This blog on Texas education contains posts on higher education, as well as preK-12 policy accountability, testing, bilingual education, immigration, school finance, race, class, and gender issues at both the state and national level. It also represents my digital footprint, of life and career, as a community-engaged scholar in Texas.
This exchange with reporters happened on June 29, 2017. It was part of a four-day “reoccupation” protest around Canada Day that takes place annually on the first day of July, Canada's independence day. As you view the video that I share, it is important to understand the context.
First, this exchange unfolded after Indigenous demonstrators erected a teepee on Parliament Hill—and, even more importantly, in the shadow of an ongoing national tragedy: the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls whose cases remain unresolved, their families’ pleas too often ignored by authorities. This crisis, rooted in the intergenerational trauma of the boarding school era and the broader legacy of colonial violence, has been extensively documented not only in Canada but across the United States, as well.
A reporter expresses why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is to blame for this, incensing the women who then accuse the media of disrespect and demanding that the reporter asking the question leave the room.
Without a doubt, their anger was more than a reaction to one reporter's disrespect. It was a lesson on white privilege and white fragility. That act of refusal is not hostility—it’s sovereignty. It's also inescapably about the agonizing loss of their loved ones. It insists that Indigenous peoples control their own stories, their own truths.
In the larger scheme of things, it means naming genocide and dispossession, and restoring not only land but decision-making power. Journalists and educators alike must ask: do our institutions create space for Indigenous truth, or do we stage reconciliation as a feel-good narrative like Thanksgiving itself that leaves power untouched?
From Parliament Hill to Texas classrooms, the struggle is shared: whose histories are told, whose truths are silenced, and whose comfort determines the limits of justice. In case you're interested and available, the Texas State Board of Education is addressing Social Studies standard this Wednesday as follows:
Date: Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Time: 9:30am – 11:00am
Location: William B. Travis building located at 1601 N. Congress, Austin, TX, 78751
**Due to construction in the lobby of the building, it will be necessary to enter from the back entrance located on Brazos St. Parking information will be provided to registered participants prior to the meeting.
As educators, advocates, and community members, we have an obligation to stand where truth is being told—even when it unsettles. Our task is to insist that our schools, our histories, and our public institutions reflect the full truth of who we are.
Indigenous demonstrators accuse media of being disrespectful in heated exchange with reporters (on June 29, 2017).
Indigenous demonstrators who led a protest and erected a teepee on Parliament Hill on Wednesday held a press conference this morning, in which they accused media of being disrespectful, rejected Justin Trudeau's reconciliation efforts with indigenous communities, and called for the UN to prosecute federal leaders
For those that will celebrate Thanksgiving this year, it's incumbent upon us all to give this story, this myth, and history a closer look, particularly as we think about the racial justice moment that we're in, along with the horrible impact of COVID on native peoples.
This in-depth, New York Times piece reminds us of the horrific killing of the buffalo as a way to kill Indians and with that, the taking of their land and resources, together with any memory of always being on Indigenous land. In this vein, I am proud of our UT students for insisting that the university incorporate a land acknowledgement in all UT programming as part of their 8 Demands in the wake of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor killings and the ensuing Black Lives Matter Movement.
Although our schools mostly do not teach this history with not even college students getting it unless they happen to stumble into a course that does, we can all nevertheless individually educate ourselves through posts like these. Also worth reading is another pertinent 2016 piece published in The Atlantic titled, "'Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone.' From the perspective of historical scholarship, there is no ambiguity in this brutal, violent history that Thanksgiving Day masks.
I would hope that we can all give thanks and acknowledge this enduring colonial legacy of which this day also happens to be about.
FORT PECK INDIAN RESERVATION, Mont. — On a frigid November morning inside a tractor barn in northeast Montana, 10 members of the Sioux and Assiniboine tribes joined in song to bless a thirty-aught-six hunting rifle, and to lift up the spirit of a buffalo they were preparing to kill. One man played a painted hand drum. Others passed around burning sage.
The hunt that followed took place on Turtle Mound Buffalo Ranch, 27,000 acres of rolling pasture on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. Every stage of the hunt was marked by a ceremony to give thanks for a buffalo that descends from animals killed to near-extinction by white settlers in the late 19th century.
The mass killing was part of a government-approved effort to seize land from Native Americans who depended on the animal to survive. The brutality of settlers’ expansion into the Great Plains and American West has been drastically underplayed in popular myths about the founding and growth of the United States.
Arguably the best-known of those myths is the story of the first Thanksgiving, a holiday Robert Magnan, who led the buffalo hunt at Fort Peck, does not observe. “Thanksgiving is kind of like Columbus Day for Native people,” he said. “Why would we celebrate people who tried to destroy us?”
