Developing My Own Place Based Consciousness: Indigenizing Higher Education Through a Doctoral Journey

• In Event: Indigenous Pathways in a Doctoral Degree: Creating Lived Methodologies Centered in Community

Abstract

Underrepresentation among Native American students, faculty, staff, and administrators in higher education is not a coincidence, and I believe linked to settler colonial logics of elimination that institutions continue to enact. The hyper-invisibilization of Indigenous issues and lack of awareness by administrations is related to challenges around belonging, student success, and retention, and is something I have experienced myself as a student and practitioner in higher education. However, institutions have begun hiring high level administrative positions to face these issues and meet the needs of Tribal Nations and their citizens who are attending these institutions, but I am curious what power and visibility do these positions have to create systemic change, or Indigenize the landscape of higher education.

My own experiences related to these positions and as a practitioner helped guide me to a doctoral program because I desired ways to Indigenize and disrupt the systemic violence that Indigenous communities experienced within. As I begin to develop my own Indigenous methodology for research and begin the dissertation process, I am beginning to understand how centering Indigenous knowledge systems and land is a way to disrupt these spaces, and how they can build the capacity for change for our communities within higher education. I continue to come back to Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat’s work around developing place-based consciousness, and centering place as a relation within the work we do in systems of education.

“To Indigenize an action or object is the act of making something of a place” (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001, p. 32). Because land and place have been at the center of my own experiences, relationships, and journey as an Indigenous student, practitioner, and now emerging scholar, I want to engage with the concepts of “Power and Place Produce Personality” as an Indigenous methodological framework that guides the research I engage with and the practitioners who share their stories (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001). When thinking about administrative positions in higher education that are created to specifically work with and support Indigenous students and Tribal Nations (even though the job descriptions themselves are vastly different), these positions are inherently in relationship to larger communities and place as mentioned in the beginning that institutions of higher education would not be in existence if not for the theft of land from Indigenous communities. By engaging with place as a relation and building my own Indigenous methodological framework around the relationships we have with one another, the institutions, and the land we are visiting or living on, then the power that can be produced can be critical and disruptive in ways that position Indigeneity at the center rather than outside of or adjacent to the goals of higher education.

Author

• Tiffani Kelly, University of Oklahoma