Beyond Erasure and Toward Truth: Non-Native Teachers Teaching Indigenous Content in Urban Classrooms in North Carolina

Abstract

Background or Context: Indigenous peoples remain persistently marginalized within K–12 curricula, where they are frequently omitted, confined to the distant past, or represented through stereotypical and incomplete narratives. Teachers often encounter these same representations during their own schooling and may enter classrooms with limited preparation for teaching Indigenous histories, cultures, and contemporary experiences. These patterns are particularly significant in North Carolina, which is home to a substantial and diverse Indigenous population but where Indigenous peoples remain frequently obscured within dominant educational narratives. Purpose of Study: This study examines how non-Native K–12 teachers in urban North Carolina schools understand, encounter, and teach Indigenous content. It considers how teachers’ own educational experiences and curricular materials shape their knowledge of Indigenous peoples and their classroom practices. The study also examines the ways some educators recognize, challenge, and move beyond inherited patterns of Indigenous erasure and misrepresentation. Research Design: This qualitative study draws on interviews with non-Native K–12 educators teaching in urban North Carolina schools and is informed by Tribal Critical Race Theory and Indigenous research methodologies. Interview transcripts were analyzed through an iterative, inductive coding process involving repeated readings, code development, comparison across participants, and refinement of codes into broader themes. Analysis also attended to teachers’ descriptions of curricular materials and their experiences learning, unlearning, and teaching Indigenous content, while Indigenous relationality and accountability informed the broader research process. Conclusions: Findings demonstrate how Indigenous erasure can operate intergenerationally through schooling: teachers frequently enter the profession having themselves received limited, stereotypical, or historically confined instruction about Indigenous peoples and may subsequently reproduce those narratives in their own classrooms. At the same time, participants demonstrated possibilities for disrupting these patterns by recognizing curricular limitations, seeking tribally specific knowledge, challenging stereotypes, and refusing narratives that position Indigenous peoples solely in the past. The study concludes that moving beyond erasure requires sustained teacher preparation and professional learning that centers Indigenous sovereignty, contemporary presence, tribally specific histories, and Indigenous knowledge rather than treating Indigenous content as an occasional curricular addition.