Native Presence and Sovereignty in College

I have watched some plays recently at Firehall Theatre. I saw Women of the Fur Trade and enjoyed it. I particularly enjoyed Eugina, and in particular, her portrayal of a woman who had freedom of mobility and who participated in the public sphere of the economy. It has a study guide as well. Even if I am not teaching a text, I like to look at study guides just to check out the pedagogy. 

If one wanted to extend their learning, they could read Daniel Voth's essay "Descendants of the Original Lords of Soil": Indignation, Disobedience, and Women Who Jig on Sundays in the book Indigenous Resurgence in an Age of Reconciliation. In the essay, he basically argues that Metis people are Indigenous through women. 

I also watched Inner Elder. I totally confess that I did not know much about the show before going. When she kept saying "alcoholic" again and again and again and again in the first ten minutes, I thought to myself "oh no, what have I gotten myself into?" The second half redeemed itself through comedy... although, as an Indigenous person I always get a little miffed when an Indigenous person on stage (whether it be pro-d or performing arts) does a direct address to the white audience. What am I - chopped liver? That being said, definitely an inspiring tale of how one person overcame a very challenging childhood in order to experience success in their field. I think the core concept within the show was that her challenging childhood was something that she tapped into in order to portray her character on Blackstone which led to her receiving a prestigious award. So, taking hardship and turning it into resilience. Without a doubt, the biggest strength of the show was the audience participation portion. I sat in the front row... and I am just really relieved that I was not part of the show, but, I also found it wildly entertaining that she brought people up to be part of the show. I also have to say that I am so impressed when someone can do a sixty minute show on their own. I can't imagine the sheer energy it must take to be the sole performer for an entire hour. 

All and all, very happy that I was able to see both shows, and gratitude to the iconic Firehall for supporting Indigenous theatre. 

Before going to the Firehall we went to Bao Bei for dinner. I love bao. There used to be a store in my neighborhood that sold delicious and affordable bao. It had brown paper on the window, no seats, and the only furniture was a counter where you could get 3 for $10. Sadly, due to gentrification, it is gone now. Bao Bei is a more upscale experience. Their bao, while delicious, are definitely not 3 for $10. They do have Sichuan fried chicken, which has a special oil on it that makes your mouth go numb. If you want to try something totally new, go try their chicken. Trust me - it's an experience. 

I recently read Native Presence and Sovereignty in College: Sustaining Indigenous Weapons to Defeat Systemic Monsters by Amanda R. Tachine. It's part of the Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy series by Teachers' College Press. I first heard of culturally sustaining pedagogy in the introduction to Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang. I vaguely understand culturally sustaining pedagogies to be a close relative to culturally responsive pedagogy/culturally relevant pedagogy, with a key difference being that teachers of Indigenous students work in a context where sometimes they are teaching within the context of knowledge(s) which exist within their teaching communities and student body, but which are not brought into the curriculum and classroom due to explicit prohibitions around who can hold knowledge. Thus, while the educator delivers formal education, they also engage practices which respect and do not undermine knowledge systems which exist outside of formal education, and which resist being subsumed into formal education. I could be wrong about that. Maybe I should do a separate inquiry into the term to ensure that I am understanding it correctly. I should add the book "Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies" to my reading list. 

Anyhow, I loved the structure of this book. It used the Navajo concept of monsters to frame the challenges that Navajo students encounter in their pursuit of post-secondary education. The author interviewed first year Navajo students about their lives, and it was a student who initially engaged this cultural concept of a monster. The author then expanded on the concept, using monster to describe systemic barriers to Indigenous student success. Monsters include things like financial barriers and classroom practices which undermine Indigenous students' sense of belonging in post-secondary. There were a number of gripping anecdotes within the book. For example, one of the students recalls receiving letters about scholarships, and going to the park to open the letters with their friends who also got letters. The students who did receive scholarships had a bittersweet experience, because they were also comforting their friends who did not receive scholarships (p. 42). I think that the research had the perfect number of participants, because there were enough to provide a range of perspectives, but few enough that I felt like I got to know some of the participants through the author's descriptions of them and through the many interview excerpts included throughout the book. The monsters concept comes from the Navajo twin story, in which there are twins who fight monsters. So, the author talks about how Indigenous students use various weapons in order to succeed in post-secondary. The weapons are not violence. They are "action and processual oriented and involved remembering, repositioning, and resurging against systems of domination." (p. 13). I love this framing of the twin story and its concept of monsters in order to interpret and represent the participants' experiences in post-secondary. I think that it is a strengths based approach. Within this framing, the author spent a lot of time integrating concepts from Indigenous scholarship, such as resurgence and survivance, while also critically examining the legal and historical context of the education of Navajo students in the US. The book is an excellent example of the way that storytelling tradition is not just a recital of stories, rather, the storytelling tradition also involves bringing the stories to life by engaging them in such a way that they help us to make meaning of the world and find our way in contemporary life. 

