Social justice leadership for American Indian sovereignty: A model for principal preparation

Abstract

The Indian Leadership Education and Development project (ILEAD) at Little Bighorn Tribal College and Montana State University did not begin with an intentional focus on social justice; this article tracks the evolution of the program to becoming a model for indigenously sensitive/culturally responsive preparation for K-12 school leaders. Beginning with a U.S. Department of Education grant in 2006 and after three iterations, the program has trained over 70 American Indian school administrators serving Montana, South Dakota, North Dakota and Wyoming. Despite the program's success in preparing school leaders for historically underserved reservations and other schools across Indian country, the program has not achieved success without significant transformation from a dominant society, western academy, typical educational leadership program to becoming a program sensitive to Indigenous ways of being/ knowing but actually honoring and recognizing how these American Indian ontologies/epistemologies made the program stronger for all students - Indian and non-Indian.