Historicizing Decoloniality in Higher Education: Roger Buffalohead, AIS, and Indigenous Community Insurgency of Minnesota

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 2:15 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Historical Inquiries to Make “the history”: Unrevealing History from Visuals in the Cold War era

Abstract

Introduction
Between 1969 and 1975 Roger Buffalohead (Ponca) served as chair of the Department of American Indian Studies (AIS) at the University of Minnesota (Buffalohead, 2012; Phillips Indian Educators). Buffalohead was part of the founding of the first Department of American Indian Studies in the United States at Minnesota (Fixico, 2024, p. 96; Price, 1978, p. 8-9). During his tenure, he participated in a series of community conversations that spoke to the early tensions between AIS and colonial institutions of higher education. The audio records (Terkel, 1971; University of Minnesota 1974a; University of Minnesota 1974b; University of Minnesota 1975) of these community dialogues emphasize AIS as an epistemological and ontological insurgency that disrupted forgotten Indigenous pasts, presents, and futures (Estes, 2019).

Objectives
Using audio recordings with print materials from Indigenous students and the Department of AIS at the University of Minnesota in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this paper asks first what can be learned by historicizing AIS as a decolonial insurgency in higher education? Second, how does a local assemblage of higher education help us reconsider the “paradox” of simultaneous “desires for a colonizer’s future and… desires for Indigenous futures” (la paperson, 2017, p. xiii)?

Methods and Data
This research uses a decolonial approach to uncover the forgotten history of Indigenous education activism in higher education (Smith, 2012). Using archival methods to examine primary source materials this paper studies audio recordings, departmental pamphlets, and student print materials to triangulate a series of ontological and epistemological challenges leveled by AIS. By using a decolonial approach, this paper historicizes decoloniality in higher education (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Patel, 2015; Patel, 2021; Smith, 2012) and expose the ways that Indigenous futures challenge the underdevelopment of colonial higher education (Rodney, 2018).

Findings
Exploring the ways that Indigenous presence in urban Minneapolis fostered a faculty and community-based activism that disrupted coloniality in higher education, this paper argues that the past offers lessons for future decolonial education practices. Such contests open space for claims about knowledge, culture, history, land, and resources that other “disciplines” don’t makes (Cook-Lynn, 1996, 70; Cook-Lynn, 1999, 15-16; Cook-Lynn, 2001, 153). By discussing the choice and interpretation of materials, this research argues for a decolonial approach to the history of education reveals a “pluriverse” (Escobar, 2017). This pluriverse “transcends a single dimension, reaches back to yesterday and recognizes today, and comes upon tomorrow,” and awakens us to our subjectivity, relationality and temporality allowing us to collectively “intervene in reality in order to change it,” (Freire, 2017, 3-4). By recovering forgotten histories, we problematize the paradoxical coloniality of liberal categories of knowledge that systematize “difference” that sort past, present, and future knowledge (Lowe, 2015, p. 6). Beyond problematizing the “colonial ordering of things” (Estes, 2019, p. 126), this intervention opens space for fugitive practices to intervene in and contest future reactionary counterinsurgencies and enclosures (Patel, 2019; Sojoyner, 2016; Sojoyner, 2017).

Author

• Christopher J. Getowicz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign