Assumptions about Race

Abstract

One cannot make sense out of the historical record of the schooling— and often the nonschooling—of Indian children and youth apart from the changing ideas about the significance and influence of “race,” a concept with little scientific meaning but enormous significance, in the United States and Canada, for how individuals and groups are perceived and also for how many individuals perceive themselves. “Race,” in the sense in which the term has been used in North America, is entangled with ethnicity and thus with inherited culture and social networks, but it is also frequently taken to refer to an inherent and unchangeable disposition passed on, as we would now say, genetically.