The methodological choices were also interesting. Inspired in part by Jo-Ann Archibald, she used a story rug as her method (p. 15). In terms of ethics, she did reach out to the Navajo Nation to ask if they wanted to engage with her research, but they told her that "because this research would occur off of the juridical boundaries of the Navajo Nation, Tribal approval was not warranted." (p. 15). I also note that she writes the book to her children (p. xi) and several times directly addresses her children. I really appreciate that, because oftentimes Indigenous people are not the target audience. Often, books are written with a general audience in mind, or even in order to help non-Indigenous people better understand Indigenous people. I know that type of work is important, but it is also weird to be sidelined within an imaginary audience. So I notice and feel joy whenever a book is written in a way that centers Indigenous readers. 

I also like the way that the book ended - with youth offering some final words, hopes for the future, and prayers. Here are some examples: 

Sam: Strength, energy, and clarity of mind to pursue my dreams and continue on strong with my life. That my path will be cleared of any obstructions and my vision is clear, that I will see what I need to do, how I need to do it, just where the road leads. Really, the biggest prayers, what I need to do to become what I need to be. (p. 184). 

Sarah: Pray for us to be more humble and to remember who we are and where we come from... Help us in that way so we can also help others... Help us keep our minds right. Help us remember our main goals, help us be as leaders, and help us be thankful too and just look back, and this is what we've done and we need to pass it along. Bless us financially so it won't be a burden. Bless our academics. Bless our living situations while we are here. But most of all, like I said mentally, physically and emotionally, bless us in that way to be strong, to keep strong. (p. 182). 

I highly recommend this book for anyone who works with Indigenous students in any capacity. The author also did a book talk which is available on the University of Chicago's Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture's youtube channel. I listened to the book talk after reading the book. I think I would have actually benefitted from listening to it before reading the book, so that I could "hear" the book in the author's voice while reading it. She is a very engaging speaker, and I also like how she said that before she became a researcher, she was a teacher in K-12. 

Indigenous Education Scholarship

 When I started my doctoral program, I tried to catch up on reading Indigenous education books that had been recently published. In this post, I am going to talk about some of the books that I read on the topic of Indigenous education. These are not summaries or readings notes or reviews. These are just a few comments on each book. I'm writing this post because I want to keep my memory of these books alive and I also want to return to the books again in the future. As I go through books that I read in the early stages of my degree, I am becoming aware of the narrow frame that I had while reading them. Rather than just sort of absorbing what they presented in an open ended and organic manner, I really just went through them trying to see whether or not they could help me with my dissertation topic. Surely reading them broadened my horizons. But I also read them during a period of time when I put pressure on myself to read a lot in a short window of time, so I probably did not really retain a lot of what I read. I look forward to rereading some of these books in the future at a leisurely pace and with no end in mind. 

So, one of the first books that I read was Indian Education for All: Decolonizing Indigenous Education in Public Schools by John P. Hopkins. It is published by the Teachers College Press, and it focuses on legislation in Montana which mandated that every Montanan learn about Native Americans, and that educators work with Montana tribes to pursue this goal. The legislation is called Indian Education for All, and if you would like to know more about it, the state has a website which contains information for teachers in order to support the initiative, including offering weekly pro-d by zoom. Montana's Indigenous population is about 9%, which overall is higher than BC's. But BC's Indigenous student population is over 11%. BC also recently implemented mandatory Indigenous content across the board through curriculum reform, so it was interesting to see something similar happening elsewhere, and specifically, to see how the government was investing resources in order to support teachers in implementing the initiative. Conceptually, another interesting thing about the book was the concept of reconciliation. In Canada, reconciliation first surfaced in land claims court decisions. And then the TRC was created as a result of a class action lawsuit launched by residential school survivors. So there is a very specific legal history attached to the word. It's interesting to see the word used in a context without that very specific history. The book also introduces new concepts, like desettling. It's kind of a dense read, but it's a great primer on concepts like culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy, tribal critical race theory, and survivance. 

