In the past two decades, there has been a growing interest in the schooling experiences of indigenous people. There is now a body of work on the educational history of aboriginal people(n1) in North America and elsewhere which chronicles native residential schools and government educational policy. Much of this research is now being supplemented by oral histories and autobiographies which offer the 'native side of the story', usually in tandem with an examination of federal indigenous policy. In North America, the field has been dominated by studies of boarding and residential schools. While these works have been useful for opening up discussions about the schools as sites of institutional racism, they have been written without much reflection on the historiographic problems that such cross-cultural encounters comprise.

A recently arrived group of aboriginal scholars has added to the critiques from feminist and postmodern theorists challenging core assumptions of how the past is portrayed. The history of education is just beginning to experience some of the tensions and 'crises in confidence' that have been unsettling the larger field of historical discourse for a decade or more.(n2) Some historians have begun to struggle with the plurality of voices, problems of text and authority, and other concerns by bringing a more interdisciplinary approach to their work. While this strategy has attendant problems,(n3) it can also open fresh lines of inquiry and a more imaginative view of historic settings. The sharing of disciplinary approaches between anthropology and history has been a prominent methodology in research about Indian White relations in North America, but for the most part, ethnohistorians have not been interested in schooling as a topic for inquiry. While one might argue that all education is cultural transmission and that ethnological approaches would benefit most historical studies of educational arenas, the most emphatic case can be made when scholars write about native people.

In this essay I will discuss two central methodological problems for an ethnohistory of indigenous education: (1) the importance of land and sense of place as the template for discussing events in space and time, and (2) the problems of using Indian autobiographies as historical evidence. I will refer to some recent works that have either ostensibly or implicitly focused on the education of Indian people. These books and articles show the thorny issues that are both enduring and emergent in the cross-cultural telling of the native schooling past. While Australia, New Zealand, and other cross-cultural settings have some similar patterns in contact and conflict over indigenous education, and there are some universal points of reference, there are also too many notable differences in these histories to offer a sensible comprehensive discussion of international indigenous education. It is most tenable, in the space provided here, to keep my comments focused on only the educational history of aboriginal people in North America. Even so, I must be cautious as the differences between Canada and the USA, while not sufficiently noted by historians, are significant. If examined carefully, I believe that these differences are fundamental and have created contrasting contexts for the language about native educational history. Nevertheless, a detailed view of these factors requires stronger magnification than will be employed here.

In broad language, the aboriginal policies for both the United States and Canada since the turn of the century--until two decades ago in Canada--centred on assimilating tribal people through compulsory attendance at residential and day schools funded by the federal governments and operated by the churches. The residential schools were designed to take native children away from the presumably regressive forces of the village and family, train them for marginal participation in the labour market, and socialize them to Christian civility. In many of these schools the children were punished severely for speaking their tribal language, for referring to native rituals or ceremonies, and for virtually any act or comment that would associate them with their ethnic identity. Beatings and imprisonment were common in many of the schools. Children sometimes ran away and died of exposure trying to get to homelands that were hundreds of miles away from the schools. Moreover, many children were sexually abused by clergy and a cadre of deviant individuals who were hired by the churches to staff these institutions. The schools were oriented toward eradicating all aspects of the child's ethnic identity and replacing it with a kind of shadow person, neither Indian nor white, who would renounce their past as a dark time of savagery. The academic training was substandard and children attended school less than half the day, spending the larger half labouring to maintain the facilities and grounds, and often providing much of the income necessary to sustain the school.(n4)

The schools, in general, did not work well toward their stated goals of saving Indian children from their culture and giving them the opportunity to join society as fully contributing members. Indians continued to practise their culture in secret and often against the law, as in the case of West Coast potlatching in British Columbia.(n5) They resisted assimilation in hundreds of creative and subtle ways and they found private corners away from white surveillance to affirm their history and identity. The residential schools were successful, however, in seriously disrupting the family structure, language and sustainable communities of aboriginal people. Many of the most dysfunctional aspects of contemporary Indian family and village life, such as drug and alcohol abuse as well as domestic violence, can be traced to the destructive influences of the residential schools. The literature that offers comprehensive views of this history, such as J. R. Miller's Shingwauk's Vision and John Milloy's A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System 1879 to 1986 in Canada or Francis Paul Prucha's The Churches and the Indian Schools 1888-1912 and Margaret Connell Szasz's Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination Since 1928(n6) from the USA, give a view of the policy makers in the government and the churches but, for the most part, the voices from native people are silent. Miller's book uses some autobiographical sources and some interviews from Indians to add depth to his study of the schools, but this is problematic for reasons I will point out later.

