Partnership Building and Systems Alignment Leadership: The Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribal Education Department as a Case for Liberating Sovereign Potential

This chapter will focus on leadership contexts found in tribal education departments/agencies (TEDs/TEAs), which are the education departments or programs housed within the executive functions of tribal governments found across the United States. There are over 570 federally recognised Native Nations within the United States, over 200 of those Nations have a TED/TEA in some form, and they are most often working in rural contexts after several generations of settler-colonial policy towards Native people focused on removal and forced assimilation to whiteness. Presently, over 90% of American Indian and Alaska Native (AI/AN) students in the United States attend public schools run by state departments of education and affiliated local school districts, meaning less than 10% of AI/AN students are attending federal Indian schools or schools overseen by Native Nations. In other words, United States policies towards Indigenous peoples have created an entangled bureaucratic educational landscape that requires leadership focused on partnership building across TEDs/TEAs and the public school systems serving Native children. Furthermore, Native Nations have inherent and sovereign rights to be involved in the education of their citizens, yet most often TEDs/TEAs are serving peripheral roles when it comes to the education of their people. In this chapter we offer a background of TEDs/TEAs, and then explore how the Cheyenne and Arapaho Department of Education (CADOE) in rural Oklahoma works to liberate their sovereign potential in education by engaging in cross-institutional leadership, partnership building, and systems alignment.