In particular, the political sovereignty of many indigenous nations marks substantive differences in historical experience from that of other racial and ethnic groups in the United States and Canada.
Beginning with missionaries and leading up to federally controlled schools, the aim was to educate American Indians so that they could return to their communities and facilitate cultural assimilation.
[1] The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s–60s contested mainstream methods of assimilationist indoctrination and the curriculum in K-12 schools and universities throughout the United States.
Developers of Native American studies widely dismissed scientific objectivity,[3] since Western cultural biases have historically informed anthropology and other disciplines.
Indigenous peoples are apprehensive and cautious of that connection, and the pursuit of knowledge, or research, is deeply embedded in multiple layers of European and Colonial processes.