Matt Villeneuve, University of Michigan ‘Educational Progress Under the Aegis of the American Flag': John Dewey in Hawaii, 1899-1951

Matt Villeneuve is a PhD Candidate in History at the University of Michigan and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard. His research is on the early twentieth century United States, with a particular focus in American Indian history. His dissertation, titled "Instrumental Indians: John Dewey and American Indian Education, 1884-1934" studies the relationship between schools, citizenship, and democracy through the lens of American pragmatism and settler colonialism. Specifically, his project aims to examine John Dewey’s influence on progressive education and its function in the assimilation of indigenous and immigrant peoples through boarding schools and settlement houses, while chronicling responses to these efforts by indigenous intellectuals, teachers, and administrators to reconstruct these intellectual currents in education to serve indigenous ends. Matt is of Turtle Mountain Chippewa descent and grew up in Seattle, Washington. More info at LINK