Original Sins

How do everyday school routines help build a racial order—and how might you undo it? In this book, Eve L. Ewing argues that schools are not neutral mirrors of society; they are laboratories that make race feel real. She names this system the Race Machine: a sorting technology that compresses the infinite variety of human life into rigid categories, distributes resources accordingly, and convinces you that those categories are natural. To change racial outcomes, you must see schools as active makers of racial meaning and material inequality—then re-engineer what they do and whom they serve.

Ewing contends that the Race Machine does its work through layered mechanisms: founding ideas that justify hierarchy (Thomas Jefferson’s writings and the Doctrine of Discovery), assimilationist schooling that constructs a unified Whiteness (Noah Webster’s language projects, Horace Mann’s common schools, and Francis Bellamy’s Pledge), and carceral and testing regimes that classify, surveil, and exclude. All of this unfolds inside racial capitalism, where wealth built on slavery and land theft still underwrites educational opportunity. If you want justice, you must confront both the epistemic (whose knowledge counts) and economic (who owns assets) foundations that make inequality feel inevitable.

The sorting starts early—and feels ordinary

In early grades, you meet the Race Machine in small acts: reading groups named for butterflies or caterpillars, norms about hair or speech, discipline patterns that tag some kids as leaders and others as problems. Those micro-decisions scale into tracks, gifted placements, and safety allocations. Research Ewing cites shows children recognize race in infancy and absorb stereotypes by age six. By the time students reach middle school, expectations and opportunities have already hardened into different futures.

Foundations that licensed inequality

Ewing reads Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia alongside his political acts to show how ideas about difference became policy blueprints. Jefferson framed Black people as intellectually deficient and Native peoples as fated for disappearance or forced assimilation. These claims, echoed in the Doctrine of Discovery, set up schooling as a technology to produce citizens for some and containment or erasure for others (compare with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on settler colonialism; Ewing integrates these traditions into a K–12 lens).

Assimilation and the making of Whiteness

As European immigrants arrived, schools pressed for "unanimity": one language, one flag, one story. Webster’s grammar, Mann’s common schools, Bellamy’s Pledge, kindergarten and playground movements, and home economics curricula all trained bodies and habits into a standard that could absorb some Europeans as White and position others outside (Irish Catholics, at first) until they conformed. These rituals weren’t just patriotic; they were tools to manufacture the national "we"—and to mark who didn’t fit it.

Black and Native schooling as control

After emancipation, freedpeople demanded schools as citizenship. Many White reformers offered saviorism instead: moral readers that preached meekness (Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book), industrial training at Hampton and Tuskegee (Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Booker T. Washington), and the archetype of the "White Lady Bountiful" to civilize labor. For Native youth, boarding schools like Carlisle enforced cultural death (Richard Henry Pratt’s "Kill the Indian. Save the man.") through hair cutting, uniforms, surveillance (the Man-on-the-Band-Stand), English-only mandates, and outing programs that replaced learning with domestic and agricultural labor.

Measurement and the myth of inferiority

Testing granted a scientific halo to hierarchy. From skull collectors (Samuel George Morton) and polygenists (Josiah Clark Nott, Louis Agassiz) to Progressive-Era eugenicists (Charles Davenport) and test adopters (Lewis Terman, Carl Brigham), measurement projects repeatedly naturalized social differences as innate intelligence. The Army Alpha/Beta tests proved mass testing was scalable; the SAT flowed from that lineage. Ewing warns you to recognize standardized tests as cultural technologies built in a context of racial science, not timeless arbiters of merit (compare Ibram X. Kendi’s critique of biological determinism).

Carceral habits in the classroom

Schools often teach children to live under watch: metal detectors, police in hallways, zero-tolerance rules, and suspensions that prepare bodies for the school-prison nexus. Ewing points to painful examples—from the field trip to Cook County Jail to historical child prosecutions like Hannah Ocuish and George Stinney—that reveal how punishment routines disappear children rather than keep them safe. For Native youth, federal jurisdiction (Major Crimes Act, post–Crow Dog) compounds over-policing and dispossession with under-protection in juvenile systems.

