UC Davis

Native American education in the United States has historically been a tool for the missionization, assimilation, and erasure of Native Americans. Due to the policies of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956 that vast majority of Native American people in the United States currently reside within urban centers. This has produced a demographic reality wherein the majority of Native American people in the U.S. reside within urban centers yet constitute a demographic minority. As such, Native Americans are experiencing multiple forms of erasure which serve as a driving factor in poor educational outcomes for students. At the same time urban Native American educators have constructed multifaceted holistic pedagogical approaches to serve urban Native youth coming from a multitude of diverse backgrounds, based on traditional Indigenous practices that have been adapted to urban Native environments to recreate an Indigenized relationship to urban landscapes. These holistic Indigenous forms of education have served as an important platform for combating epistemicide both historically and in the present. This study seeks to examine the major educational challenges of urban Indigenous education in the U.S., California, and the Oakland Bay Area; as well as the Indigenous holistic pedagogical approaches and interventions utilized by Native American people to resist erasure, epistemicide, and miseducation within urban centers. Through interviews with constituents of the American Indian Child Resource Center, the Intertribal Friendship House, and the Native American Health Center based in Oakland California, I have conducted 30 interviews with Native American educators, parents, students, and Elders that address the major educational challenges as well as the major educational interventions for urban Native youth in Oakland. This study highlights the historical/present centrality of urban Native hubs as well as the importance that these spaces play in the education of urban Native American students, the priority of establishing strong educational relationships within and with urban Native American communities, the impact of implementing culturally sustaining pedagogies, and the need for incorporating traditional Indigenous knowledge systems into the education of urban Native American students. Finally, this study discusses the educational implications of these findings for urban Native and non-Native educational communities, teacher training, and educational policy.