Sovereign Schools: How Shoshones and Arapahos Created a High School on the Wind River Reservation

By Martha Louise Hipp
University of Nebraska Press (2019)
288 pages

Review by Tim Begaye

Sovereign Schools retells the events that took place in the early to mid-1970s when Eastern Shoshones and Northern Arapahos successfully established a public high school in Wyoming for their children to receive a culturally relevant education despite unrelenting challenges from the local people and initial resistance from the state and federal governments.

The first few chapters set the context for historical conflicts: tribal struggles with White settlers and the United States, African Americans’ civil rights challenges, frustrations that led to Native militancy and takeovers of government buildings, the Kennedy Report that exposed the conditions surrounding Native education in the 1960s, and the role that Protestants and Catholics played in the evolution of Native education. The author uses the voices of Native elders to elicit stories about early American education practices, discrimination, racial prejudice against Indian children, the use of testing methods to label children with learning disabilities, and the gerrymandering of school boundaries that adversely affected Indian children.

The second half of Sovereign Schools shows how divisions along racial lines formed. White landowners relied on natural resources such as minerals, oil, and gas wells to generate taxable revenues to fund school districts while tribal groups depended on federal support. Rather than working together, tensions erupted between the Shoshones and Arapahos. Tribal divisions formed along marriage lines between the two tribes, but there were also divisions between families who lived on and off tribal lands and tensions between Native families who were cattle and sheep ranchers.

Unrelenting, the Shoshones and Arapahos persisted by successfully acquiring funding for contracting education programs through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which enabled them to run and operate their own schools. Although federal agencies eventually contributed to building a school, local White settlers in border towns near tribal lands remained opposed to forming a single district that would include primarily Indian students. Despite the challenge, Shoshones and Arapahos continued to seek funds by testifying before a committee at the state capital in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

While the U.S. Supreme Court refused to rule on the Shoshones and Arapahos’ attempt to acquire an Indian school, the responsibility for creating a plan rested with the State of Wyoming, the U.S. Department of Interior, tribal governments, and local institutions. Eventually, each institution contributed capital and other resources to create the Wyoming Indian School, using $650 million from state and federal sources and private donors.

Tim Begaye, EdD (Navajo) is an education consultant and served as an administrator at Diné College and Navajo Technical University.