Reflection on Community Revitalization and the Practice of Self-Determination

• In Event: (Re)Mapping Sovereign Imaginaries for Indigenous Publics: Examples of School and Community Education

Abstract

This paper uses Tuck & Yang’s (2012) notion that decolonization is not a metaphor, to explore the process and impact of my personal journey with the Coeur d’Alene Tribe’s efforts toward self-determination and community revitalization. In 2014, I was hired by the Coeur d’Alene Tribe of Idaho to coordinate the development of a Comprehensive Tribal Justice Strategic Plan (TJSP) to address the reduction of substance abuse-related crime on the Reservation. Although the impetus for the project was a funding opportunity through the U.S. Department of Justice, the efforts of the tribe represented an opportunity to shift damage-centered research and programming toward desired-centered approaches in community well-being (Tuck, 2009). The complexities of settle-colonial tensions posed significant challenges throughout. Relevant, yet painful questions regarding self-determination and ownership of the plan underscored the process, and surfaced decolonization as an action, rather than a metaphor. Histories of similar projects fraught with fragmentation and lack of trust left divisive scars within the community-at-large, the Tribal leadership and service providers. The collective process of assessing and addressing community well-being made visible reverberating settler colonial dynamics of inter-generational trauma in the organization, governance, curricula, and interactions of historically unfair social structures (Tuck & Yang, 2012).
This paper reflects on how this experience has opened new opportunity to (re)imagine pubic access, community accountability and Indigenous land as significant to an active process of decolonization. As a Latina, graduate student, and mother of Coeur d’Alene Tribal members, my positionality made me a ready partner with the Tribe in asserting the Tribe’s right to determine their own terms and conditions in the development of the TJSP. I served as facilitator and intermediary among an interdisciplinary committee which brought together tribal leaders, community members, and tribal justice service providers to collect data, assess existing services and identity resources needed to reduce substance abuse-related crime. The process affirmed many of the known contributing factors to substance abuse and crime in the community, yet most importantly, it helped uncover and highlight Tribal strengths and the community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) needed to repair and revitalize a community dealing with settler-colonial fragmentation and disenfranchisement. This work has been significant, as it has actively (re)positioned the Tribe as the knowledge-keeper and leading source of desire-centered outcomes, countering colonial beliefs that Tribes are incapable of successful self-governance and self-determination (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2002).
I use my autobiographical reflection conceptualize how embedded community collaborators might work within methodological paradigms of decolonization (Bang, Curley, Kessel, Martin, Suzukovick III & Strack, 2014) to contribute to community-based design research which supports Tribes desire-centered frameworks. In complex political geographies, projects of education and community restoration need to privilege Tribes as leaders of local and regional change. Decolonization for Indigenous peoples is a distinct project from other civil and human-rights based social justice projects (Tuck & Yang, 2012) as many facets of this experience of community healing involve the restoration of land and ancestral knowledge, ruptures intertwined with settler-colonial occupation.

Author

• Elva Allan, Advanced Management Strategies