T’aała’i Diidleeł (We Become One): Toward a Collective and Ceremonial Praxis of Indigenous Decolonizing Scholarship

Session Submission Type: Symposium

Abstract

This panel features a cadre of doctoral students and their collective experience in cultivating self-determined and culturally autonomous research through the creation and use of Indigenous learning modalities. By cultural definition, Indigenous learning modalities are a non-modern way of creative expression that follow familiar, age-old procedures and use materials typically found in the natural world, and also serves as the main stalk of this collective’s research process. By drawing from specific epistemological facets of the Diné (Navajo) worldview, namely the embodied life way concept of Hózhó (harmony), panelists will articulate how this emic process has recalibrated their individual approach to research as a group quest to restore a sense of harmony and human wellness to conventional academic training.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Indigenous Peoples of the Americas

Chair

• Lorna B. Williams, University of Victoria

Papers

• Reflexiones: Engaging Bicultural Children’s Televisual Media Through an Indigenous Praxis - Judith Estrada, University of Illinois

• T’áá anni dóó na’nitin náánádleeh (The Truth Becomes a Teaching): Toward a Feminine Praxis of Beauty in Diné Research - Charlotte Davidson, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• The Researcher as the Research Method: Dialect of Western and Indigenous Ways of Knowing - Gerardo Diaz, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

• Engaging Historical and Ancestral Peoples as a Praxis for Healthy Experiential Outcome in Higher Educational Environments - Jamie M. Singson, University of Illinois

Discussant

• Antonia Darder, Loyola Marymount University