The next book is Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education: Philosophies of the Iethi'nihstenha Ohwentsia'kekha (Land) by Sandra D. Styres. The book is structured in five parts, in accordance with the author's own cultural framework. Vision - (Re)centering outlines some foundations knowledge including the seven grandfather teachings, wampum, terminology, rationale for the project, and decolonization. Relationships - (Re)membering talks about seven generation thinking and also the politics around who is and is not Indigenous. Knowledge - (Re)cognizing remembers ancient knowledges, and then goes into some theory around privilege and power, panopticism, and the tension between dominant western approaches and Indigenous approaches. Action - (Re)generating provides some thoughts around how education might look different if it were based on land centered approaches. And finally, Iethi'nihstenha Ohwentsia'kekha - (Re)actualizing talks about concepts such as "word warriors", doctrine of discovery, and critical intimacy. I found the anecdote in critical intimacy to be particularly poignant. The book ends with a call to go beyond responsive pedagogies and beyond place-based pedagogies. The book pulls together a lot of thinkers in Indigenous education. But it also uses non-Indigenous thinkers such as Foucault, Descartes, and Freire. It's not an easy book to read, as it is very philosophical (as one would hope it would be, based on the title) and covers a lot of ground. It is well written and well organized. I recommend eating this book in small bites. 

The next book is Indigenous Education: New Directions in Theory and Practice, edited by Huia Tomlins-Jahnke, Sandra Styres, Spencer Lilley, and Dawn Zinga. I found that it was an interesting read, and overall I think it approached Indigenous identity from a place of strength. It featured chapters by some authors who were already well known to me and led me to some authors who I had not heard of before. I'm unapologetically BC focused, but it's good for me to look and see what's happening in other places now and then. I did not read every single chapter, though. The chapter that I liked the most was Dawn Zinga's chapter on ethical space. As an educator, I like it when people talk about their practice, that is, about what actually happens in their classrooms with their students and what they actually do in order to bring the theories that they advocate for to life. Also, many of us have ideal conceptualizations of things like decolonization or indigenization, but many of us grapple with the chasm between the ideal in our heads and hearts and the reality of the daily grind. So I loved her teaching anecdotes. I've also heard the phrase "ethical space" in passing, but I never took the time to find out what it means. She did a good job explaining it. I also liked Dwayne Donald's chapter on Homo Economicus. 

The next book is Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang. This is a collection which contains a wide range of works, both in terms of topics covered and approach to the topics. I read most of the chapters and I think it's a great collection. There was a chapter on Indigenous content requirements, and as someone who has spent time advocating for minimum content requirements, I was surprised to read about how unenthusiastic academics were about the concept. No qualms about everyone having to take a minimum number of English credits, though? Based on the chapter's conclusion, I think they landed in a place where their criticism is largely around unsupported implementation, and their final statement is that minimum content requirements are "probably as good a first step as any." (p.173). Oof. Maybe they should give their upper admin a copy of the book on how Montana implemented minimum content requirements. The sections of this book that I have the most notes on are the series editors' introduction by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. Indigenous education is a topic that transcends boundaries, as it lives both within Indigenous/Decolonizing studies (which is usually in the faculty of arts) and the faculty of education (which is a discipline focused on practice/application, and often times the students in this faculty are oriented towards a professional life outside of the university). The introduction is laid out such a way that these two separate areas of the university are oriented to each other. The introduction is also a good read. The introduction features comments from the editors, and my favourite section is where Eve Tuck reflects on why so many Indigenous people are drawn to education even though education is an undeniably colonial space (p.8). I also really loved the afterward by Erin Marie Konsmo and Karyn Recollet. They talk about how ableism and purity narratives manifest themselves in shaming people who live in the city. They advocate for an ethic of caring for all (p.244) and talk about how we can love land even after it has been damaged. Erin has a particularly beautiful section where she says "What does it mean to shame those who pick medicines in cities or at bus stops? In a conversation with a friend about my experiences being shamed for picking medicines at a bus stop, she responded, 'What does that mean for our people who live in the cities? are they not medicine?" (p.239). 🧡

 The next book is Troubling Truth and Reconciliation in Canadian Education: Critical Perspectives, edited by Sandra D. Styres and Arlo Kempf. By the time that I read this, I was already moving in a really specific direction, so I only skimmed sections of it. But one sentence in it made a lasting impression on me. Jeannie Kerr and Amy Parent open their chapter by stating "we trouble the notion that postsecondary institutions are currently able to address the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's (TRC) calls to action for reconciliation in education, and offer what we see as pedagogical opportunities for instructors in higher education to gesture towards decolonial possibilities." (p.281). Later, they state "we have attempted to trouble the context of higher education in Canada as a colonial structure that takes up the words of reconciliation in the lineage of the TRC while simultaneously maintaining colonial logic and violences." (p.291). They talk about obstructions to reconciliation in post-secondary, and they open up the conversation but don't definitively close it. In response to this, I have a few thoughts. First, even if PSEs are currently unable to address the TRC Calls to Action, they ought to act as though they intend to address the Calls to Action, and ought to at least make as much progress as they can towards the Calls to Action. Second, standing outside of the university, and speaking from the standpoint of an Indigenous citizen, I conceptualize the university as an institute of the state, especially as universities function within and are accountable to a number of pieces of legislation including the Universities Act and property laws. While universities can make some strategic gains here and there, and while individual educators can help shape the minds of citizens, at the end of the day universities can only move as fast and as far as their legislative framework will allow them. So there is a bigger conversation at play in terms of governance and accountability. The opening of this chapter was very jarring (in a good way) and it really made me think, what conditions would have to be in place in order for universities to be able to fully implement the Calls to Action?

