The Repatriation Project engaged my former students with my practice as a community artist, educator, and activist. I painted personalized portraits of each student that drew on imagery from the formal educational environment we had both shared in their rural reservation school system and the teacher-student relationship we forged. My pieces use portraiture as means of interfering with a trite image of the romanticized Indian. The Eurocentric pedagogy in our schools estranges Indigenous perspectives from the learning process and from popular culture. In my paintings I explore this issue in depth by integrating symbols from American schools with portrayals of Native students. Specifically, I use motifs that imply the assimilative undertones in schools (stars, stripes, lined paper, pages from textbooks, English writing, etc.) and how they contrast against the Indigeniety that challenges dominant cultural norms. By communicating a sense that there is a visual language and an agenda we take for granted in our schools, my work suggests a need for alternative educational models and perspectives. If we plan to interrupt the trope of the traditional banking model of education that has oppressed  non-Western cultural expression, I found that: engaging local communities in the co-construction of knowledge, my artistic practice, and dialogue around what education is meant to do for students of color are all paramount.