Reflexiones: Engaging Bicultural Children’s Televisual Media Through an Indigenous Praxis

• In Event: T’aała’i Diidleeł (We Become One): Toward a Collective and Ceremonial Praxis of Indigenous Decolonizing Scholarship

Abstract

(1) The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how a decolonizing methodological approach can yield a critical indigenous lens to examine children’s televisual media. The author will attempt to textually reflect on this approach by addressing various colonizing and decolonizing aspects of the acclaimed bilingual and bicultural televisual cartoon, “Dora the Explorer.” (2) Theoretically, a critical bicultural pedagogy (Darder, 1991) will be employed to frame an emancipatory bicultural experience exemplified in her paper. (3) A lived Indigenous epistemology guides the author’s approach. The methodological approach here, will allow for a wide range of readings. (4) Enrolled in the American Indian Studies graduate level course entitled, “Indigenous Learning and Decolonizing Methodologies,” this author has evolved her approach to research work to privilege the intellect of the heart, as mediated through the three-dimensional tactile sensibility of drawing. This intuitive praxis has cultivated a creative standpoint to re-see, critique, and decode how colonialist posturing in Dora the Explorer distill ongoing Indigenous practices, such as rug weaving and the re-telling of creation stories, as inanimate acts lacking tenacious links to the past, present, and future. (5) While the author attempts to highlight the periods of generosity that are expressed in Dora the Explorer, through the key character’s friendships (the acts of reciprocity that occurs between various characters, the creation and survival stories told through secondary characters, and the moments of care and respect shown mutually by different characters through various scenes), she concludes that there is still more work to be done in children’s media, relative to the issues of biculturalism and bilingualism, when such work is critiqued through an Indigenous epistemological lens. This panelist will also speak to how this study can open dynamic possibilities in grounding intellectual authority through an indigenized canon, for as Smith (1999) envisions: “the past, our stories local and global, the present, our communities, cultures, languages and social practices – all may be spaces of marginalization, but they have also become spaces of resistance and hope” (p. 4). (6) Throughout this study, the author will bridge critical media literacy with Indigenous ways of knowing, so educators, policy makers, communities, and families can become increasingly reflective and conscious of how children’s televisual media can reproduce hegemonic representations that reify trauma, disrespect, and colonization.

Bibliography
Smith, L.T. (1999). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London, UK: Zed Books.

Author

• Judith Estrada, University of Illinois