Meredith McCoy’s On Our Own Terms: Indigenous Histories of School Funding and Policy is an indispensable contribution to the history of education, and to an exciting and emerging historiography on school finance. McCoy sees herself as contributing to a growing body of scholarship focused on reevaluating “the histories and contemporary realities of Indian education” (p. 15); this work accomplishes this and more. It is not hyperbole to say that this may be one of the most important historical accountings of federal education policy as it concerns Indigenous education in the two decades since Margaret Szasz published her third edition of Education and the American Indian in 1999. This comprehensive, critical, and incisive historical monograph reveals American empire at work; it exposes the logics and methods by which colonialism has sought to transform Indigenous nations and tribal citizens into a homogenous, assimilated, landless, and subordinate labor class. At the same time, and most importantly, McCoy brilliantly draws from what she calls “the archives of survivance” (p. 3) to contest the violence of settler colonialism by centering narratives of Indigenous resilience, as well as individuals’ and Tribal Nations’ “repurposing” of (p. 24) and “selective engagement” with (p. 25) settler schooling to achieve their own cultural and political designs. Assessing over two hundred years of federal Indian education policy, McCoy’s deeply personal and academically rigorous narration, at base, asks: What can be learned from both federal budgets and planning processes concerning the US government’s approach to and relationship with Indian education (p. 19)?
Chapter 1 positions the violence of mission schooling and the federal Indian boarding school system in stark contrast to the ways Indigenous Nations, leaders, and parents repurposed settler aims and funds to meet their own economic and political needs. For example, McCoy shares how Samson Occom, a Mohegan minister, used his “school-acquired skills” to contest federal meddling in Mohegan affairs, critique the mistreatment of both Native and white laborers, and otherwise “turn the gaze back on settlers” in the early nineteenth century (p. 26). While McCoy acknowledges the off-reservation boarding school system that emerged in the nineteenth century as “genocide in action” (p. 37), she uses the story of her own Turtle Mountain great-grandfather, who attended Wahpeton Indian School in North Dakota, to explain how Native youth “created opportunities for survivance where none were meant to exist” (p. 46). Through her reassessment of mission and boarding schools, McCoy characterizes the subterfuge of Indigenous youth, their families, and tribal leaders as “strategies honed through decades … and centuries” that prepared them for future iterations of federal education policy and to resist white settlers’ schemes to eliminate them as distinct cultural and political nations.
Indigenous youth’s “long transition to public schools” from mission and boarding schools (p. 74) is explored in chapter 2. Within the transition, McCoy investigates the “networks of mutual support” (p. 56) that Native people created among their own Tribal Nations as well as with federal officials to secure increased influence over Indian education. It was these networks and relationships, McCoy argues, that helped contribute to “groundbreaking changes in federal policy for Indian education” in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite tribal leaders’ hard work and policy victories, however, systemic inequities persisted. She argues that policies like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and its subsequent amendments, while ostensibly aimed at improving educational outcomes, often perpetuated settler colonial objectives by failing to adequately fund Indian education and grant Tribal Nations control and influence over their children’s schooling, as well as forcing tribes to adhere to a “scarcity model of federal funding” (p. 82) that created competition between tribes instead of unifying them.
The book’s third chapter highlights the persistent and seemingly unending gaps between legislative and policy promises and federal action concerning the funding of Indian education initiatives (p. 103). In McCoy’s assessment, “this is no accident,” but rather by design (p. 104). This persistent shortfall is in fact connected to a decades-long and ongoing effort by federal officials to absolve themselves of the unique federal obligation to fund Indian education as required by constitutionally protected treaty agreements, encouraging instead that states assume this fiscal and political responsibility. In chapter 4, McCoy extends her critique of settler funding politics and structures to contemporary policies like No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act, illustrating how these laws replicate historical patterns of federal abdication and mismatched funding priorities. Her analysis underscores the importance of understanding the federal government’s evolving relationship with Native nations and the implications this relationship has for future education policymaking. This includes the necessary work that school districts today must engage in by consulting with Tribal Nations in the educating of Indigenous youth.
McCoy’s narrative is enriched by the methods she utilized to craft it. She went to great lengths to build trust with tribal communities and honor Indigenous “knowledge and experiences” (p. 19) by working through two tribal research review boards who could provide community oversight on the work in which she was engaged. Furthermore, McCoy’s approach to historical scholarship reveals “the methodological promiscuity of Indigenous studies” (p. 20)—e.g., relying on archives, discourse tracing, and interviews, as well as participant observation—that allows readers to more fully appreciate and comprehend the narratives of Indigenous survivance shared within. In other words, like much scholarship produced within Indigenous studies, McCoy was unable to rely on a single research methodology to piece together and construct a cohesive historical narrative. Where archival silences were present, McCoy read “creatively” (in ways that she imagines many Native activists, parents, and leaders have done before her) to do the kind of resistance and resurgence work necessary for Indigenous people to benefit their communities (p. 16, 18). McCoy likens her reading of archival materials and their absence to the work of critical fabulation Saidiya Hartman and Tiya Miles have relied on in their respective scholarship to confront and contest the limits of the archives.
McCoy’s work is accessible to, and undoubtedly useful for, scholars and teachers alike, just as she intends for it to be. Readers will encounter digestible explanations of budgets, funding models, and policy packaging that enhance the overall historical argument and narrative. Moreover, readers are likely to find themselves captivated by McCoy’s personal reflections, both of her own ancestral histories procured from colonial archives and generated from and informed by her own experience as a policy analyst in the federal government. These moments are among the book’s most engaging, offering a lens both humanizing and poignant through which to view the broader historical narrative. On Our Own Terms is a groundbreaking text that bridges the fields of education history, Indigenous studies, and critical policy analysis. It is a must-read and provides a nuanced understanding of the intersections between schooling, settler colonialism, and Indigenous resistance. McCoy’s work not only challenges us to reconsider the history of American education from the vantage point of Indigenous experiences but also puts forth questions that inspire a vision of what equitable, culturally affirming, and tribally governed education might look like.
