Race, Religion, and Reds: Contextualizing Schooling for Native American Youth during the Termination Era

Historians have long-established agreement that the “three Rs” impacting education policy in the post-World War II era were race, religion, and reds—the latter, a synonym-like word that individuals and policymakers alike used to represent both the perceived threat of communism, as well as any type of federal intervention. Educational historians like Diane Ravitch and Gareth Davies have written about the impact of the “three Rs” on parochial schools, the African American civil rights movement, and school finance legislation. Yet little has been written to connect the “three Rs” and their impact on the termination of Native tribes’ federal trust status and their combined effect on schooling for Native American youth during the post-War period. This paper examines the ways the “three Rs”—race, religion, and reds—influenced federal Indian policy and consequently the schooling experiences of Native youth during what is commonly referred to across Indian Country as the Termination Era. This paper brings together various historiographical traditions, including U.S. political history, American Indian studies, and the history of education to provide an interdisciplinary lens through which to view the schooling of Native Americans across the United States more transparently. In the paper, I extend a well-established historical framework to provide rich context for understanding the myriad schooling configurations that were both imposed upon and created by Native peoples after World War II.