 49, School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, December 2013).

¹²⁵ Tom Blackwell, ‘How Critical Race Theory Sparked Controversy in the U.S. and Influenced Canadian Education’, National Post, February 7, 2022; Marisa Iati, ‘What is Critical Race Theory, and Why Do Republicans Want to Ban It In Schools?’, Washington Post, May 29, 2021.

¹²⁶ Hani Morgan, ‘Resisting the Movement to Ban Critical Race Theory from Schools’, The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas 95, no. 1 (2022).

¹²⁷ Marina Franco, ‘Five Years Ago, 43 Students Vanished. The Mystery, and the Pain, Remain’, New York Times, September 26, 2019.

¹²⁸ M. Bianet Castellanos, ‘Introduction: Settler Colonialism in Latin America’, American Indian Quarterly 69, no. 4 (December 2017): 777–781.

¹²⁹ Crystal Gail Fraser and Allyson Stevenson, ‘Reflecting on the Foundations of Our Discipline Inspired by the TRC: A Duty to Respond during This Age of Reconciliation’, Canadian Historical Review 103, no. 1 (March 2022): 2.