Foreword

Despite Indigenous Peoples having the longest presence on the land now known as the United States, curriculum relating to this group is largely underfunded and ignored. Education relating to Indigenous peoples leaves most high school graduates with the idea that Indigenous peoples of North America no longer exist, or if they do, that they have been relocated to reservations and live a stereotypical, pre-colonial era lifestyle disconnected from the rest of the greater American society. I know this to at least be true in the state of Michigan, a state I called home for the first eighteen years of my life and where I obtained my K-12 education. It wasn’t until I moved over two thousand miles away to Seattle, Washington, that I was first exposed to contemporary Indigenous presence, that I was first made aware that Indigenous peoples are not a race of people slowly going extinct but diverse members of distinct political groups, very active in and relevant to larger society. I was able to learn more on the first day of my first American Indian Studies class at the University of Washington about Indigenous peoples than I had in my entire eighteen years in Michigan. Because of my random decision to take this first class, the entire trajectory of my career and future goals shifted.

I came into the University of Washington planning on going into the medical field with an intended major in Medical Anthropology and Global Health. I knew I was interested in more than just the scientific side of medicine, I was interested in helping people. It wasn’t until I began my classes in my first quarter that I realized people were really all I was interested in, and that medicine was far from the only way to feed my humanitarian interests. I learned of the vast array of issues and topics surrounding Indigenous peoples, and could not believe I had not heard of any of them in my K-12 education.

I have a sister in elementary school, and found myself constantly thinking about how her American History classes would never teach her about the peoples who have occupied the lands now called the United States since time immemorial. I thought about how she would learn in her science classes how to study a singular subject at a time, without ever hearing of the various Indigenous worldviews that often emphasize how you cannot understand a subject fully without understanding the subjects it is in relation with. I thought about how she would learn English grammar and maybe a little bit of Spanish, French, or German, how she would learn to speak a foreign language she may never use but will not understand how that language and the words it contains reflect the larger historical and cultural values of the peoples who hold that language as their native tongue. I at first found myself constantly wondering, “why? Why did we not learn these things in K-12 schooling? How did I graduate knowing the quadratic formula and every battleground of the civil war, but I could not tell you which Tribes have historically inhabited the land on which my childhood home sits?”