The crooked playing field of racial capitalism

Education unfolds inside an economy built on stolen land and coerced labor. Northern banks and insurers (New York Life, Aetna, Lehman Brothers) profited from slavery; land-grant universities like Cornell and the University of Minnesota were bankrolled by eleven million acres taken from nearly 250 tribes (Morrill Act). The Dawes Act’s allotment and trust system, later exposed by Elouise Cobell’s lawsuit, suppressed Indigenous wealth-building. Wealth—not income—moves educational odds through home equity, legacy admissions, and intergenerational transfers (see Raj Chetty and Thomas Shapiro’s findings).

Key Idea

The Race Machine doesn’t just label difference—it assigns life chances. To build just schools, you must redesign sorting mechanisms, expand what counts as knowledge, and repair the material thefts that schools sit atop.

A different future: abolition, Land Back, braiding

Ewing closes with practice and hope: abolitionist teaching (Mariame Kaba, Bettina Love) that meets material needs while dismantling punishment, Land Back as educational design (Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; Gregory Cajete), and "braiding" as a method of solidarity (Robin Wall Kimmerer; Sarah Ayaqi Whalen-Lunn). You build "schools for us" by centering community care, land-based learning, and shared sovereignty—making the Race Machine obsolete by refusing the logics that power it.

Ewing asks you to confront the intellectual scaffolding that made racial sorting in schools seem reasonable. She starts with Thomas Jefferson, who paired soaring rhetoric of liberty with a catalog of difference in Notes on the State of Virginia. Jefferson’s claims about Black intellectual inferiority and Native disappearance—paired with his political endorsement of the Doctrine of Discovery—supplied a two-pronged policy template: forced exclusion for Black people and forced inclusion (as erasure) for Native peoples. Schools became the tool to enact both arms of that project.

Jefferson’s ideas to institutional practices

By outlining tiered education for Virginia, Jefferson turned ideology into structure. White boys were groomed as future citizens; others were routed to subordinate roles or deemed outside the polity altogether. Ewing traces how this blueprint threads forward into nineteenth- and twentieth-century schooling: curriculum that treats some children as civic heirs and others as laborers or wards of the state. Carter G. Woodson’s warning—that lynching begins in the classroom—captures how curricular hierarchy authorizes social violence (compare Woodson’s The Mis-Education of the Negro).

Making Whiteness through school rituals

When immigration surged, leaders pursued assimilation as nation-building. Noah Webster standardized English and civics catechisms; Horace Mann’s common schools promised shared moral foundations; Francis Bellamy’s Pledge embedded ritual fealty to a flag and mythos. Kindergarten and playground advocates (e.g., Richard Watson Gilder; Henry Stoddard Curtis) framed early childhood and play as sites to "train" citizens. Home economics (Ellen Swallow Richards; Pauline Agassiz Shaw) taught domestic norms as science. These everyday technologies didn’t merely integrate families; they measured them against a White, Protestant, middle-class template and demanded conformity.

Curriculum as settler story

Ewing shows how textbooks and popular resources (Teachers Pay Teachers) still center Columbus and explorers as benign founders while minimizing Indigenous presence and Black struggle. The result is a canonical story in which violence becomes discovery and domination becomes destiny. This narrative focus legitimizes present arrangements: if the nation’s rise was heroic and inevitable, then wealth concentration in certain hands appears natural rather than the outcome of theft.

The politics of who counts as citizen

Deciding what goes into curriculum is political work. When you prioritize certain heroes, rituals, and "neutral" values, you inevitably sort children into different relationships with the state. Ewing urges you to see monuments, pledges, and school holidays as living policy—rituals that produce belonging for some and alienation for others (Note: This aligns with Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities—schools perform nationhood daily).

