The Center for Indian Education: 60 years of Indigenous nation building

By: Turning Points

Sixty years ago in 1959, Native American students attended school amid a national political landscape of assimilation, termination and urban relocation. That same year, the Center for Indian Education (CIE) was established at Arizona State University with the founding mission to serve the educational and cultural needs of children in Arizona’s 22 tribal nations and communities.

“The Center was really born during this period of Indigenous activism,” said Teresa L. McCarty, former CIE co-director from 2009 to 2011 who has a doctorate in Cultural Anthropology. “It’s an incredible role that the Center played in forging this pathway for American Indian education, self-determination, nation building and sovereignty.”

Founders Robert A. Roessel, Jr., G.D. McGrath, Irving W. Stout, Bruce Meador and George A. McGill (Omaha) outlined an essential philosophy for the Center that still flourishes today: providing research, teacher training, community outreach, policy advisement, leadership development, counseling, and student recruitment to enhance Indigenous education globally.

Programs housed within CIE today include: Turning Points Magazine, a resource for Indigenous college students; the Journal of American Indian Education, a scholarly publication striving to improve Indigenous education through empirical research, knowledge generation and transmission to researchers and educational settings; teacher preparation cohorts that offer early childhood, elementary/secondary and special education teacher certification; the Critical Legal Preparation Program, a pathway to law initiative that assists students who have considered law school but may not have the resources necessary to attend; and much more.

What makes the Center unique is its rootedness in Native communities. Under the leadership of 11 directors from 1959 to present day, CIE has helped to produce generations of thriving Indigenous scholars who went on to make their unique marks globally. To current Director Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (Lumbee), the work done at CIE unleashes the power within each student.

“Vine Deloria, Jr. famously said, ‘Power can neither be given nor received.’ I take that really seriously in that what I think we do isn’t empower people. What we do is help people unlock power that they already have and then figure out how to use it,” Brayboy, a senior advisor to the president, said.

Brayboy says the key in stewarding the Center is ensuring that Indigenous knowledge will always be implemented into curriculum.

“The future of Indigenous education is for us to build what we already know about how we want to educate our kids, and do it through schooling and other things,” he said. “The future is a really interesting mix of traditions and technologies, and we’ve always had technologies if you look at the canal system that surrounds the Valley. The Hohokum people created that. A loom, dyed wool and strings get used to create blankets is a technology. The future is about marrying the past with the present and guiding for generations of students who are going to come after us. But fundamentally, the future is about teaching young people about how to thrive in the society in which they will live.”

While CIE’s work continues to make impacts beyond Arizona, its legacy for the future is to still assist Indigenous children and communities in creating futures of their own making.

“The Center has been both a lightning rod and a magnet for bringing together people, programs and issues,” McCarty said. “I hope that Arizona State leadership recognizes the jewel that they have there in the Center and the work that has quietly and not-so-quietly been done over all of these years. Without the Center, we would definitely not be in the place that we’re at today in terms of progressive and anti-colonial movements, and presence that are in the field.”

Brayboy appreciates the University’s recognition of CIE’s unique impact in academia.

“The University allows us to engage in really important work,” Brayboy said. “Between 1959 and 2019… each of those presidents had to commit to the Center’s success. It’s a testament to the University about the fact that there have been so many people that have seen the wisdom that the founders originally had in this and then provided whatever resources necessary to continue it to be successful.”