Pyawasay, Sasanehsaeh2017-11-272017-11-272017-09https://hdl.handle.net/11299/191465University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. September 2017. Major: Organizational Leadership, Policy, and Development. Advisor: Karen Miksch. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 149 pages.Historically, Native communities have experienced one of the most significant and long-standing inequalities in the U.S. education system. Native scholars have attributed this disparity in educational opportunity and achievement as a lack of general understanding and invisibility of the Native populations in higher education. In this study, Critical Indigeneity and Critical Discourse Analysis were employed to identify the ways in which a higher education institution operated as a modern day boarding school. A focus was centered on the ways in which institutional policies and practices construct notions that define “doing school” and what it means to be a “student” as an approach to uncovering the guiding ideologies that maintain, sustain and reproduce the Western colonial context. Findings suggested that in order to successfully “do school” at the University, students must comply with the Student Experience Outcomes, which are steeped in market driven ideologies and aligned with an American citizenship. Just as notions of nationhood and capitalism shaped assimilation in the boarding school era, similar ideological notions of the marketplace and citizenship permeate how to “do school” today. For Native students, this means an alignment to an American identity at the demise of their tribal community. Findings in this study provide significant insight for non-Native academics and higher education practitioners. To have a better understanding of how universities may operate as modern-day boarding schools helps to better understand institutionalized whiteness and can help mitigate educational inequalities – in particular those attributed to the Native community.enThesis or Dissertation