Dr. Clint Carroll, a member of the Cherokee Nation and Associate Professor of Native American and Indian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, has worked with community elders and leaders to design a model of Indigenous education that is very different from the one that has traditionally been imposed on them.
He recently spoke at the 53rd Annual Symposium on the American Indian about his work with Cherokee Nation Medicine Keepers to develop a culturally responsive model of learning rooted in four guiding principles designed to promote Native sovereignty and push back against the colonial models of education by centering Cherokee cultural practices and knowledge in the curriculum.
John Ross, a member of the Cherokee Nation who was in attendance at the symposium, has been championing for a decade a proposal for a 10,000-acre Cherokee National Park that would be tribally owned and managed, and house a full Cherokee land-based university on the grounds.
But while that goal is still a ways off, there is much that institutions can do now to ground learning in Indigenous students’ lived experiences and cultural histories.
In his remarks, Carroll told attendees of the April 2026 event hosted by Northeastern State University how he gathered with a small number of elders within Cherokee Nation and the staff of the Cherokee Nation Environmental Resources Department for a two-day workshop. Together, they discussed developing a land-based education curriculum for Cherokee youth to prepare young people in their community to tackle environmental challenges, while centering the knowledge, language, and land-based practices of their ancestors.
During the workshop, elders reflected on their experiences with both “informal” education – learning passed down from their family, community, and teachers – as well as the “formal” education received from Indian boarding schools during their youth. Their time in Indian boarding schools serves as a reminder that “the assimilatory policies and projects of the settler-colonial state were not distant occurrences,” said Carroll.
