Educational Manifest Destiny: Exclusion, Role Allocation, and Functionalization in Reservation Bordertown District Admission Policies

Abstract

Towns that border American Indian reservations provide important contexts for studying relationships between educational institutions and marginalized communities. This study applies critical discourse methodologies to evaluate policies from districts bordering reservations, districts geographically distant from reservations, and districts located on reservations. Broadly, the study addresses the question, How do school admission policies perpetuate settler-colonialism? Findings reveal bordertown discourse that excludes Indigenous epistemologies, restricts selfdetermination, and defines the function of knowledge and peoples to reinforce Eurocentric power structures. The study offers implications for policy makers, district leaders, and community members working to enhance equity, particularly given increased pressure for school choice expansion. During the westward expansion of the United States, the doctrine of Manifest Destiny sought to justify forced removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands through fortification of Eurocentric ideals surrounding individualism, settlement, and capitalism (Brayboy 2005). 1 For hundreds of diverse Indigenous nations, Manifest Destiny did not advance "expansion"-it signaled a physical and cultural invasion by European and Euro-American settlers and colonists. Within many of today's schools, administrators, school board members, and other "policy insiders" (Bertrand et al. 2015, 3) continue to uphold a form of educational Manifest Destiny through their use of policy discourse that values obedience, individualism, and economic prestige. These settler-colonial definitions of success enact and reinforce institutional racism, which "exists when in-Electronically published