Countering Colonialism: Elder Epistemologies and an Indigenous Praxis of Community and Belonging in Schools

• In Event: Reimaging Community-Based Inquiries and Decolonizing Knowledge Production in Transnational Contexts

Abstract

Purpose of the Study
In the early 1960’s, Native American and Indigenous rights activist, Janet McCloud said, “Most of these ‘progressive’ non-Indian ideas like ‘class struggle’ would at the present time divert us into participating as ‘equals’ in our own colonization” (in Jaimes & Halsey, 1992, p. 314).
Many years later, in the summer of 2018, a Mayan elder visited an urban Indian Center in Detroit to discuss the importance of heirloom seeds. The elder’s lecture included a teaching on the tensions between Anthropocentrism, a Western ontological paradigm and Eco-centrism, a paradigm grounded in Indigenous understandings of relationality (Wilson, 2007).
Though “class struggle” and “heirloom seeds” might not seem related, the author transposes the two elder teachings to the field of education to explore how colonial and neo-colonial paradigms such as anthropocentrism define and dominate power-relationships in schools and communities while also assigning “superior value to the (mostly Western) idea of economic growth as the greatest good” (Kopnina, 2014, p. 77). The author argues that these paradigms shape theories of community and belonging so that they align with projects and programs that stimulate economic development for both the colonizer as well as the colonized (Villenas, 1996).
Theoretical Framework
The author argues “elder epistemologies” (Rodriguez, 2008), can break this cycle by calling forward ancestral knowledge, such as knowledge used in art, music, storytelling, cooking, farming, sewing and even activism and through traditional forms of resistance. Grounding schools in elder epistemologies such as the ways of knowing exemplified by the two Indigenous elders, Janet McCloud from the United States and the Mayan elder from Mexico, demonstrates how Indigenous teachings can intersect and intertwine transnationally across contexts and function in ways that rupture the coloniality of our current educational context.
Data
This study uses autoethnographnic, retrospective and archival data that builds on a transnational Kalpulli-to-Kalpulli cultural revitalization project, from which the author is lead. The project promotes dialog and collaboration between linked communities of Indigenous Mexicans in both the U.S and Mexico, with the goal of translating Mexika educational, philosophical and ceremonial practices into contemporary settings.
Significance
Elder epistemologies can be used to decode, rewrite and re-right colonial education paradigms. By sharing stories and modeling the use of “elder epistemologies” in contemporary contexts, the author hopes teachers and students can better navigate ontological tensions and resist colonial co-optation in the defining of community and belonging in schools.

Author

• Sandra M. Gonzales, Wayne State University