Concrete implications for practice

If you teach, examine how language policies, morning rituals, and "character" curricula distribute dignity. If you design standards, ask whose myths you reinforce and whose you erase. Small edits—teaching the Dakota War alongside Minnesota’s founding, using Indigenous-authored texts, repositioning Columbus as a case study in conquest—recalibrate the moral lessons students internalize.

Key Idea

Foundational ideas make daily rituals feel commonsense. Change the story, and you open new policy paths—about who belongs and what schools are for.

Beyond melting pots and myths

Ewing’s intervention is not nostalgic. She shows that the "melting pot" forged unity by hierarchizing difference; it "melted" some into Whiteness while consigning others to control. Rebuilding requires a different anchor: a multilingual, multiepistemic, place-based education that treats pluralism as a strength rather than a problem to be solved.

After emancipation, Black communities saw schools as a path to self-governance and dignity. Ewing honors that vision while exposing a parallel project: White saviorism that used schooling to produce obedient labor rather than political equals. This tension—liberation vs. control—runs through readers, teacher archetypes, and institutional models that still shape classrooms today.

Two competing purposes for education

Freedpeople fought for schools as a civil right (see W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction). Meanwhile, many northern missionaries and southern reformers framed education as moral rescue: teaching temperance, domesticity, and gratitude. Texts like The Freedman’s Third Reader and Lydia Maria Child’s The Freedmen’s Book highlighted obedience and industriousness over civic power. Toussaint L’Ouverture appears as a figure of order, not revolutionary change; Frederick Douglass’s politics are softened. The message was clear: be good workers, not claimants of equal power.

Institutions that disciplined aspiration

Hampton Institute (Samuel Chapman Armstrong) and Tuskegee (Booker T. Washington) institutionalized industrial education—training teachers to reproduce discipline, manual skills, and deference in rural Black schools. While some graduates leveraged these opportunities for community uplift, the dominant model tempered political ambition and channeled talent into service to a racial labor order. Ewing connects this to the long-standing image of the teacher as "White Lady Bountiful," a charitable authority who stabilizes hierarchy even while offering help (Note: This trope echoes in contemporary "Teach for America savior" critiques).

Teachers, courage, and constraint

Ewing doesn’t erase the bravery of many educators—Cornelia Hancock risked violence; Charlotte Forten centered Black dignity. Black teachers became pillars of community life and activism. Yet structural constraints—hiring discrimination, lower pay, prescriptive curricula—limited what even committed teachers could do. The point is not to vilify individuals but to map how systems cast teachers into roles that can reproduce subordination.

Curriculum as economic discipline

Reconstruction-era advice literature (Clinton Fisk’s Plain Counsels for Freedmen) urged wage labor, saving, and property accumulation as moral duties, casting "idleness" as ruin. Ewing shows how this economic catechism served planter and industrial interests while narrowing Black worlds to fit a capitalist order. Even well-meaning uplift campaigns promoted a life script—work, thrift, docility—that thwarted collective freedom dreams (compare to Kevin Quashie’s quiet and rest as Black interior life worth defending).

The long echo in today’s classrooms

Fast-forward and you can hear the echo whenever behavior management eclipses critical thinking for Black children, or when "career and technical education" shows up as a substitute for academic access rather than an expansion of choice. Carter G. Woodson’s line—"There would be no lynching if it did not start in the classroom"—becomes a frame for miseducation: schooling that legitimizes a smaller life.

Actionable shifts you can make

Center Black intellectual traditions and civic agency in curriculum (Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells). Replace compliance-centered routines with pedagogies of co-creation and joy. Expand CTE as "both-and" (rigorous academics plus meaningful work), not "either-or." Recruit and support Black educators, and protect their capacity to set culture and content (research shows Black students benefit from Black teachers’ higher expectations and advocacy).

Key Idea

When schools define education for Black children as moral taming and labor preparation, they reenact Reconstruction-era control. Liberation pedagogy asks you to teach for power, not mere propriety.

