A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body by Wendy Shelly Greyeyes

Abstract

Reviewed by: A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body by Wendy Shelly Greyeyes Kelsey Dayle John (bio) A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body by Wendy Shelly Greyeyes University of Arizona Press, 2022 Greyeyes starts this book with an example familiar to many community members, which is a collision of interests in a public Diné forum on education. Any Diné person knows and has likely attended one of these forums. This example illustrates an ongoing theme of the book: the intersecting mess of authority that affects the education system and its legacy within the larger context of Native nations and the US government. This book aims to demystify and contextualize one of the longest and most frustrating institutions within the Navajo Nation—education—making an important contribution to the ways that decolonial theory can be put into practice institutionally and politically. Chapter 1 focuses on the meaning and practice of decolonization within American Indian communities and how this theory might be applied to the particular example of Diné education. I admit that the mess of jurisdictions, agencies, acronyms, and stakeholders was confusing in the beginning. However, I found that Greyeyes purposefully avoided the trap of presenting a tidy timeline of events, which would be a disservice to the complexity. The most important moment for me in chapter 1 is when she argues that Diné people typically focus on the future and generations [End Page 113] to come with the belief that looking to the past is futile and at times violent. Because of this, she explains that her intentional look at history is important for future generations. This chapter also puts the work in conversation within larger fields of decolonial theory citing Sandy Grande's book Red Pedagogy in conversation with Marxist and decolonial literature from Franz Fanon to Paulo Freire. This is important because it plants the seed for readers to critique the United States' mission for public education, which stresses training for labor. Not to mention, readers have language to understand the racialization inherent in projects of Indian education. Chapter 2 focuses on outlining the different actors responsible for education on the Navajo Nation—state, federal, and local. Here Greyeyes describes the original purpose of Diné education as the practice of learning to live in relational harmony to all beings. She then uses a chronological approach to help readers understand the rise of different key players and legislation that determines the current moment. The chronology is also put in conversation with the broader landscape on Indian policy showing that educational policy is never just about the field of education, but related to the overall experience of American Indians in the United States. This shows the potential and impossibility given the Nation's entanglement with the federal government as a "domestic dependent nation," a status that casts a constant shadow on the Nation's enactment of sovereignty. The following chapter takes a deeper dive into the funding and policy landscape that has shaped the current moment. It begins with a brief mention of off-reservation boarding schools, a legacy, I think, could have been braided into other parts the book since its impact on education continues to be so great. A few important historic moments include the Johnson—O'Malley Act, the Meriam Report, the Kennedy Report, and the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act , which all frame the scope of the Diné Department of Education's authority as well as the changing national landscape of educational policy. Chapter 4 gives a breath of fresh air because it centers the rise of locally controlled schools as the reader begins to understand that "tribal control" is interpreted by many as "localized control." This foregrounds the work at the Low Mountain and Rough Rock schools. I would not say that Indian education began with these schools but that they marked moments where informal education met formalized schooling. This is a distinction mentioned in chapter 2 but is necessary for the reader to remember throughout the entire text. Chapter 5 further contextualizes the bureaucratic nature of education, explaining how this confusing web of authority came to be. The reader can better understand the goal for the...