Decolonizing Agency: Enacted Utopias for Sovereignty and Futurity

• In Event: Freire's Legacy for Social Resistance

Abstract

In the United States, Indigenous youth are punished more frequently and severely as compared to their White settler peers. Hyperpunishment of Indigenous youth should be understood in the cultural history of a settler colonial nation. In this chapter, we present a formative intervention, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at an urban high school in Wisconsin. Indigenous Learning Lab including Anishinaabe youth, families, educators, and tribal government representatives and non-Indigenous school staff examined their existing system and designed a culturally responsive behavioral support system. In the next year, the team implemented the new system. We utilized transformative agency by double stimulation with a decolonizing approach to facilitate a praxis. Our decolonizing approach was based on sovereignty and futurity.

Authors

• Aydin Bal, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author

• Aaron Bird Bear, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author