College of Education
6 Numbers and Nuclear Families: Gender and Work in Indian Boarding School Mathematics Curricula, 1879-1932
Luke Kim (Kenyon College); José Gutiérrez (Education, Culture and Society, University of Utah); Charles Sepulveda (Ethnic Studies, University of Utah); Kēhaulani Vaughn (Education, Culture and Society, University of Utah); and Cynthia Benally (Education, Culture and Society, University of Utah)
Mentor: José Gutiérrez (Education, Culture & Society, University of Utah)
Abstract
In this paper, we address the thread of cisheteropatriarchal structures in the mathematics curriculum from the Indian boarding school system during the administration of Estelle Reel. Specifically, we focus our analysis on how gender is associated with housework in math word problems. We argue that these problems reflect how ideologies of gender oppression are a fundamental aspect and extension of settler colonial capitalism within the United States (Nakano Glenn, 2015). Theoretically, we draw upon prior Marxist feminist work that parse out the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy (Federici 1975; Vogel 1983). Further, we directly connect these theoretical approaches in the analysis of the mathematical content to broader U.S. federal policy and reformist efforts (Stremlau, 2005) during our period of study, 1879-1932.
Introduction & Background
This paper presents an extension on ongoing research on math education in the Indian Boarding School System between 1879-1932 (Gutíerrez et. al, 2021) by focusing on how gender ideologies surrounding women were unmistakably central in the math word problems during the time. Elsewhere, we elaborate on how this content reflects federal policy of land dispossession (Smith et. al, 2022), which was also intimately connected to federal policies concerning indigenous women (Sepulveda, 2018; Stremlau, 2005). The aims of this paper are to 1) describe the particular ways in which gender appears in the mathematical curriculum of Indian boarding schools and 2) interpret the meaning of these problems within the context of larger settler colonial capitalist patriarchal systems to contribute to our understanding of how mathematics can act as a form of propaganda in reproducing these structures. We delineate our framework of analysis, methods, and significance in the following sections below.
Theoretical Framework
Drawing upon TribalCRIT (Brayboy, 2005), Social Reproduction Theory (Vogel 1983, Bhattacharya and Fraser, 2017), and Evelyn Nakano Glenn’s (2015) analyses of settler colonialism as the basis of race-gender formation in the United States, we suggest that the presence of cisheteropatriarchal ideologies in mathematics education (both during the time studied and now) are fundamentally grounded in the ongoing and ever-present structure of U.S. settler colonial capitalism and forced assimilation. In particular, one of the goals of U.S. federal assimilation policy at the time was to “fracture […] extended indigenou