Can Decolonization Exist in the Colonial Academy? Adding Indigenous Spiritual Narratives to the Discourse

• In Event: Collaborations Against Settler Colonialism: Excavating the Educational Sites and Possibilities of Decolonization

Abstract

This paper offers a presence in current discourse of decolonization that draws from Indigenous spirituality and Haudenosaunee community understanding. This paper employs borderland Indigenous spheres, identities, and spiritualities (Anzeldúa, 2007; Goeman, 2013). In a collaborative work we (two Indigenous scholars) theorize decolonization by striving to connect our different and deeply personal indigenous experiences, spiritualities, and ways of knowing with one another as a model of working through the incommensurability (Tuck & Yang, 2012) of settler colonialism. Through collaboration and consensus, we allow for diversity and contradiction rather than a clear-cut naming of Indigeneity or decolonial work. Colonization has a set of very real consequences for specific to Indigenous peoples, and we peacefully and collaboratively acknowledge differences and incommensurabilities within Indigenous communities while embracing that diversity in our own work.
To do this, we focus specifically on Indigenous Haudenosaunee spirituality, the peaceful approach of Good Mind (Alfred, 1999, 2009; Porter, 2008) and theory out of Indigenous Christianity. Our work embodies a complex, yet still Indigenous approach to “unsettling innocence” (Tuck & Yang, 2012, p. 10) where reconciliation may look drastically different. Instead of returning to normalcy, however, we advocate for reconciliation where the ends are anything but normalcy and the means are radically different.
This paper communicates two narratives that organically merge, deviate, and overlap throughout (Bishop, 2012). The structure of this paper mirrors the tone of our presence in academia: where we braid our narratives in and out of institutionalized education that attempts to strip us of our identities. We invite our readers to follow our narration through four major sections: our original indigenous community knowledge, tension during our first encounter with academia, a theoretical articulation of that tension using current discourse, and the contradictory position indigenous scholars doing decolonial work in a colonial academy. In many ways the narratives provide a space that questions the concrete connection between settler colonial studies and indigeneity with “time and care and a willingness to live in contention” (Snelgrove, Dhamoon, & Corntassel, 2014, p.3). Though we come into agreement about the four major themes, we allow our paths to deviate in many places; thus, there are inconsistencies between what two indigenous scholars understand as decolonization. However, we invite these contradictions into our work.

Authors

• Kelsey Dayle John, Syracuse University

• Hugh Burnam, Syracuse University