Choosing between “studies” and “stories,” as Herbert Butterfield couched the alternatives in 1959, has aggravated historians for years. He preferred an exit. With structure and narrative combined, Butterfield thought, “one may gain a profounder insight into both the ways of men and the processes of time.” Difficult as that approach may be, Karl Jacoby cautioned, it only balances a false dichotomy. Like the event in Apache history he reconstructed, some episodes lie hidden, wholly or in part, in silences not broken by documents or statistics. Adding American Indians to the mix of U.S. history, he argued, illustrates ways to resolve the dilemma and lead “toward a deeper revisioning of the American past.” Jacoby proposed “spotlighting the fraught relationship between storytelling and historical evaluation” to loosen the stubborn knot of history. The essential aim is not merely to fill a knowledge gap, an easier undertaking, but to evoke an episode's meanings, then and later. Undeniably, the past has legs, its tracks detected or hypothesized along divergent, sheltered, and sometimes surprising courses. Historians happen upon them more often along the way than at the outset, however careful and comprehensive the research design. Leaving room for possible interpretations tests its adequacy for reducing unknowns and finding new ones. They may use a compass of sorts to begin, if only to chart a general direction, but other research tools are essential for exploring details of unfamiliar territories. There, enhanced capacities for seeing and listening can help avoid unfounded claims and other epistemological disasters. For Jacoby, such are the risks historians run upon entering the places of American Indians' pasts.

Writing from her position as the Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) Superintendent at the Potrero School on the Morongo (Malki) reservation in southern California in 1909, Clara D. True concluded an article on her experiences as an Anglo teacher working with American Indian populations in the United States:

In May 2009, the Arikara returned to the land of their ancestors along the Missouri River in South Dakota. For the first time in more than a half century, a Medicine Lodge was built for ceremony. The lodge has returned from its dormant state to regain its permanent place in Arikara culture. This event will be remembered as a significant moment in the history of the Arikara because it symbolizes a new beginning and hope for the people. Following this historic event, Arikara spiritual leader Jasper Young Bear offered to share his experience and deep insight into Arikara thought:

In an earlier work I provided quantitative evidence for the claim that the recent historiography of American education is characterized by an increased emphasis on the recent past to the detriment of the colonial, early national, and even antebellum eras. In that piece I noted offhandedly that there has been next to no work done on the history of American education before the arrival of Europeans. This article is my attempt to initiate the process of filling this appalling gap. Anyone so foolhardy as to hazard a history of education before European contact in the land that is now the United States, however, must deal at the outset with at least four theoretical and methodological concerns.

Contributors to this thematic issue of the Quarterly call education historians' scholarly attention to the particularities of Native histories and the diverse ways that Native people experience and think about our worlds. Their call to envision—or re-vision—histories of Indigenous education weaves together suggestive directions for productive scholarly inquiry. In my commentary, I focus on three of their main points. First, they note the unfortunate phenomenon of academic “silo-ization” that all too often leads to a disciplinary tunnel vision blocking our view of useful—even necessary—sources, archives, methods, evidence, perspectives, questions, and analytic frameworks. Second, they point out the vast and critical difference between two common interpretations of the phrase “American Indian education,” which is to say the difference between Indigenous self-education and colonial education of Indians by settlers and their institutions. Over the last five centuries, the divide between education by Indians and education for Indians has been glaringly obvious to Native peoples but often conveniently ignored by others. That willful ignorance, of course, has been necessary to the settler colonial imperative to “eliminate the Native” and thus solidify settler claims to lands and national identity itself. Third, they make an urgent and timely call for more attention to Indigenous educational philosophies and practices in Indigenous contexts, that is, education (in Bailyn's terms) outside of the walls of (usually colonial) schools. They direct our attention to teaching, learning, and intergenerational transmission of knowledge embedded within and constitutive of Native histories.

The current issue in the History of Education Quarterly is significant for various reasons. For the first time in the journal's history, scholars from several disciplines have converged to address topics relating to the history of American Indian education. The essays challenge historians to think of research methodologies that go beyond the traditional sources of documents retrieved from archives and other depositories. This is perhaps most clearly seen in KuuNUx TeeRIt Kroupa's essay on the Arikara Cultural Center and his attempt to understand their educational history through an Arikara lens of understanding. It is also evident in Adrea Lawrence's idea of “epic learning” and her inclusion of “Native” stories and their relationship to “place” as a frame to interpret American Indian education histories. Each of these articles, including Donald Warren's piece on Native history as education history, urges historians to think more broadly on how to create Indian education narratives. However, my intention here is not to provide a comprehensive response to all three essays. Rather, I want to briefly apply key topics in each text to help enlighten my own research on Hopis and the off-reservation Indian boarding school experience, and to offer some direction on how these issues might be applied to current and future studies.

Today many historians of education reference Bernard Bailyn's Education in the Forming of American Society and Lawrence Cremin's three-book series American Education as important works that created a turning point in the field. Yet, few have constructed histories of education as narratives in the transmission of culture across generations and even fewer have taken time to critically analyze the possible meanings, implications, and limitations of proposals set forth by Bailyn and Cremin. Thus, while the definition of education was broadened, research has not advanced new research topics and designs. This special issue frames histories of American Indian cultures as education histories thereby bringing this pressing conversation into critical analysis and pushing the field toward new agendas and frameworks. The authors demonstrate that constructing American Indian histories requires new methods and concepts be employed and advocate for the dismissal of Euroamerican frameworks. Accepting their proposals, historians of education can hope to gain fresh histories of teaching and learning that can expand research in new and exciting ways.

For all the times Horace Mann has been quoted on one subject or another, the following passage has somehow escaped educational historians' notice.

I am honored and humbled to have the opportunity to consider the role of history and its relationship to “American Indian education” in this special issue of the History of Education Quarterly. Before I offer some commentary and ideas, I want to offer a caveat—or a confession—that should inform the way my paper is read. My caveat/confession is that I am not a historian, let alone a historian of education. Instead, I am an “Indigenous” anthropologist of education. Of anthropologists, Vine Deloria Jr. has written, “Into each life, it is said, some rain must fall… But Indians have been cursed above all other people in history. Indians have anthropologists.” My own thinking about anthropology is that much of Deloria's disdain is well placed. Some of what anthropologists do, however—listen to stories and engage with people and place—is useful to conversations about what American Indian education is and can be. In this case, sometimes rain feeds growth. It is from this viewpoint of growth and possibility that I offer my thoughts on the role of history, its methods, and what this might mean for American Indian education.