Buffalo grazing along a hill on the Turtle Mound Buffalo Ranch. They are part of a long-term effort to return bison to the lands they once roamed.
Credit...
Tailyr Irvine for The New York Times
It is now widely accepted that the story of a friendship-sealing repast between white colonists and Native Americans is inaccurate. Articlesdebunkingthe tale have become as reliable an annual media ritual as recipes forcornbread stuffing.
But this year should be different, say Native American leaders, scholars and teachers.
The holiday arrives in the midst of a national struggle over racial justice, and a pandemic that has landed with particular force on marginalized communities of color. The crises have fueled an intense re-examination of the roots of persistent inequities in American life.
This Thanksgiving also comes on the heels of an election in which 110 American Indian and Alaska Native candidates ran for office, according to theNational Congress of American Indians, and on the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower voyage.
Winona LaDuke, the Native Americanactivistand writer who ran for vice president in 1996 and 2000 as Ralph Nader’s running mate, believes that the country is primed to re-envision Thanksgiving as an occasion to come to terms with the cruelty Native Americans have experienced throughout history.
"I've seen a growing awareness, a wake-up, to the systemic oppression of people of color,” said Ms. LaDuke, an enrolled member of theWhite Earth Ojibwe Nation. “There is a movement toward justice for Native people. People want to listen.”
Thanksgiving, of course, is a time for listening, a welcome opportunity for prayer, reflection and looking back, and many Indigenous people celebrate it in their own way. But the problem with its origin story, Ms. LaDuke and others say, goes beyond misrepresentations about what was served in Plymouth, Mass., in 1621. (There is no evidence that turkey was on the menu, and pie couldn’t have been, because there was no flour or butter available for crust.)
Dr. Paulette Steeves, professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is researching the origin story of native people of this continent and in so doing, also challenging the colonial legacy of archeology. Not surprisingly, the academy resists. Great read and check out the video, too, where she refers to herself and others as the survivors of forced assimilation. I can't help but think about how our current struggle with the Texas State Board of Education is at once about respect and dignity and "resistance to forced assimilation," as Steeves maintains. After all, most of us who testified in support of Mexican American Studies acknowledge our indigenous ancestry with a similar goal to Steeves of reclaiming our deep and profoundly historic connection to the land. Thanks to local indigenous elder Alejandro Yolquiahuitl Martinez for sharing. Angela
Published on: July 3, 2016 | Last Updated: July 3, 2016 11:31 AM PDT
The 14-year-old girl who bumps around in the police wagon is being unceremoniously returned to the Willingdon Industrial School for Girls, a juvenile correctional institute on Vancouver’s east side.
It is 1969. Paulette Steeves, a ward of the provincial government and incorrigible runaway, has been incarcerated here since the age of 13.
“I’m not going back,” Steeves says defiantly. “I’m going to get away.”
The other young women in the police wagon respond with disbelief. “You can’t do that. How are you going to do that?”
“Just watch me,” the girl says.
The wagon passes through the front gate, pulls up the drive, and slows to a stop. A female police officer opens the rear door to let the prisoners out.
Suddenly, the girl bolts, long hair whipping behind her. She leaps onto the fence, scrambles to the top, seizes the barbed wire with bare hands, hurls her body forward. Points of metal shred her skin as she sails over the top.
She hears the other girls erupt in cheers. Steeves lands hard, then she’s away. Escaping is her specialty.
Forty-five years later, Steeves’s hands and legs are mapped with scars from that fence, clues to her origin story.
Now ensconced in a fortress that is equally imposing, though far more genteel than Willingdon, Steeves is telling another origin story. She has just been named director of the Native American Studies program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and her work as an archeologist seeks to upend long-held notions about indigenous culture in the Americas.
Steeves, who is Cree-Metis, was the first PhD candidate in her field to successfully defend her dissertation using indigenous method and theory. She has spent years building a database of Pleistocene archeological sites that show her ancestors have been in the Americas far longer than previously acknowledged. (The Pleistocene is the geological epoch that lasted from 2.6 million to approximately 12,000 years ago.)
Her work, which challenges the “colonial” legacy of archeology, is considered revolutionary by some, controversial by others. Steeves believes objections to inclusion of “indigenous ways and methods” in archeology comes from “a really strong, and deep-rooted racism in North American anthropology against Native Americans.”
Now 60, Steeves is tall and broad, with a mass of long hair, a figure that is both imposing and soft.
