“Cultural tolerance” as federal policy for Native American students in day and boarding schools during the 1930s? Active promotion of Native language learning alongside English language education via bilingual primers printed and paid for by the US government? Attendance policies allowing Native students to leave school to attend cultural events and religious ceremonies? These are just a few stunning examples historian Gabreilla A. Treglia reveals to readers in her book Education for Preservation? Examining Native American Education Policy in the New Deal, 1933-1945, which demonstrates the complex evolution of Native American schooling from the late nineteenth century into the middle of the twentieth century.

Scholars, students, and educators familiar with the history of Native American education know that federal boarding schools and reservation day schools dominate the literature, with the general consensus being that federal Indian education policy and practice were deeply problematic and complex. Treglia’s book deepens this historiography. By examining New Deal Native American education policy, she effectively extends the scope of our understanding of the Native boarding school experience an additional twelve years beyond 1928, generally accepted as the year that federal schools for Native children were closed. Doing so allows Treglia the room to explore and uncover how schooling methods and racial philosophies underwriting the “Assimilationist Era” of boarding schools (1875-1928), the period in which English-only and forced acculturation was the official norm, bled into the New Deal.

This new focus constitutes a major strength of Treglia’s book. She offers a fresh understanding of Native boarding school history that is supported by a robust and diverse set of sources, ranging from student writings and oral histories to government and school documents and bilingual textbooks, to demonstrate how a New Deal Native American educational policy of biculturalism was more rhetoric than substance. Treglia effectively points out how, for all the New Deal idealism promoting the “maintenance and continuation” of Native languages and cultural ceremonies in boarding and day schools, the “Indian New Deal” actually represented a “straightforward continuation of assimilationist ideals with a smattering of cosmetic cultural additions” (p. 9). While seemingly well intended, school officials selected aspects they deemed “Native” and made significant investments in the curriculum based on their presumption of what Native peoples needed to preserve and practice their culture. Treglia’s research, therefore, demonstrates how in the Assimilationist Era the deficit-minded White attitudes about Native Americans, their cultures, and their religions did not stop in 1928 but continued to inform Native American education into the 1930s and early 1940s. Her book also offers an important reminder for all historians that periodizing the past works well for organizing stories in the present, but actors, events, and broader historical forces do not operate according to theoretical bookends.

Despite it being a major contribution to the field of Native boarding schools, there are a few underdeveloped assertions in the author’s argument that limit the impact of Education for Preservation? beyond fields such as the history of education and history of Native Boarding Schools. For example, Treglia’s sources are rich and effectively employed to disrupt the “neat application of academic models” that she purports anchor the history of “Indian New Deal” policies, but which models does the author mean? (p. 7). At certain points in her book, she deploys terms such as government-mandated ethnocide, colonialism, colonialist, and paternalism (pp. 10, 185) but stops short of explaining why she is using such terms, what they mean according to her, and how they inform her research and analysis. Also, a more thorough grounding in the historiographies of US settler colonialism and White saviorism could possibly have yielded greater insights into what informed the educational and philanthropic philosophies of John Collier and other key White policymakers. Lastly, Treglia leans heavily on the Navajo/Diné experience to speak for the larger Native American experience during this period. While she does occasionally include Ojibwe and Lakota content and perspectives, they are dwarfed by the number of Navajo/Diné sources employed in the book. While this does not take away from the value of such perspectives in the book, it does raise the question of why the author seems to frame Navajo/Diné engagement as reflective of the broader Native American experience.

Despite these issues, Education for Preservation? is an important work with which scholars should engage, as it expands our understanding of the Native boarding school legacy much further than previously considered.