ABSTRACT
Being born in an unjust colonial society, and forced to be educated in a system that justifies and conceals the unjust, has been a personal dilemma for every Indigenous person for many generations. It remains a deliberate, sustained and systematic oppressive legacy for members of colonized Indigenous Peoples, which might best be thought of as the cognitive imperialism of a government-sponsored ethnocide or cultural genocide. Most of the Indian youth were the sons and daughters of the patriotic and conflicted warriors of World War II. They were forced by law to become ‘split-headed’, thinking and living with two distinct cognitive and language systems, by the federal law of truancy. Split-head resistance and the work of activists lead to Congress responding by enacting the Indian Education Act 1972 and the Indian Education Assistance and Self-Determination Act 1975. In 1983, President Reagan issued his ‘Indian Policy Statement’, which affirmed that ‘the Administration will deal with Indian tribes on a government-to-government basis’.
