“Recruited to Teach the Indians”: An African American Genealogy of Navajo Nation Boarding Schools

Abstract

This article is a personal and intellectual history of colonial education in the United States. The author—an African American from Atlanta, Georgia—taught elementary school in the Navajo Nation from 2005 to 2007. He was not, however, the first person of African descent to teach on the reservation. Using genealogy as method, the article demonstrates how Indigenous land, Black labor, and racialized education intersected across six generations, culminating in an earlier migration to Navajoland, when hundreds of African American educators staffed Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding and day schools after Brown v. Board of Education ended de jure segregated schools across the U.S. South.