What Do Bans on CRT in Education Mean for Native Education? Two Teacher Educators Share Their Counterstories

Despite the recent anti-CRT (Critical Race Theory) movement within U.S. education, teachings of Native histories and perspectives have never been accurately taught, or even taught. From their perspectives as teacher educators in predominantly white institutions (PWI), the authors share counterstories from their existing IRB-approved research projects to explore the impacts of CRT bans on teacher education and how the bans continue to perpetuate systemic erasure of Native perspectives. They review how legislators in the Western U.S. passed anti-CRT laws as well as its impact on teacher education. Using the TribalCrit framework with an emphasis on the first tenet, "colonization [being] endemic to society" (Brayboy, 2005, p. 430), the authors discuss how Native invisibilization and erasure are perpetuated in predominantly white classrooms by silencing Native perspectives in policy making and curriculum implementation, banning Natives in public education, and explicit refusal of white teachers to learn culturally sustaining pedagogies (Paris & Alim, 2017). While erasure and colonization may no longer be explicit U.S. federal policy aims in the education of Native youth, the subjugation of Native rights, cultures, knowledges, and histories remains a contemporary feature of state-sanctioned public education. Telling these stories of structural violence toward Native peoples reflected in the ignorance enforced by mainstream teachers and educational policymakers makes salient the overwhelming need to teach Native history and content at all levels of public education.