As I begin tonight, there are so many things I want to convey and so many people I need to thank, including you all. For a long time, I’ve been drawn to questions oriented around what it means to be human. I’ve learned from my father that I’m descended from long lines of curious and stubborn people. My family history is complex and surprising, and I’ve learned from it in many ways. Complementing my blood family, there are those who’ve been the most astounding teachers. Among these are Don Warren, Ninna Piiksii, Ruth Helm, Phil Deloria, Karla Bird, Tyson and Lona Running Wolf, Courtney Little Axe, and Kelly Dixon. Each of these people has prepared me for this paper, this talk, which I thought would be one thing a year ago and turned out to be this, something quite different. My intention tonight is to reveal learning and knowledge from an angle not typically approached in our field. I hope that when this is published in the History of Education Quarterly, you will read the sources cited. Many offer both intellectual and methodological grist for the nature of knowledge and its keeping.

Before delving in, some clarification on terminology may be helpful. Like many of those who live in Montana, I use the term “Native,” in a general sense, to refer to Indigenous North American peoples. Whenever possible, I use the specific names that people use for themselves. You will hear me use “Blackfoot” and “Siksika” often. The Siksika tribe is one of the four tribes in the Blackfoot Confederacy, located today on a reserve southeast of Calgary, Alberta.Footnote ¹ The Siksika were historically identifiable by the black soles of their moccasins. The Kainai, or Blood tribe, is now located on a reserve close to the Alberta-Montana border. The Aapátohsi Piikani, or Northern Peigan, reserve is located between the Siksika and Kainai reserves. The three tribes, who are located in what is now Canada, are collectively known as the Blackfoot. On the Montana side are the Amskapi Piikani, the Southern Piegan (with a different spelling), who are also known as the Blackfeet. Together, these four tribes make up the Blackfoot Confederacy, and they have historically lived and moved in the northern Rockies and the adjacent plains to the east. Today, those on the Canadian side are referred to as Blackfoot, and those on the US side are referred to as Blackfeet.Footnote ² You should also know that while I am a competent archival researcher, I am a novice in all things Blackfoot and Blackfeet. There are probably mistakes in this talk, and they are mine, as are my mispronunciations. I apologize for any errors. My intention is to share learning in a way that is familiar to you and doesn’t give offense to the Blackfoot scholars I cite and the Blackfoot Elders from whom I’ve been learning.Footnote ³

The Elders from different Native communities and the tribal historic preservation officers with whom I sometimes get to work, alongside the University of Montana’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) coordinator, Courtney Little Axe, frame difficult situations in a particular way. They recognize where we are in terms of time, place, and in relation to one another, and they illuminate how each interaction might be an opportunity to learn and do better through our learning. This is my attempt. Some of you may find what I share with you tonight as what Bourdieu calls the “unthinkable”—that is, the improbable, the potentially contrary, the unimagined, the phenomenon whose ethical commitments fall outside of what we believe to be our collective own.Footnote ⁴ With that in mind, I invite you to listen, to reflect, and to consider the deep body of learning that Abraham Maslow stumbled into and attempted to make sense of for nearly thirty years after his visit to Siksika.

This is a story about Abraham Maslow’s curious six-week stay at Siksika in the summer of 1938. This is also a story about knowledge-keeping and -learning that I expect many, if not most of you, have not encountered. My hope is that this story will not just illuminate the occlusion of some histories but also will show a rationale for why the histories of Indigenous peoples can and should be read as education histories. The archives that we are accustomed to as historians can be spotty for Indigenous peoples in the Western Hemisphere. As we know, archives preserve texts, images, and things that are largely made of paper. If these are the primary forms of evidence that we consult and learn from, we will miss other forms of evidence that uncover learning outside the academy and the school.Footnote ⁵ Maslow’s encounter helps reveal this.

