Inside the Reservation Classroom: Reclaiming the Oral Histories of Black and Native Freedom Seekers in South Dakota

South Dakota’s reservations are home to iconic moments of interwoven Black and Native histories. However, these archival records remain an elusive and under-considered site of historical inquiry given the marginality of the Black population and the ongoing dispossession of Native people’s lands. Turning our attention to these fragile archival moments creates an opportunity for us to understand Black and Native solidarities like never before, which were generated when Black liberatory aspirations collided with Indigenous decolonial dreams. Through an interdisciplinary historical investigation, I map the educational spaces created in the face of the domineering technologies of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism that collide within the reservation classroom and chart how Black and Native subsequently subverted these colonial racial regimes through co-implication, critical hope, and ancestral wisdom. In collaboration with former and present Black and Native educators within two school districts in a South Dakota reservation, I conducted oral histories of these educators using the lens of care and containment in order to historicize how these change agents disrupted settler colonial technologies within their classrooms. In this paper, I chronicle the ways Black educators of the 19th and 20th centuries move beyond the limits of the reservation classroom to make visible Black liberatory geography to contextualize better the legacies of these practices within present-day pedagogical practices of Black and Native teachers in South Dakota. I argue that these oral histories have the power to re-center the theories and epistemologies of Black and Native teachers as a generative toolkit to navigate freedom dreams and colonial nightmares for Black and Indigenous people. I use close reading, archival analysis, oral histories, and cultural critique to contextualize these histories into a discussion about present-day implications and critiques around schooling, coalition, colonialism, and futurity.