Pedagogical Self-Determination and Indigenous Futures: Remembering and Remaking Kin in Territories Currently Marked Urban

• In Event: Imagining and Enacting Indigenous Futures: Sovereignty, Self-Determination, and Education

Abstract

Purpose/Perspective. In this paper we trace how families and educators draw on their evolving understandings of temporal and spatial relations across scales to story socioecological histories and futures of place in territories currently marked urban. We build with Deloria (2001) among others, that “Indigenous education is not Indigenous or education from within our intellectual traditions unless it comes through the land, unless it occurs in an Indigenous context using Indigenous processes ….we should be concerned with re-creating the conditions within which this learning occurred, not merely the content of the practice itself” (pp. 58-59; Smith, 2012; Simpson, 2014). Troubling the urban non-urban divide, we share efforts to (re)claim all lands as Indigenous lands and build out discussions of Indigenous movement as an important practice across lands, waters, and territories for kinship and sovereignty. Further, we explore how the historically accumulating dynamics of settler-colonialism and racialization shape learning, identity, and experience across the life course and consider what the pedagogical demands and possibilities are when our ontological terms (Lyons, 2000) - or our pedagogical imaginings (Simpson, 2017) are guided by longer views of Indigenous past, presents and futures rather than in response to settler-colonial violence.

Methods/Modes of Inquiry, Data and Findings. We focus on two cases, highlighting the many ways Indigenous peoples are embodying self-determination in intergenerational moments and family-based learning across communities and territories. Further, we weave and theorize with the cases and our own lived stories (Archibald, 2008; Million, 2008) as a methodological form and practice of pedagogical self-determination.

In case 1, we share work across the Great Lakes to live out Anishinaabe travel and trade practices in traditional jiimaan. This work aims to secure Indigenous knowledge systems and ontological practices through a continuation of navigational, engineering, and economic practices. We discuss how an urban and reservation community have claimed their ancestral relationality through seasonal programming and asserting a regularity of movement across lands and waters. These efforts developed through longstanding Indigenous STEAM programming with intergenerational learning environments to foster children’s axiological, ontological, and epistemological security in intertribal contexts. With an emphasis on Anishinaabe travel and trade, we suggest that movement has always been an aspect of Indigenous life and that traveling and practicing together today is a necessary dimension of securing our knowledge systems, language, and nationhood into the future.

In case 2, we weave together reflections from a project that invited Chicago-based improvisational jazz artists to use the tools of research to reflect upon their routine activities to collectively design activities that are consequential within their discipline. Guided by Indigenous research paradigms and in particular principles of genealogy (i.e., kinship-based and activity-based family), relationships, reciprocity, and care (Jahnke & Gillies, 2012, Wilson, 2008) – this work highlights how practices for improvisation and collaboration are shared across generations and geographies to create spaces of Indigenous diaspora.

Significance. Pedagogically, these cases demand attention to intergenerationality and storying to foster community attunement to socioecological histories and futures of places and the roles of kinship networks toward our collective continuance (Whyte, 2018).

Authors

• Megan Bang, Northwestern University

• Anna Lees, University of Washington

• Ananda M. Marin, University of California - Los Angeles