Native American Studies

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The Department of Native American Studies was established to provide and advance quality education for and about American Indians of Montana, the region, and the nation. In fulfilling this mission, the Department is committed to meet the changing needs of Montana's Indian tribes and all Montana citizens through excellence in teaching, research, and service. In its academic program, the department provides concentrated study through an undergraduate minor, the first online graduate certificate in Native American Studies offered, and a Master of Arts degree in Native American Studies. Students in any major can also gain a multicultural perspective through NAS offerings in the University's core curriculum. The Department, through its research and other creative efforts, actively pursues interdisciplinary scholarship in the field of Native American Studies.

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2012 - 20142

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Social studies education

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    Hearing the Story: Critical Indigenous Curriculum Inquiry and Primary Source Representation in Social Studies Education
    (2012-10) Stanton, Christine Rogers
    Although primary source accounts provide students with direct access to the experiences of historical participants, they can reinforce the dominant culture historical narrative if misrepresented by teachers, curriculum publishers, or scholars. The author demonstrates the importance of adhering to guidelines presented by critical Indigenous scholars when evaluating resources that incorporate primary accounts attributed to Native Americans. To illustrate the potential for critical Indigenous theory to inform curricular decision making, the author analyzed three resources that incorporate Chief Joseph's surrender speech according to: (a) their respect of Native peoples, (b) their recognition of discursive positionality, and (c) their honoring of the complexity of Native knowledge systems. Results demonstrate the potential for social studies resources, even those that include accounts from historically marginalized peoples, to reinforce the hidden curriculum, to position peoples using discourse, and to perpetuate the myth of objectivity in historical inquiry. Implications for scholarship and teaching practice are included.
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    The Curricular Indian Agent: Discursive Colonization and Indigenous (Dys)Agency in U.S. HistoryTextbooks
    (2014-12) Stanton, Christine Rogers
    In the 1800s and early 1900s, the United States assigned Indian Agents—non-Native employees of the federal government—to coordinate intergovernmental efforts, to encourage the assimilation of Native peoples into European-American society, and to serve as advocates for individual tribes. Although Indian Agents no longer exist in an official capacity in the United States, the potentially contradictory expectations that informed their work continue to influence communities across the country. Instead of decolonizing education, today's curricular agents typically misrepresent the historical and future agency of Native peoples while reinforcing the patronizing, normative, dominant-culture narrative. This article outlines the critical discourse analysis of five widely adopted U.S. history textbooks, as situated within the broader scope of textbook research and emerging educational movements. Findings show that textbook authors and other curricular agents use strategies of exclusion and passivation to control the historical and curricular agency of Indigenous peoples. Given the influence of educational reform efforts such as those related to the Common Core Standards, now is the critical time to retheorize curriculum design and inquiry as dialogic, dynamic, transformational, and agentive processes. The project's conclusions demonstrate the need to confront the biases of curricular agents in order to guide the decolonization of curriculum materials.
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