Measuring success differently

If you judge success only by quiet classrooms and punctual homework, you will reward docility over brilliance. Redefine indicators—student-led inquiry, civic projects, community partnerships, and cultural production—to cultivate the futures Black families demanded from the start: full citizenship, self-determination, and flourishing.

Ewing calls federal Indian education what it was: a program of cultural genocide disguised as schooling. From Fort Marion to Carlisle, Richard Henry Pratt’s credo—"Kill the Indian. Save the man."—organizes a system that blends prison, army, and school. When you see school uniforms, haircuts, English-only rules, and military drills in this context, you recognize a project designed to dissolve Indigenous nations by remaking their children.

Pratt’s prison-school template

At Fort Marion, Pratt imprisoned Native leaders, cut their hair, issued uniforms, staged before/after photographs, and fused surveillance with Christian instruction. Carlisle Industrial School scaled the model: students were renamed, drilled, and punished for speaking their languages. The school newspaper, The Indian Helper, adopted the omniscient "Man-on-the-Band-Stand"—a watcher who made surveillance feel inescapable (Foucault’s panopticon in practice).

Labor over learning

The outing system sent students to White homes and farms as domestic and agricultural laborers. Superintendents proudly called their institutions "working schools." Boys harvested orchards; girls served in households. Weekend classes replaced full schooling. This wasn’t job training; it was dispossession by other means, shifting children from communal caretaking traditions into private property regimes (linking directly to Dawes Act allotment and the breaking of tribal landholding).

Injury and resistance

Ewing gives texture to the harm: Luther Standing Bear’s fear during removal, Nellie Robertson’s coerced public apology for speaking Sioux, and countless stories of punishment for practicing culture. Yet students resisted—hiding language, making art, using sign systems, and building underground kinship. Families resisted too, but law and force (compulsory attendance, arrests of parents, the 1896 Browning Ruling treating parents as wards) criminalized refusal.

The erasure continues in data and policy

Today, the asterisk problem—omitting Native students from reports due to small sample sizes—renders communities invisible, justifying further inattention. Policy compounds harm: the Major Crimes Act funnels Native youth into federal systems where juvenile protections are weaker, helping explain their overrepresentation in confinement. Ewing calls this statistical and legal extermination-by-bureaucracy (Note: See Beyond the Asterisk for a parallel scholarly frame).

Curriculum, land, and sovereignty

Erasure in school stories mirrors erasure on the ground: the Morrill Act turned nearly eleven million acres from 250 tribes into endowments for 52 land-grant universities, including Cornell and the University of Minnesota (expanding after Dakota dispossession and mass execution in 1862). Without Land Back and restored jurisdiction, Indigenous education remains conditional. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Gregory Cajete, and Keresan Pueblo teachings remind you that real learning is land-centered, relational, and communal responsibility—forms unintelligible to extraction schools.

What you can change now

Stop penalizing Indigenous languages; fund immersion and land-based programs. Partner with tribal nations to co-govern school policy and data reporting. Audit discipline policies for cultural bias and surveillance reflexes. Redirect outing-like "service" programs that export student labor into reparative projects co-designed with Native communities (e.g., watershed restoration under tribal leadership).

Key Idea

Assimilation here was extinction by design. Education becomes just only when it strengthens Indigenous sovereignty, languages, and kinship with land.

Measuring what matters

Replace asterisked invisibility with metrics that communities define: language vitality, youth participation in ceremony, tribal governance internships, and ecological guardianship. When you honor these indicators, you swap the Race Machine’s rankings for a relational account of thriving.

Ewing maps how measurement turned prejudice into policy. Pseudoscience (skull measurements), eugenics, and IQ testing converged to sell the idea that Black and Native peoples are inherently less intelligent. Schools then used tests to track, exclude, and justify unequal investments. To act justly, you must interrogate what tests actually measure and expand the epistemic frame of what counts as knowledge.

