Presidential Highlighted Session: Comparative Indigenous education: Indigenous knowledge systems, research, and decolonial practices

Group Submission Type: Presidential Highlighted Session

Proposal

CIES 2022 asks the field to consider questions, including “What would happen if we threw caution to the wind and asked ourselves—what do we really want to accomplish? What would education look like if we took risks and dared to dream?” Our formal panel presentation featuring comparative Indigenous education studies offers responses to these questions through their reframing. As Indigenous and co-conspirator scholar-educator-researchers, we ask—What happens when communities de-center colonization through the work of maintenance and fortification of Indigenous knowledges? How do educational processes serve Indigenous ontologies and land-based struggles that recognize our more-than-human relatives, political transformation, generational healing, and global relationalities? What does decolonial education look like then—formed as a result of whose risks and whose dreams?

Our panel brings together five presentations from scholars working in Latin America, North America, Asia, Oceania, and Europe and whose research on the one hand, challenges “one world world” universalism of modernity, political liberalism, private property as rights, free markets, and individualism (Kothari et al., 2019) and its effects on education for Indigenous peoples. On the other hand, we offer insights that make visible the ways in which Indigenous peoples and their practices “persevere and perform themselves into worlds” (Escobar, 2015, p. 15) and how education is reconceptualized and co-constructed as a result. These offerings align with the conference theme of “Battling the currents—the influence of politics and economics on education: making transparent the role of politics and economics on education.” As a collection, this panel is aligned with a forthcoming special section of Comparative Education Review (CER) that features the work of the panelists and where our presenters are interested in two key goals. First, we extrapolate Indigenous research where respectful and appropriate in order to understand global decolonial community-based movements for Indigenous self-determination and self-development. Second, we explore the relationship between comparative education and decolonizing Indigenous methodologies, which comprise a network of research paradigms and methods that are founded in Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and axiologies (Atalay, 2012; Chilisa, 2012; Fua, 2014; Rigney, 1999; Smith, 2012; Vaioleti, 2006; Wilson, 2001, 2008).

A common thread across our research is the vitality of relationships between Indigenous environmental stewardship (i.e. with lands and natural resources) (Kawagley, 2006; McCoy et al., 2016; McIvor & Parker, 2016; Simpson, 2014), Indigenous knowledge systems (Bebbington, 1990; Kawagley & Barnhardt, 2005), and community-based and innovative pedagogies (Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, 2013; McCarty, 2002). Our emphasis on these interdependencies is aligned with the conference theme of “Orbits aligned—how place makes the difference: theoretical and empirical approaches to research that examines the idea of space and place.” We are also concerned with the tensions of what it means to be connected with places and to build education mindful of these connections but whose processes are consistently challenged by dominant discourses of progress and modernity, local, national and global development projects, global capitalist hegemony and mass consumerism, international standards and pressures, and knowledge hierarchies and commodification. As a result of what Indigenous communities steward and what is routinely threatened, our panel takes up several interwoven themes, including analysis of coloniality/modernization as “the death project,” Indigenous knowledge systems and educational design as towards “the life project,” and the processes of decolonization and decoloniality (Mignolo, 2009; Quijano, 2014) that are required in that work.

We draw from Suárez-Krabbe’s definition of the death project, which is the exercise of coloniality concerned with power and wherein the ability to dispose of life is inherent to that power. She writes that the death project implies death ethics of war and the legal systems that legitimate it and the very behaviors that accompany those systems wherein international complicity is required for continuation (and given). Moreover, behaviors are linked with hegemonic practices through which we can see the linkages between racism, capitalism, patriarchy, and predatory behaviors against nature (2016). This panel responds to the colonial/modern perpetuation of the death project through propositions for “the life project” (Tom, Sumida Huaman, & McCarty, 2019), which is made explicit by the ways in which Indigenous peoples respond to epistemicide and share understandings of sustainability of life and how education, in and out-of-school, enact those understandings for current and future generations. Furthermore, although many disciplines and the field have begun to acknowledge decolonization and decoloniality in education, there is often conflation of terms that hold us all in the metaphorical stasis that Tuck and Yang warned (2012). Also, recognition from the field does not necessarily require acknowledging Indigeneity, agency of Indigenous peoples and communities, or Indigenous futurities and theories of change (Tuck, 2018). Our panel makes a contribution in this regard—researchers with long-term relationships and relational ties speak to Indigenous intersections with the field. Thus, we also address the “Beyond the horizon—reimagining everything” conference theme, and specifically, “imagining what can be done based on what has been learned and can be unlearned” and “desiring a future that has yet to be dreamed” with the communities where our research takes place and with the academy. Through studies that highlight Indigenous educational research and design inextricable from relationships with places, our presentations also build on the trajectory of discussions regarding the evolving field (Nordtveit, 2017) and more recently, what explorations of decolonization and alternative epistemologies (Takayama, Sriprakash, & Connell, 2016) signify in comparative education research and development studies and practices that impact Indigenous peoples and lands.

That this CIES gathering is taking place in Minneapolis is a crucial moment—the 2020 murder of Mr. George Floyd is for Indigenous peoples in this region a vivid reminder of the legacies of Indigenous erasure through Dakota loss and displacement, notably the concentration camp and executions at Fort Snelling in the 1860s, and the benefits of systemic slavery upon which the University of Minnesota was built. In this place, with CIES colleagues, our panel seeks to unlearn what coloniality teaches and to address how the many ways of knowing and learning across generations that are occurring in this place speak to why and how education as an influential institution can be reclaimed and remade.

Sub Unit

• General Pool

Chair

• Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities

Individual Presentations

• Attending to the Ethical Across México and the Mekong—Restor(y)ing Relations Towards Indigenous Futures in Learning, Interaction, and Design - * Meixi, University of Minnesota

• “Hacer el hombre mas hombre”: Fundamental education, deficit perspectives, gender, and Indigenous survivance in Central Mexico - Judith Landeros, The University of Texas at Austin; Luis Urrieta, The University of Texas at Austin

• Trans-Indigenous education - Kehaulani Vaughn, University of Utah; Theresa Ambo, University of California, San Diego

• Youth refused/youth refusals: Transnational youth displacements, sociopolitical belonging, and Indigenous scholarship - Roozbeh Shirazi, University of Minnesota

Discussant

• Elizabeth Sumida Huaman, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities