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Schooling has not always been a benevolent or even neutral institution of social uplift for all students. Rather, for Indigenous students, schooling in the United States has long been a space of colonial domination, dispossession, and assimilation. This talk explores the history of schooling for Indigenous students since the 1600s, including at Virginia-specific sites like the Hampton Institute. It then turns to an exploration of Virginia state standards and relevant legislation to examine possibilities for secondary education curricula, situated within recent efforts by other states to expand K-12 instruction on Indigenous histories. 

About the Speaker

Meredith McCoy (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent) is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and History at Carleton College. Her research examines how Indigenous families, educators, and community leaders have long repurposed tools of settler violence into tools for Indigenous life. Her first book, On Our Own Terms Indigenous Histories of School Funding and Policy, was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2024. McCoy co-directs Carleton's Indigenous Engagement in Place initiative and serves on the project leadership team for Indigenous Chicago, a community-engaged public history project, including high school curriculum, that documents Chicago as an Indigenous place, past, present, and future.