Once-children, now teachers: Theorizing Black and Indigenous Educator Care as Self-Defense

• In Event: Praxis and Pedagogies of Liberation: Resistance and Re-Existence

Abstract

This paper examines how Black and Indigenous educators mobilize what I term care as self-defense amid the violences of schooling. Rooted in educator narratives, I show how memories of school-based harm and the protection offered by caretakers fuel teachers’ interventions on behalf of their students and younger selves. Building on decolonial feminist theory and movements for liberation, this chapter argues that memory transforms care into a force of collective self-defense, locating its power in the resistance of grandmothers and the persistence of once-children, now teachers. I theorize the student experiences and schooling narratives of Black and Lakota teachers when they were children based on autoethnographic research, ethnographic research, and interviews. Based on my time working with Indigenous and Black educators in a reservation in South Dakota during the height of the Black Lives Matter Movement, the occupation of Cannonball, North Dakota, against the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the first Trump presidency, this paper stories the dimensions of educator care as self-defense. By connecting the dots between educators’ childhood experiences of school-based violence, their caretakers’ efforts to protect them, and their classroom experiences teaching, I argue that these educators mobilize care as self-defense. Here, self-defense follows the common meaning of the term, which is typically defined as the use of force to protect oneself from an attempted injury by another, but the temporal dimension shifts (Merriam-Webster, n.d.). Typically, self-defense describes a physical and often violent reaction to harm that is time and place specific: a fist transforms into a tool for self-defense in the presence of another threat. For these teachers, their specific memories of harm initiate a series of actions in order to protect against an attempted injury. Simultaneously, the teacher acts on behalf of their younger self, who needed defense as well as the student standing before them. Care as self-defense attempts to name the acts of what McKinney de Royston et al. (2021) describe as “protective care” that sustains students through the colonial apparatus of American schooling, including the moments when this care may be unrecognized as such.

Author

• Anna Almore, University of Michigan