While there is some general agreement in the research that the schooling policy was ethnocentric, colonial and ill conceived, there are extremely variegated and ambivalent accounts with regard to the range of environments and experiences in these schools. Some of the most recent narrative histories, such as K. Tsianina Lomawaima's They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School(n7) contain stories of people who remember the school fondly and with a range of opinions about how the school prepared them to be successful in their adult life. It must be argued that this history is complex, ambiguous, and continues to be a highly contested terrain with regard to questions of power, purpose, reciprocity and resistance. This schooling history has been, and remains, the most decisive arena for understanding the negotiated relationships between Europeans and aboriginal people. Arguably, the recent inclusion of oral testimony and memories about these schools from native people has had a deconstructive effect on previous generalized histories of native education. As there is no 'single story' that can give a consistent account of this history, we must depict the intersection of multifarious accounts and stand at that intersection while we tell the historian's tale. This is not to say that a synthesis is impossible, however, only that it is elusive. Cultural interpretation of past events is at the core of this enterprise; in other words, an informed ethnohistorical imagination is required in describing the deep meaning of these schools. One of the main conceptual difficulties to be encountered when bringing aboriginal narratives into these histories of schooling is that tribal people have discursive categories about time and space that collide with the way historians conventionally speak about the past. First Nations have a relationship to the land that is mythic and religious. In a general way, their epistemological framework is developed from this sense of an animated landscape. Plants and animals are spoken of as teachers and healers. The familiar pan-Indian benediction, 'all my relations', is meant to affirm the personhood of animals, plants and even stones. It is a profound acknowledgement of an interdependency that is both physical and spiritual. Human beings, in this context, have a relationship to particular animals and to specific places. This is to be contrasted with Western intellectual traditions, which presume a teleology in the abstract. For aboriginal people, time is not meaningful in the abstract; stories about the past are told in a way that connects them to specific places on the landscape. Events happen in these places and such locations are made real by the stories that are told about them. It is this sublime welding of physical location with narrative that is at the core of aboriginal outlooks on the past. Vine Deloria Jr points out that Indian people were never as concerned with when an event occurred as where it occurred. Events, then, are meaningless unless they are connected to what Deloria calls the 'sacred geography'.(n8)

In her book The Social Life of Stories.' Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory,(n9) anthropologist Julie Cruikshank has laid some important groundwork for educational ethnohistory by showing us how stories from the past serve as moral narratives that are placed in the present moment. This work displays the multiple layers of meaning that oral tradition creates as it evolves in time. Beginning with the interwoven aboriginal character of land, history and genealogy in the Yukon, Cruikshank situates the works of Bourdieu, Rosaldo and others on the landscape of political and linguistic tensions that these stories come from. She clearly illuminates how non-transportable native knowledge is; it resides in actual places on the landscape rather than in abstract domains. In the historic cross-cultural encounters at the residential schools, there were profound disjunctions in the communication and understanding between students and teachers. Both Indians and Whites interpreted the meaning of schooling and education from thoroughly different teleological assumptions and with contrasting constructions of the ethnic other. Teachers tried to connect lessons to abstract goals and principles related to idealized notions of an educated and civilized person while Indian students were encountering the schools from the linguistic and cognitive framework derived from the landscape. Cruikshank's work in ethnohistory has deep implications for amplifying how irrelevant and hollow the 'stories' (academic lessons) at school must have seemed to the native students. In explaining the educational practices of traditional Yukon elders, she notes that they illuminate reference points in time and space; such stories from the landscape should be viewed, in Cruikshank's words, as 'a part of the equipment for living rather than a set of meanings embedded within texts and waiting to be discovered' (p. 41). Not only would it be interesting to probe the substrata of the residential school histories with an informed ethnographic repertoire about how each side of the cultural barricade interpreted the events, but viewing conventional educational practice from a cultural outsider's viewpoint might animate previously overlooked experiences. In any case, speaking about the school in an overly hypothetical fashion as the instrument of state policy is a discursive form that does not correspond to the experience and narrative of traditional tribal people.