Abraham Maslow was a psychologist known for his humanistic approach as well as his hierarchy of needs and theory of self-actualization. I first learned about Maslow as an undergraduate, through an introductory psychology course in which I was required to train a rat to move through a maze, push a lever, and collect a treat. I encountered Maslow again in my master’s program as I was learning how to become a teacher. Each time, the notorious pyramid, with self-actualization at the top and basic physiological needs at the bottom, was presented as a distillation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The needs that were positioned toward the base of the pyramid—food, shelter, clothing, and safety—were deemed to be most foundational to human survival. Self-actualization, presented as the pinnacle of the pyramid, represented what it means to be fully human, a person’s flourishing and their living into the meaning they understand their lives to have. This narrative about Maslow may be similar to what you encountered as a student, and perhaps it may even be what you use in your own teaching.

In the spring of 2017, I learned a different narrative about Maslow at my college’s commencement ceremony. Our speaker was Dr. Karla Bird, an alumna who is Amskapi Piikani (Southern Piegan), or Blackfeet, hailing from what is now Browning, Montana, which is just east of what we know as Glacier National Park. Bird shared with us a story that linked Maslow to the Blackfoot community of Siksika, which, if you recall, is located not too far from Calgary.Footnote ⁶ What Maslow learned at Siksika can be read as the basis for the theories he presented as the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization. Though he might not have been able to interpret what he was seeing and hearing as fully as would a member of the Blackfoot community, what he experienced stuck with him. Blackfoot and Blackfeet scholars see a clear connection between Blackfoot axiology and ontology and what Maslow published in the years after his time at Siksika, though, some argue, he did not fundamentally understand the Blackfoot worldview.Footnote ⁷ He didn’t know what he didn’t know. Some, in contrast, have argued that Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and theory of self-actualization did not derive from his time at Siksika; those scholars rely almost wholly on non-Blackfoot sources.Footnote ⁸ Maslow himself, however, noted the evident errors he saw in how he made sense of what he experienced at Siksika not long after his return to the US and for at least the next twenty-eight years.Footnote ⁹ Moreover, two of his unpublished manuscripts reveal observations at Siksika that directly connect to the hierarchy of needs and self-actualization.Footnote ¹⁰ What is even more compelling is the fact that when Maslow arrived at Siksika, his research followed behaviorist lines around social hierarchies and dominance; but after he left, his research changed course, and he helped to found humanistic psychology, which is intent on understanding the conditions necessary for human flourishing.Footnote ¹¹ By 1942, Maslow’s publications reflect a shift from research on primates, personality, and dominance to research on security, self-esteem, and motivation. In 1943, he published “A Theory of Human Motivation,” introducing the hierarchy of needs and marking a near complete transition to research through a humanistic lens.Footnote ¹² What, then, happened at Siksika?

In the summer of 1938, Maslow, along with two other researchers, Jane Richardson and Lucien Hanks, traveled to Siksika with a letter of introduction from cultural anthropologist Ruth Benedict. Funded by a Social Science Research Council grant-in-aid, the trio intended to conduct research as newly minted PhDs. Maslow and Hanks were University of Wisconsin-educated psychologists who studied deviance, while Richardson was a Berkeley-educated cultural anthropologist. Each researcher appears to have approached this six-week field study with their own agendas. It was Richardson, who, unconventionally at the time, took the lead in interacting with the Elders upon arrival at Siksika. Normally, one of the male researchers would have done this, but neither Hanks nor Maslow had the cultural training to understand the expectations their gender carried. Richardson thus presented the researchers’ letter of introduction from Ruth Benedict and talked with the Elders to learn what they wanted the researchers to study and why. According to Kainai scholars Narcisse Blood and Ryan Heavy Head, who interviewed Richardson in the early 2000s, the Elders at Siksika wanted the researchers to study and document the ceremonies that summer, which signified the beginning of the Blackfoot new year, so that generations not yet born could find their way as Blackfoot people.