The history of indigenous people in the Americas was manufactured, says Steeves, to make it easier to overlook the atrocities that colonization brought. “When people started coming here to the Americas, they were finding signs of great civilizations, and stories were created to say these sites and this civilization was not built by the indigenous people — they called them the savages, they created the people here as ‘nature’, not as culture. If it’s culture, you can’t massacre them, or kill them, or put a head price on them. But if they are nature, it’s okay to do that.”
When she began her research, Steeves hoped to compile a list of 10 or 20 archeological sites in the western hemisphere older than 11,000 years ago. She was stunned to find over 400 sites. “Counter to the western stories that we’ve been here 12,000 years, we’ve been here over 60,000 years, likely over 100,000 years, and there is a great deal of evidence to support that.”
She refutes the common narrative of indigenous people as a group that has been culturally erased, wiped out by bad luck, disease and a lack of resistance, both metaphorical and physical.
“I see a different story. A story of persistance.”
She should know. The Cree-Metis girl who threw herself over the fence of the Willingdon school time and time again until she won her freedom, says simply: “I am a survivor of forced cultural assimilation.”
***
“We were extremely poor,” says Steeves. Born in Whitehorse, her childhood was cut from the cloth of aboriginal marginalization. “My mom was an alcoholic. My parents split when I was five. My stepdad used to beat the shit out of her.”
By the age of 12, Steeves was running away regularly. She dropped out of school, picked apples, panhandled, and made her way to Vancouver, where she survived as a street kid before landing in Willingdon at age 13.
“My mother, who was 80 per cent native, warned us never to tell anyone we were Indians,” she says. The reason was heartbreaking: Long before Paulette and and her siblings were born, her mother had two children who were taken from her by authorities and put up for adoption.
“She never saw them again, and she never, ever got over it,” says Steeves. “Because of that, it was really important to her to hide our Indian-ness.”
Part of racism is who is included and who is excluded, socially, economically and historically. Steeves grew up on the outside, excluded first from her own culture, and also outside of mainstream white culture.
By 21, Steeves had moved to Lillooet, where she worked in a sawmill and gave birth to her first son, Jessie. She had two more children, but found herself trapped in an abusive relationship. Her eldest son was diagnosed with a serious environmental illness. Doctors told her he wouldn’t live beyond the age of six.
Steeves, who had begun to reclaim her heritage — her ancestors are Cree, Sioux and Dutch — sought the counsel of elders. “You are going to do something really good for Indian people. Not just us Indians here, Indians everywhere. It’s going to be a lot harder than this, so learn from this.”
Steeves was mystified. “Here I was with three children, one of whom was terminally ill. I had a Grade 8 education, a truck and 26 cents. What was I going to do?”
Steeves left the abusive relationship. Because Jessie would have only a few years to live, she resolved to fill them with love and happiness. She moved to Ottawa, where, inspired by local buskers, she bought a small guitar and taught herself to play. She made a tub bass for her daughter, Marina, then four. Her six-year-old, Dustin, was a natural on harmonica. Jessie, 12, played the Cajun washboard, banjo and wooden spoons. “The first time we played, we sounded so terrible. Someone felt sorry for us and gave us $60.”
They called themselves The Mother and Child Band. Soon they were recording, touring festivals, playing in Las Vegas, and being courted by Nashville.
“We got really good,” says Steeves. “The music was a blessing.”
But Jessie’s health was deteriorating — he told Steeves he longed to live out his remaining days in one place and go to school like a regular kid. So they moved again, to northwest Arkansas, where there were no coal or industrial plants. Jessie’s environmental allergies and asthma could be kept partly at bay.
Steeves decided to go back to school. After writing her GED, she was admitted to the University of Arkansas Fayettville. She covered tuition costs by working as a janitor.
Jessie, by then 21, had lived much longer than doctors first predicted. “One day, I was coming home and Jessie came running out of the house. He said, ‘Whatever happens to me, don’t you ever quit. Don’t you ever give up on your education.’”
He died later that night in his sleep.
“It was really hard. I think if he hadn’t told me that, I wouldn’t have been able to go on. But I did.”
***
Since leaving Lillooet, Steeves had been asking herself: “What did the elders mean? What am I supposed to be doing?”
She was studying archeology with an eye on medical school when she was approached by Quapaw tribe elders in the U.S. Midwest to do genetic research on ancestral bones held in local museums, so they could be returned to the Quapaw for burial. The process revealed a calling to Steeves, and she listened: She would work in archeology, at the intersection of western science and traditional indigenous ceremony.
“We don’t do research just to do it,” explains Steeves. “All research has a purpose, a relationship, and a reason.”
