Schooling Stories

When Kemeyawi Wahpepah, Ph.D.'26, was growing up in the Bay Area in the 1990s, she loved playing The Oregon Trail on a bulky desktop in her school’s computer lab.

Wahpepah, who is Kickapoo and Sac-Fox, was a graduate student fellow at the Radcliffe Institute during her time at Harvard and is now a postdoctoral fellow in American Culture Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s long since reconsidered the computer game she loved in elementary school, and how it elides a tragic history of “essentially the expansion of settler colonialism, which involved active warfare against Native peoples,” she says. 

Still, she remembers her time in the computer lab fondly, which is why she included the vignette in her dissertation, Schooling Stories: Native and Indigenous Narratives of Settler Colonialism and Dislodgement. It raises one of the questions that motivates her research: “How can we create these kinds of positive schooling memories, while attending to the very difficult histories that we also need to learn in order to be an informed population?” 

Wahpepah’s own school story started in private schools that her mom sought out for their quality of instruction.

“I loved school, and overall, it was a pretty good experience for me,” she says. “But it was also an interesting experience being a low-income kid and being a brown kid in these super white and wealthy spaces.” She explored those experiences while studying the sociology of racism and inequality as an undergraduate at Harvard College, which in turn inspired her to pursue a career in education. For 11 years, she taught middle and high school English and history. She enjoyed teaching but struggled to incorporate Native perspectives into her curriculum while simultaneously meeting state standards and navigating the expectations of parents, many of whom themselves learned a version of history that didn’t include Native perspectives. 

In 2020, Wahpepah returned to Harvard to start her doctoral work. As part of her studies, she assisted former Ed School Associate Professor Tony Jack, now at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education & Human Development. 

“Part of what he looks at is the transition from high school to college and seeing how the factors and context that you deal with before college don’t magically disappear in college, even though you might be physically in a different location,” she says. For her own research, she decided to interview Native and indigenous college students about their educational experiences all the way back to kindergarten. In total, she conducted 133 interviews with 45 people at colleges all over the country. 

Ultimately, she hopes that these students’ reflections can help Native and non-Native educators alike. “Part of why I wanted to do this study of gathering people’s schooling stories was not only so that we [Native people] could see ourselves reflected in each other’s stories, but also so that non-Native people could learn from these stories, and specifically, so that non-Native educators could have a source to go to and say ‘OK, this is what Native students are saying they experienced. This is what Native students are saying they want. How can I take this and apply this to my classroom setting?’” 

Wahpepah is already drawing on her research by collaborating with Cambridge Public Schools educators interested in updating their curricula to address settler colonialism and Native history. She hopes to eventually publish her dissertation as a book so that it can be a resource for even more teachers. 

“It’s just so clear that there are so many people who really want to know more about Native folks and how to better support Native students and teach Native history, but don’t often feel like they have the resources or the knowledge to do so,” she says.

Grace Tatter, Ed.M.’18, is a writer based in New York. Her last story in Ed. was about Professor Jal Mehta’s Free Range Humans podcast