Collaging Black and Indigenous Education Sovereignties

• In Event: Artist Salons as Sites of Unforgetting: Reimagining Liberatory-Education through Plays, Film, Poetry, Novella, and Collage

Abstract

In the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance salons—spaces where Black cultural workers gathered to theorize, create, and reimagine the world—I offer this collage session as an everyday portal into our own practices of artistic and intellectual communion. Inspired by the (extra)ordinariness of the Black living room salon, I bring to this gathering the (extra)ordinary practice, emblematic of Black and Indigenous feminist thought, of collage. My contribution will include both a paper and a participatory workshop—twin offerings that reflect a belief in knowledge-making as collective, embodied, and material.
I frame collaging as a method and methodology for Black and Indigenous feminist research. Departing from the methodological bricolage of Claude Lévi-Strauss towards Black feminist theory and Indigenous storytelling traditions (work only made possible because of researchers like Cynthia Dillard, Stephanie Toliver, Joann Archibald, Amanda Tachine, and Ebony Thomas) my work defines collaging not simply as a visual or artistic activity, but as a feminist orientation toward assembling knowledge. In research shaped by survival, refusal, and reimagination, collage enables us to hold contradiction, trace memory, and honor what is fragmented but still alive. It allows researchers to gather across genre, discipline, and epistemology. Through collage, we make space for what does not fit—and that very excess becomes our theory.
My research, which investigates the experiences of Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous, and Black educators in Sicangu Lakota homelands, mobilizes collage as method to bring interviews, oral histories, walking-storytelling methods, and close reading into conversation. Collage allows me to hold the tensions that emerge when abolition and decolonization appear in the same pedagogical space, or when Black and Indigenous histories converge under conditions shaped by anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. Rather than resolve these tensions, collage invites me to sit with them, arrange them, and witness what becomes visible in the process. My paper will theorize this methodological move, illustrating how collaging enables critical feminist inquiry that is responsive to place, memory, and relation.
In addition to the paper, I will facilitate a hands-on collage-in-the-classroom workshop during the session. All participants are invited to engage in the process of creating and reflecting, using collage as a portal to surface their own ways of knowing, teaching, or being in the world. This is not simply an arts-based supplement—it is an enactment of the methodology itself. The workshop is designed to be replicable: participants will receive a toolkit and facilitation guide they can adapt for their own classrooms, whether they teach qualitative methods, K-12, critical theory, creative writing, or community-based research. Collage becomes a pedagogical practice as much as a methodological one, rooted in both Black and Indigenous feminist commitments to collectivism, storytelling, and transformation.

Author

• Anna Almore, University of Michigan