In academia, Steeves had to battle for her right to belong.
“My first week of graduate school, I was called a bitch, a damned Indian, and a troublemaker. It was extremely, extremely hard.” She argued with professors about the way indigenous people and artifacts were framed in textbooks: A stone spear point from France was described as “beautifully shaped”, while a similar artifact uncovered in the Americas was described as “undistinguished”, belonging to some “weary Native American.”
While doing archeological field work, Steeves said, “I was learning that our people were everywhere, all over these lands. Not just a few groups of hunter-gatherers.”
Steeves’ database of Pleistocene archeological sites in the Americas is part of the evidence she says debunks the “Clovis first” hypothesis. Based on the discovery of a fluted tool in Clovis, New Mexico, “Clovis first” argues that indigenous North Americans have been here no longer than 12,000 years, arriving from Asia over a land bridge connected to Siberia.
“The bias against pre-Clovis is so strong that many archeologists who found older sites and reported on them were academically destroyed,” says Steeves. “For years, archeologists spent their time looking for this ‘Clovis’ tool in Siberia and Asia to show that culture came from the East to the West. Nothing was ever found.
“Archeologists invented a pan-hemispheric cultural group called the Clovis people. The Clovis people didn’t exist.”
Steeves work and methods were considered so radical, she burned through four graduate committees.
“She is a trailblazer,” says Claire Smith, head of the department of Archeology at Flinders University in Australia. “By drawing on indigenous theory and method, she enriches the discipline of archaeology, brings new ideas to the discipline, tests them and uses them. It’s also about linking people to their homeland, building bridges to their communities in archaeology. ”
Tim McCleary, department head at Little Big Horn College in Montana, said that “Paulette’s work is part of a growing idea of re-examining the scientific approach to include the voice of native people in their own story about themselves.” McCleary says there is both archeological and genetic evidence to support the theory that “indigenous people in the North Americas have been here 20,000 years or more.”
***
Not everyone agrees. Stuart Fiedel, an archaeologist with the consulting firm Louis Berger Group, calls Steeves’ claims placing indigenous peoples and culture in the Americas as far back as the Pleistocene era “absurd”.
“The ancestors of Native Americans arrived no more than 15,000 to 16,000 years ago from populations in Eurasia.” Fiedel disputes the genetic evidence and dismisses indigenous “ways and methods” such as oral tradition as simply “not science”.
“There was a great injustice, a theft of the New World by the Europeans, and Europeans are inherent to the scientific tradition. If you want to link those two up and throw out the baby with the bathwater, well, decolonizing the landscape means you are also throwing out the ideology of the Europeans. What are we left with if we deny science because of its linkages to and use by oppressive culture?”
To Steeves, Fiedel’s comments are equally “absurd”.
“Everyone else teaches the standard world view, but understanding issues of colonization is important to thinking critically. If you don’t understand what colonization is, and where it came from, how can you decolonize your own mind?”
Indigenous ways and methods don’t exclude Western science, says Steeves. They add to it. “It’s about re-linking our communities to these ancient sites and times. It challenges the status quo and places our people in deep time, on par with other areas in the old world.”
By sharing the story of her past — her own “deep time” — Steeves is making another offering.
“What I really, really hope is that First Nations and indigenous students, and non-indigenous students, will realize that you can come from those places and that background and do good things. Your past doesn’t define you. If you listen to the ancestors and what path you are supposed to be on, you can do good things.”
Steeves knows she has a big job ahead. As for how she plans to do it, the words she uttered as a 15-year-old making her wild break for freedom still echo: “Just watch me.”
This is very exciting! Canada requiring Indigenous history and culture as a mandatory part of Ontario's curriculum shows how this movement is taking root in other places beyond the U.S. Structurally, as one can see from this report, they have a "Minister of Indigenous Relations
and Reconciliation." Wouldn't it be great if all of our countries had cabinet-level positions like these? This is obviously not possible under the current administration, but perhaps in future administrations.
Like Canada, we also all need Truth and Reconciliation
Commissions so that we as a polity can reconcile ourselves with our racist, genocidal past. I would love to see such things in other places like Mexico and throughout Central and South America, too.
Thanks to UT Education Policy and Planning masters student, Karissa Jobman, for sharing this excellent news!
Bringing knowledge about treaties, Indigenous rights, cultures and
perspectives to the classroom as a mandatory part of the province's
curriculum is a response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions
Calls to Action 62 and 63.
The province is investing $2.7 million support capacity building for educators to teach the new curriculum.
The gym at Milliken Mills High School was filled with about 1,000 students and faculty for the announcement.