The Elders were intent on keeping this knowledge for Blackfoot youth who had attended residential schools, Canada’s equivalent of US boarding schools for Native children. By 1938, students were returning home from schools not knowing how to behave as members of the Blackfoot community. They had forgotten, or they were enrolled in the residential schools so young that they did not have the opportunity to become educated as their Elders had. Behaving in ways acceptable at residential schools did not work at Siksika, and returning Blackfoot students were not allowed to live in neighboring white communities.Footnote ¹³ The students were thus caught in a bind, and the Elders saw that the American scholars could help ameliorate this. Richardson and Hanks quickly adjusted their research agendas to align with what Blackfoot Elders requested. Maslow did not.Footnote ¹⁴

Maslow was there to study deviance, particularly that which manifested in sexual or aggressive ways, and he attempted to stick to the research agenda with which he came. According to Ryan Heavy Head, Maslow’s approach did not make sense to the Blackfoot Elders, who expected to be interviewed themselves as the most educated and knowledgeable members of the Siksika. Maslow, though, pursued his interviews with younger members of the community, and in doing so, isolated himself and wound up on the periphery. Some found his research intrusive, as he asked individuals to share very personal information and crossed gender boundaries when he asked about women’s societies.Footnote ¹⁵ As Narcisse Blood remarked, “In some ways, Maslow was like Napi. He fumbled along.”Footnote ¹⁶ Napi, or “Old Man,” is a trickster known for creating chaos, and the Blackfoot stories about him reflect a range of behaviors and paradoxes that are of this world. And, Maslow might have glimpsed this in himself: he acknowledged his lack of knowledge. As Joe Pablo, a Salish Elder, observed, “Maslow’s approach saying that he knew nothing saved him, and perhaps the Elders appreciated that.”Footnote ¹⁷ In fact, in his unpublished manuscript, coauthored with John J. Honigmann, Maslow noted his naïve approach in observing people as they were, without focusing attention on “the formal aspects of the culture, such as kinship, ceremonial life and social structure,” admitting “that a fuller study of the structures of the society and culture in association with a study of personality may throw a different light on his [Maslow’s] picture and point out instances where he [Maslow] misinterpreted behavior.”Footnote ¹⁸ Even if Maslow was like Napi in the way he went against the grain, he nevertheless glimpsed interactions and practices among the Blackfoot that offered a path to the development of the hierarchy of needs and theory of self-actualization, though his framing does not mirror that of the Blackfoot.

Central among Maslow’s observations is the high regard that the Blackfoot at Siksika showed toward children. In a word, children were beloved, and when they were born, they were already actualized.Footnote ¹⁹ From birth to death, learning over the course of one’s lifetime includes developing an awareness of who one is and how one fits into the larger, interconnected web of their community and the universe.Footnote ²⁰ As Maslow phrased it, to become fully actualized is “the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”Footnote ²¹ Among the Siksika, children were so precious and significant, Maslow and Honigmann note, that grandparents sometimes adopted their first grandchild; and if a child were ever in need of a family, “there would probably be quarrels for the privilege of taking him.” The whole community cared for children, ensuring that “every child knows he is wanted and loved by every person in the whole tribe” so that all of the child’s needs were met.Footnote ²² Being enveloped in a loving and generous community positioned children to learn through their experiences with a high degree of trust and autonomy.Footnote ²³

Such autonomy surprised Maslow. Blackfoot psychologist Sidney Stone Brown recounts two examples of the independence children were afforded. In the first example, Maslow observed a small boy struggling to open a door. Rather than open the door for the child, adults, including Maslow, let the boy struggle and figure it out for himself. Once he opened door, all of the adults praised the boy “for being tenacious, for persevering and accomplishing his goal.”Footnote ²⁴ In struggling to open the door, the boy learned that struggle is normal and that his determination and persistence were skills worth learning and were valued in his community.

In the second example Brown recounts, another young boy did something that was inconceivable to Maslow. The child was a bundle carrier, a significant spiritual role that adults typically fulfilled. Sacred bundles, which are important in ceremony, are comprised of physical items that are imbued with spiritual power. The bundle carrier is responsible for protecting the bundle and for keeping the knowledge that was conveyed with it when the bundle was transferred to the carrier from the previous bundle carrier.Footnote ²⁵ So, when asked to transfer the bundle by another tribal member, the seven-year-old boy, as the bundle carrier, determined that he should go out away from home, on his own, to fast and pray for several days in order to contemplate the request in a responsible way. Adults and children alike respected his decision without fuss.Footnote ²⁶ In recognizing the boy’s capacity to make this decision, those around him: (1) affirmed his actualization as a person, (2) affirmed his responsibility as a bundle carrier, (3) affirmed the actions he took to fast as appropriate, and (4) affirmed his contributing and integral role in the community, which connected him to others at Siksika and the spiritual world in which he lived.Footnote ²⁷ What Maslow appears to have missed, or not recognized, was that the boy, because he was a bundle carrier, was transferred. That is, when he received the sacred bundle, he also received specialized knowledge that carried with it particular responsibilities.

