Honoring Our Ancestry

• In Event: Watering Our Foremothers' Garden: Building a Community for Black, Indigenous, and Women of Color Resistance in Education

Abstract

Recognizing our ancestors and genealogy is more than an onto-epistemological pursuit – it is our ethical responsibility. We must recognize our genealogy as individuals, collectives, and scholars. As scholars and BIWOC, we already recognize the Black, Brown, Indigenous and Queer & Trans scholars who have come before us, whose work we draw upon, and who helped make our work legible to an institution that was not built for us. Our intellectual foremothers continue to create space and push us to engage the sociocultural, political, and ethical dimensions of teaching and learning in our work.
We also recognize that the work is ongoing – the academy rarely feels like a space where we can bring our whole selves, our whole histories, and whole dreams of futurities (Patel, 2016). The academy still has not contended with its settler colonial origins and ideologies that have perpetuated harm in our communities, which include lands, waters, skies, and more-than-human beings.
Beyond our academic genealogy, connecting our work to our ancestors, openly, as our teachers and guides and as a motivation for our work is our responsibility. It is the responsibility of the academy to broaden its notion of science and research such that this possibility is realized. Methodologies that desettle western notions of science (e.g., Smith, 2013) are held up in this work as well as more widely utilized methodologies which we engage with critically, considering the socio-historical, political, and ethical dimensions of our work. Connecting to ancestors – especially through a lens of critical historicity (Bang, Faber, Gurneau, Marin, & Soto, 2016; Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) toward equitable futurities – is a site of lifting up our lifeways. It is a site of lifting up our histories before our collective oppression and our resistance, resilience, and survivance (Vizenor, 2008). Connecting to our ancestors refuses oppression by the settler colonialism state (Wolfe, 2006) and the ongoingness of this in everyday moments. The everydayness (Corntassel & Scow, 2017) of connecting our work with our ancestors as individuals, collectives, and scholars supports us as we become the ancestors we want to be for future generations. In this session, we will honor our genealogy and ancestors through shared storytelling and storylistening in order to create a healing space for collective work in the present and moving forward.

Author

• Nikki McDaid, Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy Learning Sciences