Indigenous Making

• In Event: Cultural Making: Practices, Priorities, and Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives and Purpose: This paper builds on current conceptions of cultural making to focus on Indigenous children’s making as they engage their teachers in the practice of making from within important family practices. A focus of this work is exploring the role of Indigenous making in the ethical and political development of Indigenous children in Thailand. We highlight two student-teacher pairs as they engage in Indigenous making with Hmong cloth dyeing and Akha bamboo fish traps as part of everyday living of Indigenous relationships, where the “material struggle for decolonization is engaged and resisted” (Barajas-López & Bang, 2018, p. 8)

Theoretical framework: Human making - the use of materials, tools, and technologies to engage in acts of creation - has long been part of Indigenous systems of relationalities (Barajas-López & Bang, 2018; Authors, 2022). Indigenous making is a way to uphold stories, enact intergenerational responsibilities, and strengthen identities of who one is becoming individually and as a people. We use Indigenous relationalities to refer to the ethical worldviews governed by natural laws, the moral beliefs to uphold personal and communal responsibilities to be good relatives within living systems of the living world (Cajete, 2015). These guiding principles form the foundation of Indigenous knowing and being, and we add, Indigenous making. How might Indigenous young people in Thailand learn what it means to be a responsible family member and person in the world through making? What about acts of making (e.g. the materiality, the physicality, the social context) allow for the deepening of Indigenous relationalities?

Methods and Modes of Inquiry & Data sources: This study employs video and interaction analysis to trace talk-in-interaction (Erickson, 2004; Jordan & Henderson, 1995) among the teacher-student pairs as they engaged in Indigenous making. This data comes from a larger participatory design research project (Bang & Vossoughi, 2016) at an urban Indigenous school called Sahasatsuksa in northern Thailand where the authors worked alongside a teacher collective to restor(y) relationships between home and school, in which Indigenous making was a part.

Results: From each pair, we share one key episode that illustrates the ethical and political shifts that emerged from Indigenous making at school. First, students and teachers deepened ethics of consent, care, and responsibility to the land and family relations. Second, both pairs expanded current ideas of technology to include intergenerational technologies with bamboo. Finally, engaging and reflecting on the process of making held political implications for how teachers engaged in the redesign of schools towards Indigenous futures rather than simply nation-state ones. When Indigenous making involved children’s family knowledge—their material, purposeful engagements with natural world relations were valued as important contributors to learning, children and teachers were supported in enacting everyday renewals of Indigenous resurgence.

Scholarly significance: Learning sciences scholars warn that making devoid of interrogating culture, power, and purpose can reinscribe neoliberal values to restrict educational possibilities (Vossoughi et al. 2016). As colonialism and neoliberalism manifest materially through the very processes of creation, Indigenous making and sharing constitute a site of decolonization, resurgence, and relations.

Authors

• Meixi *, University of Minnesota
  Presenting Author

• Sukanda Kongkaew
  Non-Presenting Author

• Panthiwa Theechumpa
  Non-Presenting Author