Knowledge transfer, I expect, will be unfamiliar for historians of education. The transfer of knowledge, according to Blackfoot scholar Betty Bastien, “is the exchange of medicine power and responsibility.”Footnote ²⁸ Such power and responsibility requires reflection, as demonstrated by the young bundle carrier whom Maslow encountered. Kainai scholar Mike Bruised Head writes that the “transfer of knowledge is the methodology in the Blackfoot thought, in the Blackfoot world, in the Blackfoot metaphysics. All unwritten.”Footnote ²⁹ Knowledge transfer was and is also key in learning ceremonies and songs, essential forms of knowledge expression and knowledge keeping. Not only is knowledge transfer essential for maintaining balance and ensuring what Bastien describes as a “good heart,” it also requires one to act in service to others.Footnote ³⁰ Knowledge transfer, as Bruised Head explains, is verbal, as it has been for millennia, and it is the primary means through which knowledge moves and is protected over time. The methodology of knowledge transfer has remained constant, and the Elders ensure strict adherence to the protocols, songs, and stories. The Elders are the archives.Footnote ³¹ Those who are transferred are transformed, as with the young bundle carrier Maslow met.Footnote ³²

Like the two boys described above, children learned through awareness and their relationships as they grew into adulthood.Footnote ³³ And these relationships were secure. Since they were infants, they had likely been “handed around freely,” as Maslow noted, and given what they wanted by many members of the community. Trust between adults and children as well as among children was high. Each child was regarded as actualized, as knowing themselves and learning their roles in their community. Parents, as part of this community, did not bear the sole responsibility for raising their child; others contributed, simply as members of a society that cared deeply and had high regard for children.Footnote ³⁴ As Maslow and Honigmann write,

Imagine coming up in such a society! How stunned Maslow must have been. It was so contrary to his own upbringing in New York as a son of Ukrainian refugees. His family experienced displacement and dove deeply into a society premised on individualism and a clear values-based pecking order between adults and children. Blackfoot children, in contrast, had the latitude to learn in a variety of ways, and they were supported by the community. By the time children reached adulthood, Blackfoot individuals not only had a clear sense of self but also understood their role in an interconnected society and geographic place. Maslow found this to be stunning. Shortly after his time at Siksika, he wrote, “From a psychoanalytic point of view, the Blackfoot are unusual. They seem definitely not to have any major anxieties, or repressed aggression, or castration complexes or the like.”Footnote ³⁶ More specifically, Maslow estimated that “70-80% of the Blackfoot are more secure than the most secure 5% of our population.”Footnote ³⁷ He believed this was attributable to Blackfoot modes of child-rearing.Footnote ³⁸

Central to these practices was the recounting and teaching of stories. Blackfoot stories run parallel to what historians write and tell. Bruised Head notes that the stories are archival, though they may be unwritten.Footnote ³⁹ Bastien adds that “sacred stories … are the living knowledge of the people. The stories explain the nature of reality, the science, and the economic and social organization of Siksikaitsitapi [“Blackfoot speaking real people”]. They are the accumulated knowledge of centuries.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Along with key Blackfoot stories that describe the beginning of the universe and the creation of the world and its living beings are the stories of Napi, the Blackfoot trickster. Napi, or Old Man, “lived life in the extreme, always wanting too much and thinking too little.”Footnote ⁴¹ Through his extremes, Napi made the boundaries of the good and ethical life visible, while teaching about humility, service, and the many, often paradoxical, aspects of human nature. Infants begin learning these stories through lullabies, and children continue to learn them as they grow. In the telling and retelling of stories, adults encounter them again and again, adding to their own learning and fulfilling their responsibility to tell the stories to the next generation.Footnote ⁴² Bruised Head describes Blackfoot stories as an archive that the Blackfoot have shared from generation to generation from time immemorial. That the core threads of the stories have remained the same is their validation.Footnote ⁴³ The centrality of stories in learning, along with the enveloping, positive regard children experienced as they grew, moved with them into their roles as adults.

