I Write as an Uninvited Guest on Indigenous Land: Recentering Allyship in Education

Abstract

A settler colonial educator of European descent, I write as an uninvited guest on Indigenous land. Truths of the past are determining the future of humanity, a contribution that allyship can make. In this article, I share vital information and critical ideas that underscore the importance of allyship in the contexts of settler colonialism and educational transformation. My purpose is to help anticolonial educators connect their Indigenous teaching, research, and activism to the vision and goals of decolonization. Much of the allyship work in education puts “decolonial” consciousness-raising at the center of transformation, but without much attention to its humanitarian relationships (beyond racist binaries), reparation (amends are in order), and freedom (disproportionate containment continues). Through ongoing dialogue, the educational community can invoke meaningful work on behalf of tribal justice. As argued, pedagogies that are filtered through settler colonial consciousness need recentering to grapple with radical politics of the day and Indigenous ways of seeing the future. This article is organized with Allies for Politicizing Pedagogy—my literature-informed framework, introduced for the first time—and its three elements/themes: (a) allyship and dialogic transparency, (b) decolonization and the radical imaginary, and (c) Indigenous futurity and the future. A reflection ends this work.

Acknowledgments

Anonymous reviewers’ constructive feedback improved the draft versions.

Disclosure statement

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to this article.