What Place Insists Upon: Cultivating Caretaking Relations and Responsible Leadership

• In Event: Placing Reciprocity: Centering Relationality in Community-Rooted Education

Abstract

Objectives: This project takes up Indigenous and anti-displacement scholars' interests in asking: What issues and analytics does place “insist upon” (McElroy & Werth, 2019, p. 880)? Aligning with the 2023 AERA annual theme, we shift the epistemological anchors of our practice from the concerns of state certification programs or professional associations to those of the places we
inhabit and seek to sustain.

Methodology: We anchor this collaborative practitioner inquiry (Brydon-Miller & Maguire, 2009) in Indigenous understandings of place as living relatives (Silva, 2019). Contrary to white and colonial understandings of place as property (Moreton-Robinson, 2015), Indigenous understandings of place as kin promote caretaking ways of knowing and being in relation to the lands which we depend upon (Estes, 2019).

Methods: Data for this study included reflective practitioner memos conducted during the 2021-2022 academic year, course texts (e.g., syllabi, lesson plans, summative student reflections), and collaborative notes from our decolonial experiments in teaching and learning across occupied Hawaiʻi and Montana.

Findings: We identified three demands that place made on our teaching:

(1) Place insisted that we situate our learning in and with community. Engaging place in our teaching required place-ing learning in relation to the people, lands, and waters that constitute place. As one example, we invited students to community workdays. These ungraded, voluntary, caretaking events allowed students to actively restore community places (e.g., spiritual sites, farmlands, fishponds) and interact with community members as hosts. Through joint activities, we deepened our individual and shared understandings of the communities we sought to serve and advanced the political project of nurturing “students who lead, not leave” their communities (Lipsitz, 2015).

(2) Place insisted that we recognize–and diligently work to refine and redefine–our distinctive locations relative to white supremacy and settler-colonialism. TallBear (2019) points out that undoing centuries of white supremacist and colonial hierarchies of human life is not easy. Through our shared learning, we homed our distinctive responsibilities to place—from those who identified as stewards of intergenerational, sacred knowledge to those who identified as settlers and sought to contribute to projects in decolonization and Indigeneous resurgence.

(3) Place insisted that we think outside of inherited designs. Engaging place also made evident inadequacies of the “American School” (Givens, 2021), which rewards individualism, competition, and compliance. Place invited to ask: What might learning look like that does not service the white settler state? How might we codesign educational environments that advance “a new American Dream whose goal is a higher Humanity instead of the higher standard of living dependent on Empire” (Boggs, 2012, p. 72; c.f., Fujino et al., 2018; Shield et al., 2020).

Scholarly Significance: Jacob and colleagues (2021) remind, “From an Indigenous perspective, if you do not know where you are, you are lost” (p. 2). Asking what place insists upon offered a generative approach to locating ourselves, our teaching, and our shared leadership in service of community-defined ends.

Authors

• Ethan Chang, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
  Presenting Author

• Jason D. Cummins, Montana State University
  Presenting Author

• Alicia Reyes, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
  Presenting Author

• Nicole Alia Salis Reyes, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa
  Presenting Author