Educational Pasts, Enduring Colonial Presents

Abstract

Abstract Taking Indigenous sovereignty as at once axiomatic and constitutively strategic, this article argues that it is necessary to expand the chronology and disrupt the geographic certitude through which the history and present of US higher education and its internationalization are conventionally understood. Colleges and universities in the British colonies and what became the United States, including Harvard, William & Mary, and Dartmouth, were founded and funded with the intention that they would function as a vital technology through which the nation-state and white Christian culture would reproduce and secure themselves, their possessions, and their futures. This project was to be accomplished through the assimilation and at times incorporation of people, often youth, from polities understood as fundamentally other from that of their instructors and benefactors. Assessments of the extent to which such projects were effectuated vary, but it is well established that contemporary universities and colleges are conceptually and financially rooted in colonial educational projects that targeted Indigenous students for incorporation and assimilation. In an era when many of these same institutions are making substantial, if inadequate, efforts to contend with their historical origins, it is necessary to move beyond acknowledgment of these histories and contend, instead, with how such projects materially and epistemologically underwrite the basic functions of the most well-resourced and prestigious higher education institutions of the present.