North Dakota
Reconstruction Vignette
On July 16, 1873, The Bismarck Tribune in present-day North Dakota published an article called “The Indian Policy.” The author justified federal policies to expand settler colonialism and destroy Indigenous sovereignty, framing these actions as promoting “civilization.” He echoed Republican elites and industrialists, who used broad Reconstruction-era discussions of U.S. reconciliation, citizenship, and racial inclusion to justify campaigns for westward invasion and extraction. When this article was published, the federal government had just broken its 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie with the Sioux — invading their designated land in the Black Hills to capitalize on the discovery of gold. It ends with this excerpt, describing the Sioux as “incorrigibly hostile,” and whose further displacement might bring “an honest move towards their civilization.”
Source: Chronicling America
North Dakota
Standards Overview
Coverage of Reconstruction: Partial
ZEP Standards Rubric Score: 1.5 out of 10
The coverage of Reconstruction in North Dakota’s standards is partial, and their content is dreadful. The North Dakota Department of Public Instruction adopted the current social studies standards in 2019.
Reconstruction is covered during grades 6–12 in a unit titled “Growth and Division in the Union (1814-1877).” The standards are broad and conventional with only two references to Reconstruction. The standards require students to “explain the social, economic, and political effects of Reconstruction.” The standards offer guiding topics for this theme, including the “13th - 15th Amendments, reconstruction plans, Jim Crow laws, migration from the south, Compromise of 1877.”
Based on a brief review of district-level curricula, Reconstruction is typically covered in grade 8. However, the “U.S. History to 1877” course in one district, Grand Forks Public Schools, covers only through the Civil War and does not even mention Reconstruction.
Educator Experiences
Respondents to our survey shared that Reconstruction is mentioned in North Dakota state standards, but many teachers do not spend significant time on the era. Denise Bervig, a high school educator, noted that classes should include “a fuller picture of Reconstruction and the consequences of Reconstruction.” She has used materials from PBS, Gilder Lerhman, and the Smithsonian Institute as part of her lessons in the Reconstruction unit. A high school and college educator wrote that his district is “packed to the gills with so many things that need to be covered that reconstruction, because of its complicated narrative, gets short-changed.” He also noted that “critical race theory” is “just the latest education boogeyman,” and that “there is a lot of pushback to anything remotely critical of current history textbooks.”
Assessment
North Dakota’s state Reconstruction standards are insufficient. While the standards mention the “social, economic, and political effects of Reconstruction,” most of their focus is on political developments. Black people’s efforts to gain freedom and equality may be included in the standard mentioning “migration from the south,” but otherwise the standards overly emphasize national political developments and the end of Reconstruction. They also do not explicitly mention white supremacist terrorism and disenfranchisement as the cause of the defeat of Reconstruction.
Teaching Reconstruction effectively requires centering Black people’s struggles to redefine freedom and equality and gain control of their own land and labor during and after the Civil War. Any discussion of Reconstruction must also grapple with the role of white supremacist terrorism in the defeat of Reconstruction and the negative and positive legacies of the era that persist to this day.
In November 2021, Governor Doug Burgum signed into law HB1508, a bill that prohibits the teaching of “critical race theory” — defined by Republican legislators as “the theory that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but that racism is systemically embedded in American society and the American legal system to facilitate racial inequality.” A related bill in 2023 would have banned teachers from addressing “the emotional problems of a student,” but it failed to pass. Several respondents to our survey expressed concern about the possible chilling effects on classroom education that such bills can have around the country, particularly on discussions of the history and legacies of Reconstruction.