Altering discourse and realigning categories of phenomena has been central to the task of poststructuralism, which raises questions about whether the documented past is reflected or invented. While literary theorists, such as author Gerald Vizenor, find resonances between native narrative and the works of Foucault, Derrida, Barthes and others,(n10) Cruikshank suggests key elements of the discord between aboriginal knowledge and postmodern presuppositions about native understandings: 'Narratives arguably connect analytical constructs with the material conditions of people's daily lives, leading in directions quite different from postmodern relativism.'(n11) Of course, even a modest discussion of postmodern controversies in native narrative is beyond the scope of this essay. That being said, it may be instructive to quote from George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer's book Anthropology as Cultural Critique, where they have indicated the complexities to be encountered in writing the ethnography of a historical moment: 'The only way to an accurate view and confident knowledge of the world is through a sophisticated epistemology that takes full account of intractable contradiction, paradox, irony, and uncertainty in the explanation of human activities.'(n12)

Narrative ethnohistory is alive in the present moment for native people. In explaining current social conditions and challenges, or even in personal introductions, tribal people usually offer extended historical and genealogical descriptions as a way of locating themselves and their discourse meaningfully in the present. These narratives are always founded on a moral cast, which is embedded in their belonging to the land. However, the native sense of past and present is founded on a tradition that is oral, not textual. What presents the deepest challenge to historians, who conventionally rely on documented accounts of past events for evidence, is that tribal people did not write things down, but rather, had intricate oral forms for chronicling experience. Because written accounts are more familiar, and generally more accessible--both physically and culturally--historians have preferred to use them in writing about Indian education. In a recent effort to provide more balance in this educational history, native autobiographies have been embraced, and over-utilized as evidence of the Indian perspective and voice.

While oral testimony has been regarded with some suspicion by historians, written accounts from Indians need to be scrutinized for somewhat different reasons. In reviewing Michael C. Coleman's American Indian Children at School, 1850-1930, Maureen Smith surmises that 'there are problems inherent in using autobiographies, especially those by people not traditionally predisposed to such self-reflective prose'.(n13) She goes on to point out the concerns about bias as most of the 'autobiographies' were told to or edited by non-natives. There are a number of questions about what kind of material was edited out and what might have been 'edited' in. Many of the Indians who were writing during that period would have been the ones 'selected' by the school system in that they would have attained the academic and literary sophistication to write a book. Moreover, it is unlikely that these individuals would have represented the most traditional tribal perspectives and memories of the events going on around them. Even if individuals with advanced traditional understanding were to have been writing during this time, an articulate but culturally incomprehensible explication of the schools and their designs would have been rejected by editors of the day. It can be presumed that those autobiographies from Indians which contain accounts of life at school and were seen as interesting and publishable during the period covered in Coleman's book would have been stylized and fictionalized in such a way as to respond to White perceptions of what Indians were supposed to think and act like. These become the accounts of 'individualized' generic Indians who are edited and packaged for literary consumption. They are more revealing about the cultural values and perspectives of Whites than about actual Indians. How, then, can historians adopt an ethnohistorical stance and produce deeper, thicker descriptions of educational settings that involve First Nations people? Certainly, an uncritical over-reliance on autobiographies will not suffice. Nor will a broad sweep of the policies and conditions in the schools, ignoring tribal interpretations of the educational environment. Historians, while examining documents and oral testimony, should keep a focus on the local and regional aboriginal sense of place. While doing this, they need to evaluate Indian-White cultural negotiations regarding linguistic, economic and cosmological visions. In this kind of writing about culture, it is crucial to acknowledge that both Indians and Whites encountered each other and defined each other from cultural promontories. It has been too often assumed that only the aboriginal person dwells within a cultural system and that government agents and church officials operated in an unproblematic cultural normativeness. A careful reading of works in ethnographic theory can be a profitable, if not destabilizing, tonic for such inclinations. James Clifford, for example, writes that 'once culture becomes visible as an object and ground, a system of meaning among others, the ethnographic self can no longer take root in unmediated identity'.(n14) In other words, just as increased historical knowledge awakens a broader and deeper sense of situated and implicated self, an expanded awareness of culture can expose one's biases and presumptions about reality and identity. An individual only truly begins to engage with the 'other' by first unmasking the 'self'.

I have made remarks earlier about the scarcity of ethnohistorical studies that have investigated educational themes. Notwithstanding this general pattern, two recent articles are exceptional in that they are concerned with settings which are ostensibly about education and native people, and that they are informed by a combination of documentary and ethnological knowledge. Both William H. Ahern, 'An experiment aborted: returned Indian students in the Indian School Service, 1881-1908', Ethnohistory, 44/2 (Spring 1997) and Amy C. Shutt, '"What will become of our young people": goals for Indian children in Moravian missions', History of Education Quarterly, 38/3 (Fall 1998) are concerned with comparing and contrasting the cultural goals and imperatives of specific tribal groups with those of distinct organizations of Whites in schools where resistance and reciprocity were played out daily. These works employ the research of anthropologists and apply ethnographic analysis to the schooling settings producing descriptions, which illuminate the core dilemmas for both Indians and Whites as they navigated the cultural barricades. Ahern shows the Indian School Service's attempts to use graduates as cultural brokers and ambassadors in the schools and in communities. By revealing significant aspects of Sioux and other plains tribal values, Ahern gives us a sense of the cognitive dissonances experienced by returning graduates who worked for the bureau. Amy Shutt's work is a detailed analysis of Delaware religious beliefs and the ways Moravian missionaries exploited Christian educational and theological resonances with Indian beliefs. Complex cultural negotiations were at the core of this setting and Shutt draws on a wide range of anthropological studies to portray the evolution of an educational and religious exchange.

