Regenerating a Caub Fab Feminist Approach

• In Event: Refusing Racial Injustice: Generating Educational Possibilities Through HMoob Theory and Praxis

Abstract

Objectives: As we continue to build scholarship and literature centering a racially just society, projects that center our spirits are scarce, especially in an educational/classroom setting. Typically, spiritual projects get put into religious studies in the academy and if scholars dares to be radical, the topic of spirituality gets put into the discipline of anthropology. This essay breaks down disciplinary boundaries and argues that spirits are core to our learning experiences, broadly defined. Whether in a classroom setting or outside of the classroom learning occurs when we recognize that our spirits are core to our existence.

Perspective(s) or Theoretical Framework: This essay introduces a Caub Fab feminist approach drawing from Critical Indigenous Studies and Third World Feminism perspectives. Thinking through a Caub Fab worldview, by which we honor our kinship with spirits of lands, spirits of skies, spirits of waters, regenerating a caub fab worldview imagines different ways we resist patriarchal, western ways of knowing.

Methods and Data: Through (re) membering our ancestral knowledges (e.g. wedding rituals) we call upon all spirits to acknowledge the importance of women during her wedding. We call upon our ancestors to acknowledge a new being into our families. We continuously pledge to spirits of lands, spirits of skies that we will honor the women we brought into our family to maintain clan relations. By drawing on my experiential knowledge and analysis of songs and texts, the methodology and data set utilized in this paper forefront decolonial perspectives that decenter racist notions of validity and legitimacy.

Results/Conclusion: When we recognize and accept Hmong women as knowledge keepers, we no longer need to resist patriarchy. Our knowledges comes from our grandmothers and great-grandmothers. When we accept HMoob ways of knowing, being, and doing we write and tell our histories in ways that we can become good ancestors as Daniel Heath Justice (2018) suggests.

Significance: A decolonial perspective to decenter HMoob men, I move to center the ways in which we have always, since time immemorial, centered women through our cultural practices. A racially just society moves beyond what we come to know as race, in a US context. Spirits are core to our existence, therefore, to trace spirits is to heed our calling to imagine a more just society. Spirits are often foreclosed from educational spaces, by acknowledging and including spirits into our educational spaces, we disrupt western ways of knowledge production and we disrupt western ideas of learning and education. This presentation does not suggest that spirits are exclusive to HMoob communities. Instead, I agree with Younging (2018) stories are spiritually connected to the land and ancestors. Thus, relevant and necessary for tracing and imagining educational possibilities outside of western norms.

Author

• Karen Vang, University of California - Davis