K. Tsianina Lomawaima (Mvskoke / Creek descent) retired from the professoriate in 2021 after teaching at the University of Washington (1988-1994), University of Arizona (1994-2014), and Arizona State University (2014-2020). Her work straddles Indigenous Studies, anthropology, education, ethnohistory, history, legal analysis, and political science. Her scholarship on federal off-reservation boarding schools is rooted in the experiences of her father, Curtis Thorpe Carr, a survivor of Chilocco Indian Agricultural School. More recent scholarship continues a focus on Indian policy and expands to questions of U.S. citizenship and early twentieth century debates over the status of Native individuals and nations.
Lomawaima is the author of the award-winning book, (1994), which is based on recollections of Chilocco alumni juxtaposed against the official records of racist ideology and repressive practices from the 1920s and 1930s. She is also the co-author of the award-winning book To Remain an Indian: Lessons for Democracy from a Century of Native American Education (2006) with Teresa L. McCarty, which critically evaluates U.S. education policies and practices from early twentieth century federal institutionalization of Indian children through the contemporary standards movement.
Lomawaima is a cofounder of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) and a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and of the National Academy of Education.
Select Recent Publications (2006-2021): Teachability indicated by superscript numbers1, 2, 3
1 Chris Time Steele. “K. Tsianina Lomawaima on the Doctrine of Discovery, Rethinking Education, and the Chilocco Indian School.” Time Talks Podcast: Politics, Music, and Art. Jan. 27, 2021. https://timetalks.libsyn.com/k-tsianina-lomawaima-on-the-doctrine-of-discovery-rethinking-education-and-the-chilocco-indian-school
2Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “American Indian boarding school stories from the 19th and 20th centuries” for Boarding School Histories and Storytelling, Part 1, episode 4 of the 2019 Boarding School Healing Webinar Series, National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, May 2, 2019. https://boardingschoolhealing.org/webinars-now-available-on-youtube-episodes-3-4/
Deloria, Philip, K. T. Lomawaima, Bryan M. J. Brayboy, Mark Trahant, Loren Ghiglione, Douglas Medin, & Ned Blackhawk (Eds.). Unfolding futures: Indigenous ways of knowing for the twenty-first century. Special Issue of Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 147, no. 2 (spring 2018).
1Lomawaima, K. Tsianina “Indian Boarding Schools, Before and After: A Personal Introduction.” Journal of American Indian Education 57, no. 1 (2018): 11–21.
Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, and Jeff Ostler. “Reconsidering Richard Henry Pratt: Cultural Genocide and Native Liberation in an Era of Racial Oppression.” Journal of American Indian Education 57, no. 1 (2018): 79–100.
1Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “Mind, Heart, Hands: Thinking, Feeling, and Doing in Indigenous History Methodology.” In Sources and Methods in Indigenous Studies, ed. Chris Andersen and Jean M O’Brien, 60-68. London: Routledge, 2017.
1Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “A Principle of Relativity through Indigenous Biography.” Biography 39, no. 3 (June 2016): 248-269.
2Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “Federalism: Native, Federal, and State Sovereignty.” In Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians, ed. Susan Sleeper-Smith, Juliana Barr, Jean M. O’Brien, Nancy Shoemaker, and Scott Stevens, 273-286. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.
Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “Education.” In The World of Indigenous North America, edited by Robert Allen Warrior, 365–87. Routledge Worlds. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.
2Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “‘All Our People Are Building Houses’: The Civilization of Architecture and Space in Federal Indian Boarding Schools.” In Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education, ed. Brenda Child and Brian Klopotek. Santa Fe: SAR Press, 2014.
3Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “The Mutuality of Citizenship and Sovereignty: The Society of American Indians and the Battle to Inherit America.” Studies in American Indian Literatures 25, no. 2 (Jun 2013): 331-351.
3Lomawaima, K. Tsianina. “American Indian Education: By Indians versus for Indians.” A Companion to American Indian History, 2nd edition, ed. Philip J. Deloria and Neal Salisbury, 422-440. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2007.
1Lomawaima, K. Tsianina and Teresa L. McCarty. To Remain an Indian: Lessons in Democracy from a Century of Native American Education. New York: Teachers College Press, 2006.