Why treaties matter
What does the research say?
Peer-reviewed scholarship in social studies education consistently documents that Indigenous peoples and nations are marginalized in K-12 curricula — confined to a pre-1900 timeframe, stripped of political status, and presented through a settler narrative of inevitable displacement rather than as sovereign, contemporary nations (Shear et al., 2015). Calderón (2014) describes this pattern as a “settler grammar” embedded in curriculum design itself, one that normalizes land dispossession by treating it as background rather than as a site of ongoing legal and political relationship. Brayboy’s (2005) Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) offers a corrective framework, arguing that Indigenous peoples occupy a distinct legal-political status — not merely a racial or ethnic one — rooted in treaties, sovereignty, and government-to-government relationships with the United States.
Why is it important?
When curricula omit or misrepresent this legal-political dimension of Native nationhood, students — Native and non-Native alike — inherit an incomplete and often distorted civic education. Sabzalian (2019) frames the presence of accurate, contemporary Indigenous content in schools as a matter of survivance: the difference between curricula that reduce Native peoples to historical artifact and curricula that recognize their continued self-governance, resurgence, and contribution to civic life. This matters for every student’s civic literacy, not only for Native students’ sense of belonging and identity. Understanding tribal self-government, resource protection, economic development, caring for people and place, and treaties as living documents is foundational to understanding federalism, property law, natural resource policy, and the structure of governance in Minnesota itself.
What are the implications for education?
Educators can make a huge difference by teaching treaty rights and sovereignty content as core disciplinary knowledge. These can be integrated across social studies, economics, environmental science, and civics rather than isolated into a single unit or heritage month. McCarty and Lee’s (2014) framework of culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy suggests that this content is most effective when it draws on Indigenous-authored primary sources (as the Why Treaties Matter series does ) rather than secondhand summary, and when it explicitly names contemporary tribal governments, enterprises, and legal victories alongside historical dispossession. Calderón’s (2014) land education approach further suggests pairing curriculum content with place: using local maps, local treaties, and local tribal nations as the entry point rather than a generic national narrative. For teachers and instructional designers, this means designing learning experiences and assessments that ask students to locate, name, and reason about sovereignty and treaty rights as they operate today — not only as historical fact but as an active civic and legal reality educators themselves are obligated to teach accurately. The below Why Treaties Matter educator guides foreground treaties as living legal instruments, sovereignty as an inherent and continuing status, and land-based knowledge systems (Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005) as intellectually rigorous ways of understanding kinship, economy, and place.
About the educator guides
The Why Treaties Matter educator guides were developed by a team of educators, cultural resource specialists, and community members convened by the Minnesota Indian Affairs Council and the Minnesota Humanities Center to provide educators with background, student readings and activities, vocabulary lists, and suggested web and print resources to teach this important topic.