Education That Serves Indigenous Publics

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

Abstract

Public education in the US has been “the functionary arm of colonialism” (Calderón, 2009, p. 53). For Indigenous students, public education and K-12 schools have been sites of erasure, assimilation, and absorption, sites that domesticate and contain Native knowledges and experiences (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006; 2014; San Pedro, 2014) and that reproduce “the language of conquest” (Four Arrows, 2006) as official knowledge in schools. However, just as public education and schools have been sites of coloniality, they have also been sites of Native survivance (Vizenor, 1999; San Pedro, 2014; Sabzalian, 2015). This paper draws attention to both coloniality and survivance as a way of rethinking the purposes and practices of public education.
Nearly 90% of Native youth attend public schools (NCES, 2012), yet the imagined “public” in such schools is rarely Indigenous. Examining public schools in light of the presumed student subject (typically a white or “multicultural” settler subjectivity) brings into relief numerous colonial assumptions, discourses, and practices with which Native students contend. Recentering Indigenous students as the presumed “public,” can radically transform the visions and practices of public education.
This paper draws on Malea Powell’s (2002) notion of “rhetorics of survivance,” a conceptual tool she developed to examine how Gerald Vizenor’s notion of survivance has been put into practice by Native writers who have critically used and reappropriated the discourse of Indian-ness to serve Native purposes. Rhetorics of survivance are “tactics by which Native people make space for themselves by undermining and ‘tricking’ dominant narratives” (Ríos, 2015, p. 94). As a means of countering coloniality in K-12 schools as well as reimagining the purpose and processes of public education, this paper examines various “rhetorics of survivance” enacted in my own research as an Indigenous scholar, as well as those enacted by Indigenous students, families, and educators in a K – 12 public school district. As this paper will show, such rhetorics of survivance are often enacted when the presumed “public” of education is incongruent with Indigenous identities, knowledges, communities, or aims of education. Rhetorics of survivance are often animated in the face of settler colonial educational practices, and reclaime space for education “on Indigenous terms” (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2014), whether physical, social, cultural, emotional, intellectual, and ideological.
Through an autobiographical reflection of my own doctoral research, layered with narratives of families and youth as they create an “active sense of presence” (Vizenor, 1999, p. vii) in public schools, this paper explores the possibilities of public education that takes seriously the goals of Indigenous self-determination and “rhetorical sovereignty” (Lyons, 2000), education that serves Indigenous publics. Such exploration is necessary, as “Native visions for an Indigenously rooted and inspired education hold a promise for schools and a promise for a nation that can look cultural difference in the face, not as an enemy but as an ally” (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006, p. 170). Articulating such alternatives serves the equally important purpose of sharing knowledge with other Indigenous peoples (Smith, 2012).

Author

• Leilani Sabzalian, University of Oregon