From skulls to scantrons

Samuel George Morton’s Crania Americana, Josiah Clark Nott’s racial categories, and Louis Agassiz’s polygenist notions gave racism a scientific gloss. In the Progressive Era, Charles Davenport’s Eugenics Record Office mainstreamed hereditarian thinking. Alfred Binet designed a tool to identify students needing help and warned against misuse. But Lewis Terman’s Stanford-Binet and Carl Brigham’s Army-derived SAT scaled testing into classification engines. The Army Alpha/Beta’s 1.7 million examinees convinced the public that tests were objective, even when cultural content skewed performance (e.g., knowledge items about stamps or roosters in nests).

Statistics as weapons

Data misuse amplified harm. Prudential’s Frederick Hoffman used numbers to argue "Mulatto" degeneracy and justify discriminatory insurance. Terman advocated tracking some groups out of advanced education; Brigham used Army data to assert racial hierarchies (he later recanted, but not before the damage was done). Later, Arthur Jensen and William Shockley revived IQ determinism to political effect, shaping debates about schooling and social spending.

The epistemic critique: whose knowledge?

Tests assume a narrow canon of knowledge and cognition: decontextualized problems, individual recall, and specific cultural referents. Ewing centers Indigenous and Black epistemologies—Keresan Pueblo’s A’ dzii ayama’ guunu (service-oriented giftedness), Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s communal responsibilities, Gregory Cajete’s Native science (perception, story, spirit)—to show you that what looks like "low ability" may be a mismatch between the test and lived intelligence. When school data asterisk Native students out of existence, bureaucratic invisibility becomes a feedback loop that justifies neglect.

Curriculum politics and historical narratives

Ewing connects testing to curriculum power: if Columbus remains heroic and conquest vanishes from the story, then scores in that storyworld measure conformity, not truth. Teachers Pay Teachers’ abundance of celebratory Columbus lessons exemplifies popular curriculum’s settler grammar. When knowledge is defined this way, "achievement gaps" are often gaps in access to culturally resonant content and opportunities, not innate deficits.

Designing just assessment

Move from single-shot, decontextualized exams to performance tasks, portfolios, and community reviews that honor multiple ways of knowing. Disaggregate data without erasure; avoid the asterisk by collaborating with small communities on qualitative measures. Use tests for resource delivery—not gatekeeping—paired with robust supports (tutoring, enrichment, language access). Audit gifted identification and advanced-course admissions for cultural bias (the "Deja Jackson" counselor study shows how names and assumptions block access).

Key Idea

Tests are cultural artifacts. When you treat them as destiny, you turn a tool into a myth that justifies inequality.

A practical shift in mindset

Ask in every testing debate: What do these items assume I know? What preparation or cultural capital do they reward? Who benefits from the cut scores? Without those questions, you risk reenacting the gospel of inferiority under the banner of evidence.

Ewing reframes "school safety" as a choice about what kind of society you rehearse with children. U.S. schools have long trained students to live under watch—from corporal punishment in slavery to the panoptic routines at Carlisle and into today’s zero-tolerance codes, school police, and exclusionary discipline. Rather than a pipeline, Ewing highlights a nexus: a web of practices and policies that normalize punishment as the default response to youth.

From whips to watchers

Under slavery, torture made bodies legible to owners. In boarding schools, surveillance made children legible to the state (the Man-on-the-Band-Stand). Foucault’s theory of the panopticon becomes vivid when you consider hall passes, uniform checks, metal detectors, and omnipresent cameras: students internalize being seen and regulate themselves accordingly. The lesson is obedience, not care.

Harms that aren’t aberrations

Ewing recounts wrenching scenes: a school-sanctioned field trip to Cook County Jail; historic prosecutions of children like Hannah Ocuish and George Stinney; and modern-day abuses such as pepper spray and excessive suspensions against Native students at Loleta Elementary. These are not isolated; data show Black and Native youth are disproportionately suspended, expelled, and arrested at school, then overrepresented in juvenile custody (policy structures like the Major Crimes Act intensify Native exposure to federal systems).

