Alaska Native Political Leadership and Higher Education: One University, Two Universes

(Paperback)

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Through an in-depth study of Alaska and comparative material from other indigenous communities around the world, this book explores the relationship between land and education. While the colonial function of education is just beginning to be acknowledged, Jennings highlights, at international, national, and local levels, the extent to which Euro-American institutions continue in the contemporary period to define indigenous understandings of land and spirituality to conform to those embodied in the dominant society. He advances indigenous articulations of educational agendas as components of native sovereignty and distinctive spiritual, intellectual, and material relationships to land. This book will be of value to educational policymakers, those teaching multicultural and comparative education, and anthropologists and Native American studies instructors.

Reviews

Alaska Native Leadership and Higher Education provides a fascinating inside account of the views of the Native leadership in the 1970s and 1980s toward the University of Alaska. This account, as Jennings himself points out, is almost entirely critical and unfavourable. Jennings endevours to show that what outsiders might view as 'contributions and successes' were in fact achieved by great political struggle in the context of 'systematic racism and cultural conflict.' * Recensions *

Author Bio

Michael L. Jennings is professor of Philosophy and Humanities at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and president of the union United Academics. He has also served as assistant professor of political science and director of Alaskan Native studies at the University of Alaska, Archorage; special assistant to the University of Alaska system-wide president; special assistant to the president of Tanana Valley Community College; deputy director of the Fairbanks Native Association; and educational field counselor for the Alaska Federation of Natives, Inc.