Contemporary Indigenous education: A nature-centered American Indian philosophy for a 21st century world

This paper recognizes the need to integrate, synthesize, organize, and give focus to the enormous amount of accumulated materials from a wide range of disciplines about American Indian cultures and American Indian education toward the evolution of a contemporary epistemology for American Indian education that is indigenously inspired and ecologically based. Traditional American Indian forms of education must be given serious consideration as conceptual wellsprings for the “new” kinds of educational thought capable of addressing the tremendous challenges of the 21st century.