Even though he was on the periphery, Maslow witnessed a community of actualized people, where self-esteem was not reflective of dominance.Footnote ⁴⁴ Rather, members of the community recognized each other’s talents and roles without jealously or animosity. In a 1966 letter to Henry Geiger, an actor, pacifist, and editor of the biweekly journal MANAS, Maslow writes:

This was a fundamentally different conception of leadership than what was manifest in Canadian and US Indian policy, where single individuals were expected to serve as capaciously authoritative leaders. Instead, Blackfoot leaders were part of a collective, interwoven social web. Because people were raised in a loving and generous community that affirmed individuals’ talents, and the distribution of those talents spanned the collective whole, there was little reason for insecurity, fear, or jealousy. Maslow and Honigmann write, “The general attitudes of the Blackfoot personality are marked by good self-esteem and self-confidence,”Footnote ⁴⁶ with a sense that others “liked and respected them.”Footnote ⁴⁷ As a result, generosity was central to maintaining robust social relationships.Footnote ⁴⁸

When individuals boasted without cause, criticism and teasing could follow. Maslow observed that criticism, when it occurred among the Blackfoot, was about a person’s behavior, not about the person. People were not guilted, nor were they humiliated. Humor, Maslow observed, was often the means through which criticism was delivered. Through joking, people could “trade on weaknesses … mak[ing] it certain that no one can long entertain delusions about his abilities.” One person told Maslow that humor was educational, that it motivated people to improve themselves.Footnote ⁴⁹

The Blackfoot language, like the people’s sense of humor, is also instructive. Blackfoot is a verb-based, agglutinative, polysynthetic language, meaning a thought is expressed in relation to action using morphemes, or word parts that can stand on their own or be combined to create accretive words. For those of us who speak only noun-based languages, how this works can be challenging to imagine. To illustrate, Blackfoot language instructor, Jesse DesRosier, provides several comparisons. First, because Blackfoot is a verb-based language, the world is reflected as being dynamic. This, in turn, means that people, as part of the world, have the capacity to change through action. An example might be someone saying, “You are acting crazy,” which is different than “You are crazy.” When a quality is expressed through action, it does not permanently attach to an individual. An individual can change how they act and, therefore, change the quality that has been attributed to their action. Transformation is possible, and, with that, it is difficult to offend. Second, in Blackfoot, time is seasonal and thus circular; it is not linear, as we might typically frame it in English or other noun-based languages. DesRosier notes that the “future is similar to the past in that we can’t touch it,” yet we may experience patterns of similarly contoured events again. Third, ownership of knowledge or property is primarily through attachment to one’s body, and both can be transferred, as we have seen. In English, by contrast, ownership represents an accumulation of goods beyond one’s body. The more one has, the wealthier and more successful they might be.Footnote ⁵⁰ These few examples provide a glimpse into how language shapes thought and how language can shift thought in ways that express different ontologies. One Blackfoot language learner commented to me that they were coming to understand that for those who are fluent in Blackfoot, the world lights up differently, something akin to going from three dimensions to four.

