Learning from Little Tree: The Political Education of the Counterculture

This essay uses the scandal surrounding the authorship of Forrest Carter's The Education of Little Tree, discovered to have been written by white supremacist activist and speechwriter, Asa Carter, as an occasion to examine the shifting relation between American education and the political sphere in the 1960s and seventies, demonstrating how the figure of the Native American became a symbolic vehicle of the period's increasing inability to decide where the boundaries of higher educational institutions and practices should be drawn, and of the confusing directionality of politics conducted in the educational domain.