Relationships Are Reality: Centering Relationality to Investigate Land, Blackness, Indigeneity, and Futurity

• In Event: Reclaiming the Possibilities of Connectivity: Relationality in Education Research and Action

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential of methodologically engaging relationality to guide education research dedicated to collaboratively solving our most-pressing educational problems. Specifically, this paper presents a critical analysis of the research design and interview protocols for a qualitative study on land ideologies, which centered relationality to understand the types of relationships with and beliefs about land held by education researchers engaging decolonizing methodologies. Once identified, these land ideologies were theorized as a guide to conceptualize the role of schools in imagining Black and Indigenous futurity in the age of climate crisis.

Critical Black and Indigenous epistemologies theoretically frame this project. Shawn Wilson (2008), an Indigenous scholar writing about methodology, explains that the concept of relationality means “relationships do not merely shape reality, they are reality” (p. 7, original emphasis). In action, this means that the relationships among and between the agents of the social, natural, and spiritual world form the basis of what we know and what we hope to learn. The state of those relationships contours our assets as well as our challenges. Wilson’s contribution is based on the earlier writings of Indigenous scholars who struggled with how to recover research from its imperial origins and refashion it as a tool for decolonial struggle (Kawagley, 1995; Smith, 1999).

The methodology of the focal study offers concrete examples of how the principle of relationality can shape education research. Importantly, the principle of relationality comes from, and is most widely used by, Indigenous scholars (Cajete, 2000; Deloria, 1979; Tuck & Mackenzie, 2015). This paper grapples with the generative tension of engaging relationality as a Black, non-Indigenous, researcher by analyzing convergences in Black and Indigenous intellectual genealogies. Critical indigenous methodologies (Brayboy et al, 2012) and Black feminist thought (Hill Collins, 1990) converge in their shared commitment to re-claiming scholarship as a mechanism to accurately depict the world that Black and Indigenous peoples inhabit, from the power structures that constrain us to the methods of resistance that sustain us. Beyond depiction, these critical frameworks demand that research participate in the shared project of addressing our most pressing challenges. In this paper, I offer my process of tracing Black and Indigenous intellectual genealogies as a mechanism for engaging tenets of Indigenous scholarship as a non-Indigenous person with intention and accountability.

Meaningfully connecting education research to the many stakeholders it is intended to serve is an immense challenge. This year, the American Educational Research Association is inviting its members to engage in “deliberate reconnection” (2019) with the youth, families, practitioners, and policymakers with and about whom we produce scholarship. In addition to challenging the way we present and disseminate research, this reconnection demands methodological solutions. This paper contributes to this scholarly need by examining how the principle of relationality can shape research intending to leverage the power of connection among and between stakeholders.

Author

• Kyle M. Halle-Erby, University of California - Los Angeles