Woven with Refusal: From Resistance to Sovereignty through Indigenous Presence and Love

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 4:15 pm - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Sovereignty, Refusal, and Relational Pedagogies: Indigenous Frameworks of Accountability, Love, and Responsibility in Education

Abstract

Woven refusal offers a framework grounded in Indigenous presence, love, and ceremonial accountability. Refusing to conform to settler expectations or center resistance as a reaction, it foregrounds relation, responsibility, and future-making. This paper asks: What does it mean to refuse institutional inclusion not out of resistance, but from a place of refusal and love? Drawing on Indigenous feminist theory, storywork, and critical autoethnography, this work weaves lived experience with analytic insight—from institutional silencing to tokenization on ancestral lands. These moments are not deviations from the research; they are the research. Refusal is not rejection, but a generative act: a methodology of slowness, truth-telling, and accountable relation that reclaims American Indian Studies as intellectual, spiritual, and community-rooted practice.

Author

• Kelly Leah Stewart, University of California, Los Angeles