"Who (and What) Is Driving?" Indigenous Leadership, Teachers, and Scholars

• In Event: At the Crossroads: Enacting Anticolonial Responsibility in Social Studies Scholarship Through Community-Centered Participatory Research

Abstract

I shape my research because of who I am. My family contains complex colonial history between my Cherokee, German, and English/Scottish ancestors. My Europeans ancestors came to Turtle Island and took not only land, but also my Cherokee ancestor, Sarah Oo-Waite.

As a teacher and scholar, I endeavor to prioritize relationships and responsibility. I worked with Indigenous students on tribal action projects and taught a sovereignty-focused civics curriculum. From the use of TribalCrit (Brayboy, 2005), Safety Zone Theory (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006) and Zones of Sovereignty (Lomawaima & McCarty, 2014) as frameworks to analyze data, to students editing and contextualizing their transcripts, my dissertation work had Indigenous scholars and participants in the driver's seat. Together, we determined ways to navigate the road together, instead of trusting a pre-determined map.

Despite my commitment to relational methods, I encountered challenges because of settler colonial requirements imposed on dissertation research. For example, the IRB did not support my plan to compensate youth (who cannot be trusted with money…) for their shared labor and leadership during the “official” study timeframe.


To enact anticolonial responsibility, social studies researchers need to ask who—and what—drives our research. Instead of allowing settler colonial norms and institutions to define our research trajectories, we challenge social studies scholars to look to community leaders, educators, and students for guidance. Involving stakeholders—and students—throughout the research design and process helps avoid damage-centered research (Tuck, 2009).

Within participatory research, we also look to scholars who consistently engage in relational work for leadership in navigating the crossroads between academia and communities. Scholars of Indigenous Research Methods (IRMs) (e.g., Brayboy, et al., 2012; Chilisa, 2019; Drawson, Coombs & Mushquash, 2017; Kovach, 2018; Windchief & San Pedro, 2019; Wilson, 2008), Indigenous social studies scholars (Calderon, 2014; Haynes Writer, 2008; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2002; McCoy, 2018; Rains, 2003; Sabzalian, 2019a, 2019b), and non-Indigenous critical social studies scholars (e.g., Shear & Krutka, 2019) offer relevant guidance for emerging scholars of participatory social studies research.

These scholars share an emphasis on reciprocal, ongoing relationality as the primary force for and mechanism of learning, research accountability, and validity. Continually investing time and intention in relationships helps ensure that research processes and outcomes function as a gift (Battiste, 1998; Jacob et al., 2018; McGregor & Marker, 2018). However, without anticolonial commitments, even the most well-intended community and practitioner partnerships can serve figurehead and tokenizing functions, thereby reinforcing settler colonial systems of relationship and leadership typical in academic research (González, 2019; Hicks et al., 2012).

Participatory social studies scholarship serves as a way to resist settler colonial research methods, which prioritize individual and institutional recognition and prestige; seek to seize, settle, and commodify unique knowledges as property for the benefit of community outsiders; and marginalize or exclude community members and youth due to assumptions that they lack expertise and methodological sophistication. Driving with Indigenous leaders—without becoming a backseat driver—thus requires focus on shared commitments and advocacy.

Author

• Rachel Talbert, Teachers College, Columbia University