The implications for the qualities of the Blackfoot language are several and are profound. The Blackfoot language communicates a dynamic world, one that is in flux, and is thus animate. The language reflects this reality, reinforcing relation as a fundamental tenet of both how the world is and how a person should live. Brown notes, “Elders explain that language holds 80 percent of the culture.”Footnote ⁵¹ This is significant. With meaning, purpose, and relationships come the ethical expectations necessary to maintain those relationships, maintain balance, and maintain “the good heart.”Footnote ⁵² In this way, language, in large part, constitutes culture.Footnote ⁵³

Guided by language, stories, and individuals who were transferred, those at Siksika whom Maslow encountered and observed were connected and secure, providing little content for his inquiry into dominance and deviance. Maslow’s subsequent observations of Blackfoot society at Siksika as well as his hierarchy of needs and theory of self-actualization reveal gaps in his understanding, which contemporary Blackfoot scholars have noted. First among these gaps is that the Blackfoot framing of actualization and needs is circular, with actualization at the center, rather than arranged as a hierarchy as Maslow framed it and the graphic pyramid with which it has been represented.Footnote ⁵⁴ Second is the fact that Maslow’s observations and framing were largely around the individual. He was a psychologist, after all. Nevertheless, Blackfoot scholars describe the Blackfoot people as a collectivist society.Footnote ⁵⁵ The third gap is the importance of place, not just in Blackfoot society, but also Blackfoot cosmology and language. Maslow appears to have missed this altogether.

Understanding the significance of place is not something historians trained in the Western context are accustomed to studying deeply. Kapisi et al. have described place as a central sensemaking feature for the Blackfoot in that place centers not only the present-day community, but also the community of ancestors.Footnote ⁵⁶ Since time immemorial, the Blackfoot and Blackfeet have lived on the land on which they currently reside in the mountains and along the Rocky Mountain Front in what is now Alberta and Montana. What does that mean? According to a recent study published in Scientific Advances, a genomic analysis of the Blackfoot shows that they have lived in their present-day lands for at least 18,104 years.Footnote ⁵⁷ This means that they did not move to the area from the Great Lakes, as twentieth-century linguistic studies speculated.Footnote ⁵⁸ 18,104 years is a long time in the history of modern humans. It is roughly one-third to one-half of the 40,000–60,000 years that modern humans have existed on this planet, according to scholarly estimates based on the archaeological record.Footnote ⁵⁹ And that record is largely based on African and European examples.

To be in a place and to know a place for such a long period of time is inextricably educative. It is the basis for learning what we would identify as scientific knowledge of the natural world and the cosmos; and, it is the basis for learning what we would identify as philosophy, spirituality, art, geography, history, sociology, and psychology, which occurs by humans forging and sustaining social relationships with each other and with the ecological network of living beings around them. While the knowledge of place accretes through a deep understanding of a geography, it also cascades through time. Not only are one’s contemporaries part of this place, but so are their ancestors, and presumably, their descendants. What about this relationship? And how might it have permeated stories, ceremonies, and language?

As Kainai scholar Narcisse Blood noted, “If the land could speak in our territory, it would be Blackfoot.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This should not be surprising, given that the Blackfoot have been in their territory for at least the last eighteen thousand years. The diverse territory, spanning the mountains of the northern Rockies across the prairie to the east, provided ample means through which to learn empirically, ethically, and spiritually. As Bruised Head has written, “All that is within the Blackfoot Territory, we have a name for it and a story, and that’s what makes up our language.”Footnote ⁶¹ This includes all the features of the landscape and the plants and animals that live there as well as their various relationships. Each mountain, river, place has a name, and in order to engage each properly for learning, one must know and use its Blackfoot name. Each Blackfoot name allows for spiritual connection that makes knowledge transfer possible, a practice extending back millennia.Footnote ⁶² Bruised Head writes that the mountains “were our ‘institutions.’ The mountains are animate. That is where the spiritual vision, powers were given to heal. You had to call the name of that mountain to guide you in this process. It’s still happening today.”Footnote ⁶³ The land from which stories, ceremonies, songs, and knowledge derive has made the Blackfoot the Blackfoot.Footnote ⁶⁴ The depth of connection that has been forged over millennia has been the basis for Blackfoot education.