I have one more pile of books that I might blog about (Indigenous literature). And a bunch of random books I also want to talk about. But I might not do them right away or ever. I will only do them if I feel inspired to do so, because this blog is my place of joy, and so I have committed myself to the idea that I will only blog when I think to myself "it would be so fun to blog right now." So, no promises that I will blog those anytime soon... but I probably will blog them sooner or later. ✌️

Walking the Clouds - Grace Dillon

*Update - I noticed that the original version of this is riddled with typos. Blogger doesn't have spellcheck? Or maybe I turned it off somehow? Anyhow, fixed the glaring errors. 

When I encounter an author, I often look them up to see if they have any podcasts or lectures online. Then when I am reading, I can imagine their voice narrating it. Grace Dillon does have a number of lectures available online. She's a gregarious speaker with a delightful laugh. I recommend watching this video from the Future Imaginaries Symposium in Kelowna.

This post focuses on her introduction to the book she edited, Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012). She actually has another collection, Hive of Dreams: Contemporary Science Fiction from the Pacific Northwest (2003). I just recieved it in the mail. Grace Dillon does not address Indigenous fiction in the introduction. But I haven't looked too closely so maybe I am wrong about that. 

In the introduction to Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (2012), Grace Dillon opens with reference to a Drew Hayden Taylor play in which one of the characters is an Indigenous science fiction writer who resists their writing being limited to a mechanism to educate non-Indigenous Canada about Indigenous people, and instead just wants to follow their own creative impulses while also making a living (p.1). Reflecting on the concept of Indigenous self-expression through science fiction, Dillon asks the question "Does s[cience] f[iction] have the capacity to envision Native futures, Indigenous hopes, and dreams recovered by rethinking the past in a new framework?" (p.2). She says the anthology “weds s[cience] f[iction] theory and Native intellectualism, Indigenous scientific literacy, and western techno-cultural science, scientific possibilities enmeshed with Skin thinking." (p.2). 

She says, "The stories offered here are thought experiments that confront issues of 'Indianness'” (p.2) and also describes them as a "mindscape" (p.3). The parameters of the mindscape are described through the names of the sections in the book: “Native Slipstream; Contact; Indigenous Scientific Literacies and Environmental Sustainability; Native Apocalypse, Revolutions, and Futuristic Reconstructions of Sovereignties; and Biskaabiiyang, ‘Returning to Ourselves’: Beyond the Shadow-Worlds of Postmodernity and the (Post)Colonial." (p.3). Dillon engages with Indigenous scholars as she: invokes Gerald Vizenor's Suvivance (p.6); invokes Lawrence Gross's concepts of post-apocalyptic stress syndrome, aakozi (Anishinaabemowin for being out of balance), and returning to bimaadiziwin (being in a state of balance), (p.9); and invokes Linda Tuhiwai Smith's approach to decolonization, which Dillon describes as "changing rather than imitating Eurowestern concepts." (p.10). She says, "In the end, Walking the Clouds returns us to ourselves by encouraging Native writers to write about Native conditions in Native-centred worlds liberated by the imagination." (p.11).

Dillon, G.L. (2012). Imagining Indigenous Futurisms. In G.L. Dillon (Ed.) Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction (p.1-12). Tuscon, Arizona: University of Arizona Press.

There are a few stories in the anthology that I thought were pretty good. The book is laid out as a scholarly reader, with academic introductions to each piece. 

The front matter of the book has a page that says "Volume 69" and lists the (very impressive) editorial board, which includes Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, and Leslie Marmon Silko. I saw that and I was like Volume 69 of what?!? so I went to the website website and found this description: 

Launched in 1971, Sun Tracks was one of the first publishing programs to focus exclusively on the creative works of Native Americans. The series has included more than eighty volumes of poetry, prose, art, and photography by such distinguished artists as Joy Harjo, N. Scott Momaday, Simon J. Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Luci Tapahonso.

I do love collections of things. So maybe some day I will look further into this Sun Tracks collection. But not today because I have some other things to do today. 

In 2016, Extrapolation, a scholarly journal on science fiction and fantasy, published an Indigenous Futurisms issue and Grace Dillon wrote the editorial.

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