The Children Are Sacred — Education as Love, Not Control
Indigenous pedagogy is founded on the understanding that children are sacred beings who come into the world with specific gifts, and that education's purpose is to help each child discover and develop their unique medicine — not to conform them to a standard template.
The Lakota teaching 'Oyate ki wicayupte' — 'it is the people's responsibility to care for the children' — extends to every adult in the community. Child-rearing is not the private responsibility of nuclear families but the shared sacred obligation of the entire community. In traditional Lakota society, a child was raised by the village: grandparents for wisdom, aunts and uncles for practical skills and identity formation, parents for daily care, the entire community for ceremony and belonging. The boarding school system's destruction of this model — removing children from families, forbidding their language and culture — was explicitly designed to 'kill the Indian in him, save the man' (Richard Henry Pratt, 1892). The trauma of this system continues to resonate across generations. Contemporary Indigenous education movements are recovering the original pedagogy: learning from the land, from elders, from ceremony, and from the cultivation of each child's unique gifts.
It takes a village to raise a child.
Developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory — which identifies the extended family, community, and cultural system as essential developmental environments alongside parents — provides scientific validation for the Indigenous village-raising model of child development.
Lakota oral tradition
Written about in
- What Native American traditions say about elders
Teaching is aimed at finding the particular gift a child arrived with rather than fitting them to a standard. Grandparents commonly carry that work, which is part of why elders and children are so often paired.
- What Native American traditions say about raising children
The Lakota teaching Oyate ki wicayupte makes the care of children the responsibility of every adult, not of a household: grandparents for wisdom, aunts and uncles for skills and identity, parents for daily care. The boarding schools, which removed over 100,000 children, attacked exactly that distribution — Richard Henry Pratt's stated aim in 1892 was to kill the Indian and save the man. The pedagogy being recovered today is the one that was targeted.