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Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (Lumbee), who studies the impact of the school-to-prison pipeline on Indigenous youth, will deliver a distinguished lecture at 2 p.m. Tuesday, May 25 as part of SESP's ongoing conversation regarding justice and equity. Note: The event is at 2 p.m. -- not 1:30 p.m. as originally stated. 

Brayboy, President’s Professor in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University (ASU), documents and analyzes the history of colonization from boarding schools to the modern school to prison pipeline, which he calls an under-explored issue among Indigenous youth.

“The attempted assimilation and colonization of Indigenous youth in the United States has moved from boarding school policy to the modern network of zero tolerance and school discipline policies that form the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ as students are pushed out of classrooms and into mass incarceration,” he wrote. 

His work suggests that schools with a predominantly non-white student population, particularly majority American Indian and Alaska Native schools, reported higher rates of school discipline. 

“Furthermore, reports of Indigenous students being disciplined for purported dress code violations when wearing traditional Indigenous hair styles signifies the ways in which colonization permeates the educational system in the United States,” he wrote. “These destructive, disruptive, and colonial educational practices must be stopped.” 

At ASU, he is senior advisor to the president, director of the Center for Indian Education, and co-editor of the Journal of American Indian Education. From 2007 to 2012, he was visiting President’s Professor of Indigenous education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Brayboy and his team have, over the past 17 years, prepared more than 165 Native teachers to work in American Indian communities and more than 21 American Indian PhDs. He is a fellow of the American Educational Research Association and a member of the National Academy of Education.