Instrumental Indians

“Instrumental Indiansis a monumental achievement. Matthew Villeneuve does not simply indict Dewey for his lifelong instrumental treatment of Indigenous people. He shows how we need to fundamentally rethink Dewey’s pragmatism in light ofthis history.” - Elizabeth Anderson, author of Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic Against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back “Matthew Villeneuve has done a great service for Indigenous educators and philosophers interested in Dewey’s pragmatism and educational philosophy.Instrumental Indiansillustrates that at almost every step in his distinguished career, Dewey’s miseducativeview of American Indians was a product of his intellectual entrapment in the frontier discourse. Nevertheless, Villeneuve also notes that a good share of his philosophy, when freed from that discourse, might still prove useful when viewed through Indigenous experiential philosophies and decolonized. This book will be required reading for all educators, philosophers, and historians of philosophy.” - Daniel Wildcat, author of On Indigenuity: Learning the Lessons of Mother Earth “Instrumental Indians presents a convincing and provocative case for how and why Dewey’s ‘pioneering pragmatism’ impacted (and still impacts) America’s understanding of Indigenous Americans. I can’t think of another study so full of philosophical insight and methodological originality.” - Thomas Fallace, author of Dewey and the Dilemma of Race: An Intellectual History, 1895–1922

Matthew Villeneuve (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe descent) is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.