Cultivating Alliances: Appropriating Power and Privilege as Tools for Language and Cultural Reclamation in Indigenous Education

• In Event: 66.032 - Challenging Colonial Legacies in Education: Reclaiming Indigenous Culture, Language, and Heritage in the Americas

Abstract

Addressing issues of culture, language and heritage in education, research and praxis, this paper emphasizes institutions of schooling as frontline battle grounds for Indigenous communities around whose knowledge is considered legitimate and whose knowledge is not (Lomawiama & McCarty, 2006). Grounded in the author’s personal and professional experience as a white teacher, teacher-educator, and scholar-educator working with and alongside Indigenous students, teachers and communities in often hostile institutions of education, this paper presents an interactional orientation toward social justice which privileges the critical issues central to education for Indigenous peoples through a stance of cultivated alliances within educational spaces of power, such as the public academy. Informed through ethnographic research with both US and Mexico teachers working in Indigenous serving schools, this paper offers a conceptualization of alliances between Indigenous and non-Indigenous stakeholders, as negotiated, emergent, and interaction-based processes which demand cultivation and on-the-ground action (Bertely Busquets, 2011). As the majority of current and future teachers serving Indigenous students in public schools are either non-Indigenous or who have been forced to attend non-Indigenous teachers preparation programs (Castagno, 2009; Ladson-Billings, 2005), the cultivation of critical and strategic alliances for disrupting institutional racism are of heightened importance for social transformation in the
educational process.
Using the term White privilege (McIntosh, 1989; Tatum, 2003), the author discusses systemic implications of institutional racism, and the ways white privilege can and should be used to reveal and weaken hidden systems of advantage with and alongside Indigenous communities. Rejecting the dangerous and masked forms of White Privilege readily present in academia, e.g. “white liberalism” - a constant “educated” thinking about race, yet a continued avoidance of responsibility for racial inequality and injustice (Castagno, 2009; Tatum, 2003), this paper discusses a need for increased critical readings of situated movements of power in order identify discourse, action and resource distribution which can make more visible the legitimate perspectives and lifeways of Indigenous peoples in institutionalized schooling. Such a grounded and situated approach for disrupting social inequities requires attention to whose voice can and cannot speak for Indigenous peoples, while paying acute attention to the strategic power White Privilege offers allied educators, such as the author of this paper, for increasing critical opportunities for challenging standardized pedagogies, racist curricula, and normative discourses which paint Indigenous children and communities as “deficit” or worse, no longer present. The orientation of alliances draws attention to the nuanced, and subversive shifts in power, analyzing critical opportunity spaces for multiple and insider voices to “educate” others about the identities and dynamic realities of Indigenous peoples. As the White power structure authored racist narratives about Native peoples—there remains a significant responsibility for White educators to experience the discomfort of relinquishing power or actively co-opting systemic privilege in order to create space for co-authoring more truthful narratives about our local and global realities. This paper centers on efforts to enact research and teaching from an alliance stance which further challenge the “great divide” between theory and practice, knowledge and action in education (McCarty, 2006).

Author

• Vanessa Anthony-Stevens, The University of Arizona