From Absence to Presence: Tensions in Transforming Praxis in Indigenous Education

• In Event: Roundtable Session 66
  In Roundtable Session: Tensions Between What We Know and What We Do: Research Praxis in Higher Education

Abstract

Although much contemporary research suggests the benefits of accounting for differing epistemologies in constructing and delivering university canon and curricula, little evidence suggests such an accounting is actually taking place in the education of Indigenous students at White-dominant institutions. Indeed, this is an area where what we know theoretically is not followed to any recognizable degree by a transformation in what we do pedagogically. American Indian students who experience lowered grades and failed courses because their performances do not fit conventionalized EuroWestern models, for example, are often negatively labeled "resistant," "confrontational," or “absent,” and their actions are deemed unbecoming of "serious" or “committed” students. Not often are these experiences labeled failures on the part of instructors to recognize survivance (Stromberg, 2004; Vizenor, 1994, 2009) and rhetorical sovereignty (Lyons, 2000; Maughan, 2008) concomitant with refusals to be governed or controlled. Neither are alternative performances encouraged by which teachers might assess competencies: hybridic modes of thinking, doing, and being, which benchmark the limitations of what can be known from a Eurocentric perspective (Battiste, 2002; Brayboy & Maughan, 2009).

The goal of this paper is to demonstrate tensions caused by epistemological bases that are contradictory, often contested, and most certainly rhetorically negotiated given shared but differently constructed histories, statuses, goals, purposes, and epistemologies (Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005; Brayboy, 2005; Cajete, 2005; Kirkness & Barnhardt, 2001). An interdisciplinary framework of Indigenous Studies, anthropology of education, and discourse studies informs its methodologies and methods. Specifically, the research utilizes critical Indigenous research methodologies or CIRM (Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Ruehl, & Solyom, in press) and critical ethnography (Noblit, Flores, & Murrillo, 2004). CIRM recognizes self-determination and sovereignty as principles undergirding all Indigenous education. Critical ethnography rejects deficit or deprivation views while remaining cognizant of colonized histories.

Drawing on four years of data (participant observation, field notes, interviews, focus groups, and video recordings), this paper documents and interrogates instances of hybridic survivance and rhetorical sovereignty as demonstrated by interactions between research participants in a mandatory, supplemental instruction workshop. Participants are comprised of American Indian students in a teacher preparation program and the non-Native faculty and graduate research assistants who work with them. The method of analysis used in this research, rivaling (Flower, Long, & Higgins 2000; Flower, 2003), works from a perspective described as talking across difference for intercultural inquiry. The point is to draw out negotiated understandings through rival interpretations.

This paper finds that viewing interactions through an Indigenous epistemological lens can make visible the discriminations that privilege Euro-American academic performances, and hence become a catalyst to unpacking the possibilities and limitations of contesting injustice and supporting Indigenous realities in higher education systems. Although the methodologies used and the locally specific nature of this research may be seen a limiting in some senses, findings can profitably be extended to composition classrooms and other academic discourse communities.

Author

• Sundy L. Watanabe, Utah Valley University