Learning and knowledge are connected to specific places. Thus, the loss of Blackfoot names for mountains and plants has profound effects for knowledge keeping, including medicinal knowledge. Bruised Head illustrate the impact with an analogy, “It is like all the doctors are told there’s no more medical schools; there would be less doctors, or people would die in the European communities.” This knowledge loss for the Blackfoot is the direct result of colonization.Footnote ⁶⁵ With this loss of names comes the loss of connection with the world, the universe, and its alliances.Footnote ⁶⁶ Indeed, as Narcisse Blood remarked, “If the land could speak in our territory, it would be Blackfoot.”Footnote ⁶⁷

What of Professor Blood’s comment? What of knowledge that is encoded in language? Prior to the recent genomic study’s finding that the Blackfoot have been in their territory for the last eighteen thousand years, linguists had posited that because Blackfoot is an Algonquian language, the Blackfoot, as a people, must have originated from a proto-Algic group.Footnote ⁶⁸ The genomic data suggest otherwise, as the Blackfoot are one of the oldest and genetically distinct populations in North America, which makes the origins of the Blackfoot language as much of a mystery for western linguists today as it was before the proto-Algic hypothesis was formed. The Blackfoot language, though, is a keystone of sorts to understanding what Maslow witnessed and attempted to translate and make sense of in 1938 and over the course of his career. As noted earlier, some have described fluently speaking Blackfoot as an ability to experience the world in multiple dimensions, in an illuminated way that is fundamentally different from what we experience in speaking English. Maslow seemed to have recognized this, noting gaps in his knowledge, and Blackfoot scholars have affirmed this as well.Footnote ⁶⁹ Such a difference in language and perception would, as several have observed, make translation challenging, particularly if a concept that exists in Blackfoot does not exist in other languages. Moreover, if Blackfoot children in the twentieth century were prohibited from speaking Blackfoot at the residential schools they attended, they would understand the world and relations around them in ways very different from what their Elders had learned.

When Blackfoot children began to attend residential schools sponsored by the Canadian government, the sacredness of childhood shifted. By the time Maslow visited Siksika, Blackfoot children were required to attend residential schools, as they were banned from the nearby school in Gleichen that white children attended.Footnote ⁷⁰ Like Native children in the United States who attended boarding schools, Native children in Canada faced the expectations of learning English through immersion and even corporal punishment, a devaluing of their cultures and practices, and a conversion to a belief in the individual and the accumulation of wealth above all else.Footnote ⁷¹ Maslow remarked that Blackfoot children were punished for speaking Blackfoot at school.Footnote ⁷² What happened to Blackfoot children at the residential schools was not only a loss of language and an understanding of how to behave upon their return to Siksika, but a loss of something revered: learning and growing into their actualized selves. Blackfoot psychologist Sidney Stone Brown writes that removal to residential schools didn’t just relocate students; it severed their spiritual connection to the place where their ancestors had always lived.Footnote ⁷³ It’s no wonder that Blackfoot Elders asked Richardson and Hanks to record the ceremonies they witnessed. The Blackfoot needed a corrective repository of their learning.

Like Richardson and Hanks, Maslow saw that the Blackfoot Elders at Siksika were educated people. And like the Blackfoot Elders, he saw that Blackfoot children who attended residential schools were returning to Siksika uneducated. That is, they did not know how to behave, interact, or make sense of the Blackfoot world in ways that were congruent with historical Blackfoot practices. The incongruences that returning students experienced were grounded in differences between Blackfoot and Euro-descended epistemologies and the attendant assumptions about the nature of knowledge, how one comes to know, and how knowledge is kept. Blackfoot scholars Betty Bastien and Mike Bruised Head describe Euro-descended epistemologies as based in rational thought, objectification, and certainty. That is, nature is held to be largely, if not wholly, knowable.Footnote ⁷⁴ We can see this in the history of education, for example: we typically study papers in archives to understand what happened in the past. As a result, the history of formal learning has dominated our field, focusing primarily on established institutions of education and, occasionally, on the methods of learning that are practiced in them. As historians of education, we have followed the paper trail, tracing the documentary residue that people and institutions have left behind. And we have pieced together bits of such objective evidence as a constellation in order to describe a particular story of the past.

