DECOLONIZING INDIGENOUS EDUCATION IN THE POSTWAR CITY: Native Women’s Activism from Southern California to the Motor City

Urban Indigenous histories continue to write off Native people as being immigrants to cities and outside of modernity. They ignore gender as a category of analysis (Danziger, 1991; Fixico, 2000; LeGrand, 2002; Laukaitis, 2015). Yet, native women were actively engaged in culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy (McCarty & Lee, 2014) and decolonial educational efforts in postwar cities. We move in both time and space, from postwar Southern California to Detroit, to illustrate how Native women challenged colonialism and gender conventions through education. They were what we call urban Indigenous feminists (Arvin, Tuck, & Morrill, 2013; Mays, 2015).