‘A Nation Is Coming’

Blog series Americas and Oceania

Author Dinos Pappas is a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Stirling, and is a 2026 Eccles Institute Visiting Fellow.

What does education have to do with the revival of collective rights and cultures of a nation? The Eccles Institute Visiting Fellowship at the British Library gave me the opportunity to explore this question through the Library’s Americas and Oceania collections and in the context of my doctoral research that examines the transformation of Native American education during the 1970s and 1980s, when Native educators and organisations increasingly argued that education should not simply be something provided to Native communities, but something over which they should exercise authority themselves. This represented a profound shift since, for much of US history, education had been one of the principal means through which federal authorities attempted to assimilate Native peoples into mainstream American society, often at enormous cost to Indigenous languages, cultures and communities. By the 1950s, the “termination” policy sought ultimately to end the special political relationship between the United States federal government and Native nations. Against this background, demands for Native self-determination raised a deceptively simple question: was putting Native culture into the classroom enough, or did Native people also need the power to determine what education was for?

One of the great advantages of working through the British Library collections was being able to place sources beside one another. This offered remarkably different answers. Theodore Fischbacher’s A Study of the Role of the Federal Government in the Education of the American Indian: A Dissertation, Arizona State University (1967) proved particularly revealing. Writing as termination was being implemented, Fischbacher identified what at first appears to be a contradiction when federal authorities were encouraging reservation day schools, community involvement and curricula that recognised Native traditions, while simultaneously pursuing the longer-term incorporation of Native people into mainstream American society. This distinction became important to my research; cultural recognition did not necessarily mean Native control.

I encountered the same tension in a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) educational film catalogue from 1970 that offers a fascinating glimpse into the educational world the Bureau was helping to construct immediately before the major reforms of the 1970s. Its organisation is particularly revealing, with ‘American Indians’ appearing as one of several subject categories alongside mathematics, science, language arts and social science. Native history and culture were visible, but largely as subjects to be studied within a curriculum that had already been determined. Equally striking are the categories that are missing from it; tribal sovereignty, treaty rights, tribal government, or federal Indian law. Native cultures were highly visible, but Native political authority was much harder to see.

The collections also revealed how dramatically those assumptions were being challenged. For example, To Sing Our Own Songs, a report arising from a workshop for American Indian educators contains discussions that question the assumptions behind the measuring of Native children’s learning. When psychologist Mogens Jensen discusses conventional assessments of cognitive ability and the importance of cultural experience in understanding how children learn, the terminology used is uncomfortable, to say the least, to modern readers with the repeated uses of language such as 'low functioning', 'deficient cognitive functions' and 'retarded' children, reflecting the psychological and special-education discourse of its period. Yet, within that framework, Native cultural difference is no longer merely something to be inserted into an existing curriculum. It begins to challenge the assumptions through which educational systems themselves classify and assess Native children.

Another source made this transition tangible in institutional terms. At D-Q University, founded as a Native-controlled institution of higher education in California, documentation for a Native Language Education project records Native personnel occupying key roles. The accompanying photographs matter as much as the staffing lists, visually reinforcing an educational model built around local people and local knowledge. Native communities were increasingly becoming producers and authorities of educational material.

Perhaps the most arresting discovery of my fellowship came from Akwesasne Notes, an influential Native newspaper associated with the Mohawk community at Akwesasne. Across its pages, education appears within a much wider conversation about Native political and cultural survival. One extraordinary double-page image brings that relationship into focus. Beneath the headline ‘LOOK, A NATION IS COMING!’ are photographs of Native children. The accompanying words address them directly; ‘My Children! You Are Our Future’. The image stopped me. Its significance lies in the way it connects nationhood with generations yet to come. Sovereignty is not presented simply as territory, government or a legal relationship with the United States. A nation must also reproduce itself across generations. Education now becomes fundamentally political, and the future generations must be able to sustain it.

The struggle associated with Red Power was not confined to dramatic moments of protest. Sovereignty had to endure beyond them, and this required institutions, languages, knowledge and people capable of carrying it into the future. Schools, community education programmes and Native-controlled colleges could therefore become places where sovereignty was not merely demanded but reproduced.

The sources I examined at the British Library do not tell a simple story of federal control suddenly being replaced by Native self-determination. They reveal a more complicated transformation, during the 1960s and 1970s, when Native educators and communities increasingly pushed the argument further.

Bringing these very different materials together during my Eccles Institute Visiting Fellowship has changed my understanding of that transition. Native educational sovereignty is not simply a question of control over schools, but something deeper; the authority to determine what knowledge matters, how children should learn, and how education might help ensure that a people, a culture and a nation continue into the next generation. And perhaps that is why the words printed above those children in Akwesasne Notes seem such an appropriate expression of what was at stake. ‘Look, a Nation is Coming’.