“Too Many Negro Teachers”: Power and Conflict in Dinétah

This paper focuses on a 1963 protest led by one Native employee, Leon Grant, against “the number of African American” teachers in Chinle, Arizona. This event provides a window into the ways Native Americans and African Americans situated their claims to civil rights in relation to one another. Yet what appears to be a bilateral conflict between Indians and blacks, should be understood as a triangulation between the Navajo drive for self-determination, black educators’s self-interest and ideologies of social uplift, and the structuring presence of U.S. settler colonialism.

How did black educators understand their own participation in implementing BIA policies? In what ways were African American educators shaped by the colonial structure of the BIA and how did they attempt to influence that structure? Likewise, how did black educators and Indian communities understand their status in relation to one another within the context of competing claims to the federal government for rights? And how did their differing relations to the state affect their strategies?