Elder Epistemologies as Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy

• In Event: Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Educational Justice in a Changing World

Abstract

This is a reflective piece based on long-term relationship and mentorship with one Lakota Elder recently passed on to spirit, a beginning reflection on her work around deep cultural mapping, the reflection of language, Lakota values and disciplines, crafted out of the meaning of her loss.

The paper addresses relationality and Indigenous relational pedagogies, the engaged and enacted meanings and practices of knowledge systems placed within long experience with interactional, unfolding networks of ways of being, perceiving and envisioning the everyday, an everyday that extends beyond memory.

While in other contexts, a focus on youth engagement and understanding is located at the center, within a decolonizing pedagogy, Elders are central to Indigenous survival, coherence and futurity. Elders exist in that space of centrality as integral to a collective, participatory, community-based practice of enacting cultural coherence and meaning-making, vivifying ancestral systems of knowing and knowledge production. Elders enact the continuities between ancestors and coming generations, as “the mirror to our ancestors,” located and embedded within the deep experiential understanding of the need to be able to respond coherently and dynamically, dialogically, with responsibility, respect, and reverence to a continually shifting world with wisdom and discernment. Elder epistemologies, methodologies, pedagogies and praxis locate and ground a culturally sustaining center by enacting intergenerational oral processes, reminding and awakening the surrounding generations by their practice, the way they walk through the world, that knowledge must be engaged and enacted and, co-created with ancestors and generations to come.

Authors

• Amanda Holmes, University of Arizona

• Norma E. Gonzalez, The University of Arizona