Ataa’didiin Ba’ Hane’: Pollenating a Call to Action for the Next Seven Generations

• In Event: Dismantling Racial Injustice IS Imagining an Indigenous Holistic Well-Being Framework for the Next Seven Generations

Abstract

In addition to providing an overview for this workshop, our first presenter will discuss the Indigenous Corn Pollen Model in holistic leadership and well-being (Author 1, 2009, 2018, 2022) highlighting the valuable contributions of Navajo elders and their epistemology relating to spiritual, mental, physical, and social well-being attributes. The sacred symbol of corn in Navajo cultural lifeways serves as an inspiration of this holistic framework to promote success for youth in relation to well-being. The Corn Pollen Model is composed of 16 well-being attributes derived from interviews, stories, leadership experiences and survey results from 23 American Indian graduate and professional students, along with talking circles from international Indigenous scholars. A non-Native perspective was also included in the model, which also includes western perspectives of well-being.
We open the workshop with a prayer from a Zuni elder, and our first presenter and chair will begin by providing an in-depth overview of the 16 well-being attributes, along with other critical components of the model, to provide context, understanding, and to spark discussion in the engagement portion of the workshop. More specifically, the first portion of this workshop will focus on the discussion of each of the quadrants of the Indigenous-based Corn Pollen Model, and the respective attributes that comprise them. These four quadrants and their respective attributes (Author 1, 2018) include:

• The spiritual well-being quadrant: Strongly tied to having purpose in one’s life which also connects to attributes cultural well-being or identity, linguistic well-being or language, and artistic well-being or possessing one’s gift in life. Navajo elders were instrumental in providing the basic framework that includes spiritual well-being.

• Mental well-being quadrant: Connected to attributes including thinking or cognition skills, emotional well-being or heart, intellectual well-being or wisdom, and technical well-being or future skills needed to promote wellness.


• Physical well-being quadrant: Related to the body and includes attributes of environmental well-being or sense of place, cyclical well-being or honoring time/change, and medicinal well-being which is needed for healing purposes.


• Social well-being quadrant: Correlates to attributes honoring relations to embody professional well-being or goals, economic well-being or maintaining stability, and political well-being which connects leadership attributes to life-long learning.


Upon laying a foundation of understanding and need for the Indigenous Corn Pollen Model in holistic leadership and well-being (Author 1, 2009, 2018, 2022), our first presenter will discuss how the model has been implemented to construct educational possibilities, while also speaking to the challenges of forwarding such a model within an historical and contemporary context defined by political and racial injustice, including invisibilization, erasure, epistemicide, and other forms of structural and systemic violence that serve as continuous assaults on sovereignty and self-determination (Khalifa et al., 2019). Our first presenter will conclude in centering and offering the Indigenous philosophy “Si’ah Naaghai Bik’eh Hozhoon,” (SNBH) or the Beauty Way Path of life, which focuses on the overall completion and celebration of success through the symbol of the corn/graduation tassel, while also deeply embodying notions of possibility through action at the core of this year’s conference theme.

Author

• Shawn Lee Secatero, University of New Mexico