Federal agents, church officials, and education reformers have long used schooling as a weapon to eliminate Indigenous people; at the same time, Indigenous individuals and communities have long repurposed schooling to protect tribal sovereignty, reconstitute their communities, and shape Indigenous futures. Joining scholarship that speaks to Indigenous perspectives on schooling, this paper offers seven touchpoints from Native nations since the 1830s in which Indigenous educators repurposed “schooling” as a technology to advance Indigenous interests. Together, these stories illustrate the broad diversity of Native educators’ multifaceted engagements with schooling and challenge settler colonialism's exclusive claim on schools. Though the outcomes of their efforts varied, these experiments with schooling represent Indigenous educators’ underappreciated innovations in the history of education in the United States.

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American Indian or Filipino peoples to a significant degree" and calls for further work in that area (p. 18). While the narrative includes testimony from Native students like Luther Standing Bear, Zitkála-Šá, and several Carlisle graduates who returned as faculty, the vast majority of the text focuses on white teachers' expressed, often racist opinions about their students. In addition, Eittreim uses the word Sioux to refer to the students from Oceti Sakowin Oyate. The term means "enemy" and was weaponized against Lakota and Dakota peoples during the Plains Wars to present them as irredeemably fierce, whereas Lakota and Dakota mean "ally" and "friend." The use of this term is unfortunate, since Eittreim shows throughout that she cares deeply about probing imperial narratives. However, the end result is imbalance. Without a significant counterbalance of student accounts, especially from Filipino students whose voices are entirely absent from their chapters, Teaching Empire tends to neglect the impact of institutional white supremacy teachers enacted against their students. Examining curricula used in these classrooms may have helped to shed further light on engagement between teachers and their students and given greater context to the claims teachers made about their work in their letters, diaries, and memoirs. Teaching Empire makes a crucial contribution to the scholarship of empire and education history by putting its full analytical focus on the teachers who sought to enact US empire through their classrooms at Carlisle and in the Philippines. Scholars will find this book a useful framework from which to build deeper inquiry into these systems of erasure, the specific classroom materials and curricula that shaped those experiences, and the enduring legacy of late nineteenth-century paternalism in both education and policy.

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