While these two articles are rare and noteworthy as models for an ethnohistorical interpretation of Indian schooling, there are even fewer works that can inform our understanding of more recent settings. In my own work on the ethnohistory of Lummi education I sketched out the school environment during the 1970s, an era of extreme anti-Indian hostility as a result of fishing rights victories won by tribes in federal courts. A number of the teachers were fishermen and resented the Lummi claim to a larger portion of the salmon. For the Lummi, the salmon represented an inextricable economic and spiritual survival. The White community and school contrived categories of discourse that excluded culture as a concept. This was done to confound the Lummi's historic and aboriginal claim to the fishery. The school became a battleground over interpretations of history and reality. The narratives of this history form the assumptions which have created the language of educational possibilities and outcomes.(n15) For Lummis, and other tribal people, this most recent history is an ongoing kind of oral tradition about schooling and their enduring efforts at cultural survival in the midst of stern attempts to assimilate them. There is no way to speak productively and intelligently about the deepest and most important issues of indigenous education without an awareness of the themes and character of the cultural past. As anthropologist Robin Riddington claims, 'A moment in Indian time includes every other moment shared in the individual and collective memories of individuals, community, and culture'.(n16) We must begin to write this history with an acknowledgement that Indian interpretations of schooling may have been founded on a completely separate paradigm of understanding. Acknowledging this condition of epistemological uncertainty is, perhaps paradoxically, the most productive way to begin an ethnohistory of indigenous education.

(n1) In this essay I use a number of terms interchangeably. Indigenous people in North America refer to themselves as Indian, native, First Nations, and aboriginal when talking in a general fashion. It is most precise, and respectful, to use the name that each tribe uses to refer to themselves (Cheyenne, Lakota, Lummi, Yakima, etc.) whenever possible.

(n2) See Malcolm Vick. 'Narrative history: truly writing the past', History of Education Review, 27/2, (1998), 1-15 for a wide-ranging discussion of some basic conceptual, theoretical and epistemological concerns that have been raised regarding what counts as historical evidence and what modes of inquiry produce a 'faithfulness to the past'.

(n3) See Richard White's essay, 'Indian peoples and the natural world: asking the right questions', in Rethinking American Indian History, edited by Donald L. Fixico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 87-100. White points out that when historians use evidence and methods from other disciplines they are vulnerable to the vicissitudes of those fields of study: 'We become prisoners of the conceptual framework of those outside our discipline and when their work changes or falls apart, so does ours' (p. 96).

(n4) See Jean Barman, Yvonne Hebert, and Don McCaskill (eds), Indian Education in Canada, Vol. 1: The Legacy (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1986).

(n5) For a close examination of the Potlatch Law see Daisy Sewid Smith, Prosecution or Persecution (Vancouver, BC: Nu-Yum-Balees Society, 1979). Individuals who participated in this gift-giving ceremony were sentenced to up to two months in prison.

(n6) J. R. Miller, Shingwauk's Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); John Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System 1879 to 1986 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999); Francis Paul Prucha, The Churches and the Indian Schools: 1888-1912 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); and Margaret Connell Szasz, Education and the American Indian: The Road to Self-Determination Since 1928 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974).

(n7) K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called it Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994).

(n8) Vine Deloria, Jr, God is Red.' A Native View of Religion (Golden Colorado: Fulcrum Publishing, 1994), 122.

(n9) Julie Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories: Narrative and Knowledge in the Yukon Territory (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1998).

(n10) Gerald Vizenor, 'A post modern introduction', in Narrative Chance.' Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literature, edited by Gerald Vizenor (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989).

(n11) Cruikshank, The Social Life of Stories, 162.

(n12) George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 14-15.

(n13) Maureen Smith, 'Review of Michael C. Coleman, American Indian Children at School, 1850-1930' (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993), History of Education Quarterly, 34/4 (Winter, 1994), 496.

(n14) James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 106.

(n15) Michael Marker, 'Lummi stories from high school: an ethnohistory of the fishing wars of the 1970s', PhD dissertation, University of British Columbia, 1995.

(n16) Robin Riddington, Trail to Heaven: Knowledge and Narrative in a Northern Native Community (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1988), xiii.