Indian Education

“Indian Education” explores how systemic racism within both reservation and off-reservation schools dehumanizes Indigenous students, damaging their self-worth and reinforcing historic cycles of abuse and exclusion. Alexie portrays the education system as a space of cultural conflict where Indigenous identity is suppressed and pathologized, rather than as an environment that provides tools for empowerment. Consequently, Junior learns more about classrooms than he learns within them. 

From the beginning of the story, teachers treat Junior with suspicion, hostility, or patronizing expectations. In second grade, he faces discrimination from teacher Betty Towle, a Christian missionary thematically linked to the Indigenous boarding schools of the 19th century. Her reasons for punishing Junior are vague. When Junior asks what she is asking him to apologize for, she responds as follows: “‘Everything,’ she said, and made me stand straight for fifteen minutes, eagle armed with books in each hand […] all I learned was that gravity can be painful” (286). Her discipline bears no relationship even to a supposed infraction; it is instead a way of exerting her authority over a student whose mere presence is treated as a disruption, reflecting an educational system that treats Indigenous students as inherently deficient or in need of correction.