Whose Truth Matters in Education Research? Deconstructing, Reconstructing, and Advancing Indigenous Truths in the Pacific Region (and Beyond)

Session Type: Invited Speaker Session

Abstract

The world-wide colonization of indigenous communities and their interests through education is not a singular issue but formed through multiple sites, in multiple ways and often simultaneously. Education research has often been complicit in maintaining power over what ideas and findings matter and from whose perspective is prioritised in the pursuit of truth. As well, educators are implicated in neo-colonial relations of power and privilege. Education and schooling are complex sites of cultural oppression and therefore require a broad range of complex responses; different disciplinary bases that canvass a range of educational and schooling sites and issues. Issues of race, inequality and justice systematically impede indigenous, brown and black folk participating in the pursuit of truth through education. Oppressed peoples know the power that history education has in shaping their cultural and political identities. Renowned African American historian Carter G. Woodson wrote of the indoctrination of Black communities who were miseducated to believe they were inferior in every class they entered and every book they read (1993). Miseducation was much more than a contemporary critique of the system but a cycle that results from the mis-educated continuing to teach and mis-educate others. For this reason, indigenous peoples have developed alternative methodological approaches to research, in our search for what counts as truth. To this point, as Fijian and Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hauʻofa explains, indigenous people need to “actively reconstruct [their] histories, rewrite [their] geography, create [their] own realities, and disseminate these through [their] own educational institutions and [their] societies at large.” Failure to do so would relegate them to “mental reservations” rooted in narratives of “passive submission.”

Drawing on various perspectives, this session explores the effectiveness of indigenous approaches that positions research as critical and potentially transforming for our communities who are the most impacted by imperialism, colonialism, racism and oppression underpinning much of the miseducation indigenous peoples experience.

Sub Unit

• AERA Presidential Session

Chair

• Margaret J. Maaka, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa

Participants

• Kekailoa Perry, University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

• Te Rina Warren, Massey University

• Maung T. Nyeu, New York University

• Kamuela M. Kimokeo, Windward Community College

• Tanya L.M. Samu, University of Auckland

Discussant

• Huia Tomlins Jahnke, Massey University