"Where I Am From": Empowering Silenced Tongues Through an Alter/Native Storytelling of Embodied Truths

• In Event: Vice-Presidential Session. Connecting Home(lands): Continuing Legacies of Pacific Islander and Asian Anti-Imperialism Across Oceans

Abstract

I present a short film that portrays oral narratives of individuals from marginalized ethnic groups: Pacific Islander, African, Black, Native Hawaiian, Indigenous, Native, Latinx, and Filipinx. Their poetic renditions of Where I’m From (Lyon, 1999) advocate for change in modern day’s education curriculum and pedagogy to incorporate and highlight students’ unique lived experiences and “truths”. Our Alter/Native movement abandons the Eurocentric, colonial foundations of the world and instead expands the anti-imperialist lens in persistence for recognition, representation, reparation, and transformational change in academic institutions.

Alter/Native Anthropology, a play on IN/EQUALITY Alternative Anthropology (Buck, 2010), and principles of Transdisciplinarity (Leavy, 2011) challenge us to identify core ideas, questions and approaches beneficial to personal, intellectual, research and anti-imperialist program development. A preliminary definition of Alter/Native Power is the dynamic history, research, scholarship, community engagement and social action agenda that these strategies and critiques engender (Chapman, 2019, personal communications). Through these lenses, individuals uncovered underrepresented truths and created pipelines for collective action.

I asked each participant to embody and recite Lyons’s Where I’m From. The only instruction given was to storytell and record with sentences that begin with “I am from”. Participants were given the freedom to be unapologetically artistic, without any implicit biases that could derive from research instruction. This was to examine if individuals instinctively practice Alter/Native components. I collected all participant videos and compiled them into a single short film. The methodological practice of arts-based research used within this project encourages the transition and implementation of S.T.E.M to S.T.E.A.M, with A representing the Arts.

The project is composed of participant submitted video and audio recordings that were then edited on the Movavi software.

The participants’ display of their embodied and lived experiences underscores the racial disparities in not only our education systems, but also in today’s America. When participants described where they were from, many paid homage to their ancestral native lands or significant locations of their upbringing. Although all participants are from America, not one participant explicitly accentuated being American. Alternatively, participants described being in America, displaying the lack of connection of one’s self to our nation.

The participants’ deeply-rooted testimonials bring forward silenced truths that could be utilized in academia to inform and address the historical and current desires and needs of our growing ethnically diverse communities. Beyond the university, this project and research studies alike could prompt policy leaders, practitioners, and researchers to take action on specific issue areas mentioned in participant storytelling.
Incorporating arts into academic disciplines offers a greater understanding and connection to the content, one’s self, and one another by learning through embodiment and practicing transdisciplinarity. Alter/Nativity therefore offers boundary-breaking approaches to higher education’s traditionally narrowed disciplines.

Author

• Isa Kelawili Whalen, University of Massachusetts - Boston
  Presenting Author