Neha Naqvi, a Grade 12 student, said Indigenous issues should be talked about at school.
"We shouldn't ignore these issues just because they happened in the
past. It still affects people today and we should talk about them not
only with the government but First Nation people themselves and help
each other."
This is the second annual Treaties Recognition Week in Ontario, running Nov. 5-11.
On February 23, the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin released its statistics on the numbers of children's books
by/about American Indians/First Nations and People of Color during the
year 2015. Their data is based on books that are sent to them. It is raw
data that does not address the quality of the books themselves. This
data is important and I'm very glad they collect it. I use it in my
work.
In 2015, CCBC estimates that they received about 3,400 books. Dr. Sarah
Park Dahlen at St. Catherine University, working with illustrator David
Huyck, Molly Beth Griffin, and several others (including me), created a graphic
that depicts the CCBC data for 2015. Kudos to Sarah for getting it
done. David Huyck's idea--to reflect the percentages by different sized
mirrors--is excellent. Including animals, trucks, etc., is also
excellent because it tells us that there are more books about animals,
trucks, etc. than about any individual demographic. That's deeply
troubling.
As of this writing (Thursday, September 15, 2016), the graphic has gone
viral. It is being widely shared across social media. I'm very glad to
see that, but I'm also seeing lots of assumptions about the data itself.
My post today is a close look at the data specific to Native peoples
and my attempt to look closely at that 0.9% on the graphic.
Earlier this year, CCBC sent me the list of books on their American
Indian Log (it includes First Nations, Latin America, Pacific Islands,
and New Zealand). There are a lot of ways to analyze their list. I may
do more with the list in another post, but for now, I'm focusing on
fiction (according to CCBC's tags) published by US publishers.
Fiction, US publishers:
Here's the list of fiction written or illustrated by Native people
(titles in blue are ones that AICL has recommended, here or elsewhere;
titles in black have not been reviewed)
Bruchac, Joseph. Trail of the Dead. Published by Tu Books/Lee and Low (Apache)
Bruchac, Joseph. Walking Two Worlds. Published by 7th Generation (Iroquois)
Robertson, Robbie. Hiawatha and the Peacemaker. Published by Abrams Books for Young Readers. (Mohawk)
Now here's the books on the CCBC list, by writers and illustrators who
are not Native (titles in red are ones that AICL reviewed here or
elsewhere and did not recommend; titles in black have not been reviewed)
Bowman, Erin. Vengeance Road. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. (Apache)
Johnston, E. K. Prairie Fire. Published by Carolrhoda/Lerner. (Haida and Tseshaht)
Osborne, Mary Pope. Shadow of the Shark. Published by Random House. (Maya)
Rose, Caroline Starr. Blue Birds. Published by Penguin/Putnam. (Tribal nation not specified)
Shepherd, Megan. The Cage. Published by Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins. (Maori)
Velasquez, Crystal. Hunters of Chaos. Published by Aladdin/Simon and Schuster. (Mayan and Navajo)
Voelkel, J & P. The Jaguar Stones: The Lost City. Published by EgmontUSA. (Maya)
Who publishes what?
In 2015, the Big Five publishers did not publish Native writers. Over
half of the books the Big Five published misrepresent and/or stereotype
Native peoples. As I found in the 2013 data set, Native writers get published by smaller publishers.
What does that mean?
If teachers/librarians wanted to get all 11 of the fiction from US
publishers on the 2015 CCBC list, they'd likely have a harder time
getting those from the smaller publishers because those aren't stocked
in stores like ones from the major publishers. Given the poor quality in
the books from the Big Five, children will most easily see problematic
depictions of Native people.
Is there a focus on one Native people?
Yes. There are 3 books with content specific to the Mayan people. I
think that's interesting because this sample is US publishers. We might
expect that, in sum, we'd see them publishing books about US tribal
nations, but, no! It is very hard to make generalizations based on such a
tiny set of data, but what do you think?
What settings (chronologically) get published?
There are 11 books. Some are straight up historical fiction (Blue Birds). Several, like Shadow of the Shark are
hard to categorize because there's time travel. I think this sample is
not large enough to make any definitive statements about setting, but
what do you see? What observations might you make?
The bottom line:
The Native child in the new graphic is holding a very small mirror. When you take a close look at the
quality of the books that could be mirroring her in some way, what she
gets is, primarily, distortions.
_____ This post was updated on September 16 to correct an error. Patty
Loew's book was incorrectly listed in the CCBC log as fiction. It is
nonfiction and has therefore been removed from the list of books by
small publishers, above.