Why punishment feels "normal"

Carceral logics promise control and quick certainty. They flourish when schools lack resources to meet needs (counselors, nurses, social workers) and when staff conflate compliance with learning. Ewing notes that punitive routines often masquerade as benevolence—dress codes that "prepare kids for work" or suspensions "for safety"—but the outcomes are disappearance from learning time and reinforcement of racial stereotypes.

Alternatives that build safety

Abolitionist approaches replace punishment with relationship-centered accountability: restorative circles, peer juries, transformative justice partnerships, and trauma-informed practices. These work when paired with material supports—food, stable housing, healthcare—and when staff are trained to recognize bias and de-escalate. Schools that cut suspensions without adding care simply push discipline off the books.

What you can do tomorrow

Audit discipline data by race, disability, and incident type; identify "subjective" offenses (defiance, disruption) that hide bias. Replace police responses with community-based responders and counselors. End exclusionary discipline for minor infractions. Co-create classroom norms with students; teach conflict skills as core curriculum. In Indigenous contexts, align responses with tribal justice and peacemaking traditions, not external carceral systems.

Key Idea

Safety is a function of relationships and resources, not force. If you rehearse punishment, you produce a society that expects cages.

Shifting adult beliefs

Sustained change requires adult mindset shifts. When you experience a student outburst as a challenge to your authority, you reach for control. When you experience it as a communication of need, you reach for care. Ewing invites you to rewire those reflexes—because the Race Machine depends on the first response.

Ewing anchors school inequality in the political economy that made American wealth: slavery and land theft. If you treat education as a meritocratic ladder without looking at who already owns the building, you will misdiagnose the problem. The book follows the money—from plantations to Wall Street, from reservations to land-grant endowments—to show why equalizing school inputs cannot, by itself, erase racial gaps in outcomes.

Slavery’s profits, far beyond plantations

Northern firms financed and insured slavery: New York Life and Aetna sold policies on enslaved people; Lehman Brothers began as a cotton brokerage; fortunes like J. P. Morgan’s and John Jacob Astor’s grew in cotton’s orbit. These profits seeded banks, insurers, and industries that later appeared neutral but distributed advantages across generations (Note: Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton provides a macroeconomic backdrop that complements Ewing’s school-centered frame).

Universities built on stolen land and labor

The Morrill Act (1862) transferred nearly eleven million acres from about 250 tribes to fund 52 land-grant universities. Cornell realized the largest financial return; the University of Minnesota’s endowment grew after violent Dakota expulsion and mass execution in 1862. Elite campuses also profited from slavery: Yale leased a plantation; Princeton courted planter-class students; UNC accepted land from a donor who owned 221 enslaved people; enslaved people built and maintained campuses. Modern "UniverCities" (Davarian Baldwin) extend extraction via gentrification and land grabs.

Trust land and long theft

The Dawes Act broke communal landholding into allotments held in federal trust, limiting Indigenous ability to build wealth or use land as collateral. Elouise Cobell’s class-action suit exposed federal mismanagement of trust funds and missing records; the 2009 settlement ($3.4 billion) barely scratched the harm, with many beneficiaries deceased. These legal architectures made poverty, then blamed culture.

Wealth, not income, drives mobility

Wealth funds tutoring, test prep, stable housing, and college costs. Raj Chetty’s work shows Black and Native children experience lower upward mobility and higher downward mobility even at similar incomes. Thomas Shapiro’s interviews demonstrate how intergenerational transfers (down payments, tuition) alter destinies—advantages schools alone can’t replicate. Property-tax funding ties school quality to housing markets, compounding earlier exclusions like redlining and GI Bill discrimination.

