"Tracing the history of Native American schooling in North America, this book emphasizes factors in society at large--and sometimes within indigenous communities--which led to Native American children being separate from the white majority. Charles Glenn examines the evolving assumptions about race and culture as applied to schooling, the reactions of parents and tribal leadership in the United States and Canada, and the symbolic as well as practical role of indigenous languages and of efforts to maintain them"--;

"An overview of efforts to provide formal schooling to the children of native peoples of North America, from seventeenth century New France to the residential Indian schools of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the Indian charter schools of the twenty-first. The racial assumptions of the White majority, the ambivalence of Indian families and tribes about the schooling offered to their children and youth, the uneasy cooperation between church groups and government, and efforts to maintain or revive native languages, are discussed in a perspective covering both Canada and the United States."