Transnational Indigenous Sovereignty Across Time and Space: Disrupting Multicultural Education "Days"

• In Event: Liberatory Praxis Through Indigenous Epistemologies, Reconciliation, and Resurgence

Abstract

Against the backdrop of liberal multiculturalism through the calendrical celebration “days” in U.S. schools, such as Indigenous Peoples’ Day or Lunar New Year, we focus in this paper on responses by Indigenous students and families as examples of acts of Indigenous sovereignty that disrupt institutionalized multiculturalisms. Drawing from our projects and collaborations in northern California with Indigenous Maya families from Yucatan at an elementary school and with youths and adults connected to Oceania (Tonga primarily) at a high school, we argue that multicultural “days” bracket Indigeneity within sanitized realms of performance for the benefit of non-participatory audiences, a callback to eras of Eurocentric voyeurism identifying, equivocating, and ultimately containing, Indigenous sovereignty and personhood within existing racial and settler hierarchies.

Authors

• Patricia Baquedano-Lopez, University of California - Berkeley

• Nathan Gong, University of California - Berkeley