How tracking and expectations exploit the field

Within this crooked field, schools sort further. De facto tracking channels Black and Indigenous students out of advanced STEM and AP routes; counselor and teacher biases (the "Deja Jackson" experiment) quietly gatekeep. White parent advocacy often wins honors placements (Lewis & Diamond), while Indigenous parents face marginalization. Better classes get better teachers and reputations, reproducing inequality under the banner of merit.

Policy beyond technocratic fixes

Raise funding, yes—but pair it with repair: reparations, Land Back, wealth-building via baby bonds and down-payment assistance, tuition waivers for tribal citizens at land-grants, and endowment transfers to communities harmed by university growth. Inside schools, open access to advanced coursework, audit placement biases, and invest in early, universal enrichment so "giftedness" isn’t a gate but a garden.

Key Idea

Education cannot fix what asset theft broke. Justice requires redistributing the fruits of stolen labor and land—and redesigning school structures that magnify inherited advantage.

Measuring progress honestly

Judge reforms by wealth effects and access, not just test scores: homeownership rates, debt loads, AP/IB participation, counselor caseloads, and the presence of Native and Black students in selective programs. If these don’t move, the field remains crooked.

After diagnosing how schools sustain racial hierarchy, Ewing turns to building: abolitionist teaching, Indigenous resurgence, and a braided ethic of solidarity. The goal is not just to remove harmful systems, but to make them obsolete by meeting needs, restoring land relations, and weaving community care into the fabric of learning. You are invited to co-create "schools for us"—spaces that nourish dignity, curiosity, and connection.

Abolition as presence and practice

Drawing on Mariame Kaba and Bettina Love, Ewing frames abolition as building the social conditions that render punishment unnecessary: housing, healthcare, food security, childcare, and mental health care. In classrooms, this looks like restorative and transformative practices, culturally sustaining teaching, and curricula that confront history while cultivating joy. David Stovall’s provocation—"Are we ready for school abolition?"—asks whether entrenched institutions can be repurposed or must be replaced with community-rooted alternatives (freedom schools, co-ops).

Land Back as educational design

Land Back is not just a deed transfer; it’s a pedagogy. Following Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, education flows from land—language, kinship, responsibility to more-than-human relatives. Gregory Cajete’s Native science offers method: perception, story, ritual, and stewardship as rigorous knowledge practices. For land-grant universities that prospered on Indigenous dispossession, repair means returning land, endowment shares, and governance seats—and building degree programs and pipelines co-led by tribal nations.

Braiding as method and ethic

Ewing adopts braiding—evoked by Robin Wall Kimmerer and visualized by Sarah Ayaqi Whalen-Lunn—as a way to work: intertwining Black and Indigenous struggles without erasing difference, strengthening each strand through relation. In practice, braiding means co-teaching across communities, sharing resources, and building campaigns that link school discipline reform to Land Back or housing justice, recognizing their common roots in dispossession.

Concrete moves you can make

- Replace police contracts with investments in nurses, counselors, and community partners.
- Co-create land-based curricula with tribal nations; fund language immersion.
- Establish reparations-aligned scholarships and debt forgiveness for descendants of those exploited by university wealth-building.
- Open advanced coursework by default enrollment and targeted supports, not gatekeeping tests.
- Build intergenerational learning spaces—gardens, kitchens, maker labs—run with community groups rather than for them.

Reimagining metrics and success

Track belonging (student surveys), relationship density (advisories, mentorships), and repair (land returned, scholarships endowed, juvenile contacts reduced) alongside academic indicators. If safety improves and exclusion drops while learning deepens, you are making the carceral logic obsolete.

Key Idea

You don’t free children by tinkering with the Race Machine; you retire it by braiding care, sovereignty, and justice into how and where learning happens.

A hopeful discipline

Hope here is not naïveté. It is practice: daily acts that shift power to communities, honor land, and widen who gets to be fully human at school. When you teach, lead, or parent from that place, you make the book’s thesis concrete: schools built race; you can build something better.