Are You a "Real" Indian? Collective Identity Assertion and Educational Experiences of Urban Native Youth

• In Event: 72.052 - Indigenous Students Navigating Identity, Motivation, and Epistemology in Education: A Fireside Chat

Abstract

Urban Native American youth face colonizing schooling experiences that impact the way they collectively (re)form their identities. Working with a community group serving Urban Native youth, I utilize a decolonizing methodological approach (Smith, 1999) consisting of iterative autobiographical discussion sessions, culminating in a composite narrative (Van Manen, 2010; Sangtin Writers & Nagar, 2006). The collective narrative demonstrates how schools’ impact on students’ Native identity creates a complex pull between being irrelevant and being totalizing. Both of these manifestations reflect students’ place within a racialized colonial system (Friedel, 2010, 2011) that renders urban Native youth in their “non-authentic” manifestation of “Indianness” as invisible and privileges a stereotypical picture of Native people as the only visible aspect of their identity.

Author

• Bayley Marquez, University of California - Berkeley