Blackfoot epistemology, in contrast, is premised on change, or flux, and the interconnectedness of the conscious universe. Because the universe is conscious and is fundamentally relational, maintaining balance is crucial to ensure the natural order of love and generosity. Humans, then, learn so that they can understand their place in the greater cosmos and help maintain the natural balance of generosity and love in order to ensure their survival.Footnote ⁷⁵ By extension, understanding the relationships that shape the universe is central to Blackfoot knowledge, which, as Bruised Head explains, “is everyday experience, language, song, ceremony, relationship with all the people and everything we consider animate, and the stories, the dreams, the metaphysical.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Blackfeet and Métis scholar Rosalyn LaPier describes this comprehensive view of the universe as one that has visible and invisible realities, both of which require attention and engagement.Footnote ⁷⁷ Not only is Blackfoot knowledge experiential, it takes a lifetime of learning and reflection to make sense of it because of its vastness and its intricacies.Footnote ⁷⁸ And knowledge conveys one’s responsibilities for maintaining good relationships with one’s family and alliances in reciprocal ways in order to make sound decisions, serve one’s community, and ensure that the knowledge survives in the present and over the long term.Footnote ⁷⁹ Learning and knowledge-keeping, as Kainai scholar Ryan Heavy Head notes, are also processes of “recognizing all the ones we called in before” who gave gifts that resulted in learning.Footnote ⁸⁰ This, too, is a form of relationship.

Blackfoot scholars have described learning as a complex of phenomena:

1. 1. Learning is personal and not necessarily objective.Footnote ⁸¹

2. 2. Learning is “becoming aware.”Footnote ⁸²

3. 3. Learning is experiential.Footnote ⁸³

4. 4. Learning demands responsibility in service to others, in the ethics of compassion, respect, generosity, and in relationships.Footnote ⁸⁴

5. 5. Learning is reflective.Footnote ⁸⁵

6. 6. The natural order of the world is generosity and love. If that is not apparent, things are out of balance.Footnote ⁸⁶

7. 7. Learning is an expression of and evidence of connectedness.Footnote ⁸⁷

8. 8. Learning is medicine; so is language.Footnote ⁸⁸

9. 9. Learning’s purpose is survival.Footnote ⁸⁹

10. 10. Learning happens through observation and reflection.Footnote ⁹⁰

11. 11. Learning happens through ceremony.Footnote ⁹¹

12. 12. Learning comes from the land.Footnote ⁹²

Elders guide learning and keep knowledge through consultation, stories, and ceremony. The Elders whom Maslow, Richardson, and Hanks met had determined that in order to maintain Blackfoot education for Blackfoot people, they needed a written backup, while understanding that English could only provide a shorthand record for their descendants. And, within a Blackfoot community, as Bruised Head notes, “what the Elders say is law.”Footnote ⁹³ Richardson and Hanks honored the request the Elders at Siksika made. Although Maslow did not, he nevertheless recognized that the Blackfoot’s system of education had much to offer to the world beyond Siksika. For the duration of his career, Maslow attempted a translation of sorts of the Blackfoot system of education through his humanistic approach, imperfect though the translation was.

So, how did we, as education historians, who are familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and the theory of self-actualization, miss his six-week stay at Siksika? Framed differently, how did we miss his exposure to the living root of the ideas he published, which helped birth an entirely new subfield of psychology and approaches to working with children that have influenced policy and practice? One reason might be that historians of education have not recognized Indigenous histories as education histories. Not all Indigenous histories can be found in the paper remains left in archives. Not all Indigenous histories can be adequately conveyed in English. Not all Indigenous histories find their heft in the school. This calls into question the very nature of education’s histories. Must they be tied to schools? How do we know if a school is educational? What if schools themselves are tricksters, offering a sense of purpose and opportunity for some while disintegrating meaning and integrated futures for others? What do we do with that?

If school is our primary prism, we miss the extraordinary education that Maslow glimpsed. And yet, as the Blackfoot Elders whom Maslow had the good fortune of meeting and learning from realized, education is precious and can be damaged. The Blackfoot Elders recognized, too, that with care and attention, education can be recovered. I, for one, find this inspiring and a way to consider where our official narratives might have occluded the richness and beauty of what Maslow witnessed. What might we learn by leading our queries with that premise?