Indigenous cosmologies and black onto-epistemologies in gender and education

KEYWORDS:

• Indigeneity
• gender
• education
• de-colonisation

This issue of Gender and Education explores the relationship of Indigenous and Black onto-epistemologies, cosmologies and practices to gender and education in the broadest sense. It serves as an instance of how to rethink the colonial underpinnings of our contemporary understandings of gender and education. It is not news that feminisms have been confined to colonial logics and settler colonialist ideals. As Shari Huhndorf and Cheryl Suzack (2010, 1) wrote more than a decade ago, ‘despite [important] interventions and the urgency of gender analysis specific to Indigenous communities, Indigenous women and feminist issues remain unexamined in contemporary feminist theory’. Black feminist writer bell hooks also warned long ago ‘that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement’ (hooks 1981).

Drawing on Indigenous feminist and gender theories and Black feminisms, this special issue is a crucial (yet minor) step towards decolonial and anticolonial knowledge production in gender and education. The collection of articles, taking seriously this journal’s feminist commitment, challenges the dominance of colonial thought practices in educational academic work. Without a doubt, the authors in this issue push the field of gender and education studies in unique directions, recognizing both the indebtedness of feminist research to Indigenous and Black onto-epistemologies, cosmologies and practices, as well as the knowledges from the margins that have been ‘developed, in a wide range of forms, over thousands of years, prior to and outside of the creation of universities’ (Coburn 2020, 430).

As guest coeditors, we enter into this special issue from different locations and position(alitie)s. Veronica is a settler in (what is for now called) Canada; she grew up in Argentina under military coups, from which she inherited a process of whitening the nation state. Veronica’s work in early childhood education seeks to unsettle the violent colonial acts of child development always already embedded within pedagogy (e.g. Pacini-Ketchabaw and Montpetit 2019; Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2020). Tuija is a feminist Indigenous scholar coming from educational gender studies. Originally from a small village in the northernmost part of Finland, she is an Inari Sámi Indigenous person from a working-class background. The strengths, positionalities and vulnerabilities of that mixture have meant that her academic work has been societally, pedagogically and activist oriented from the get-go. Applying insights from feminist new materialist, Indigenous and affect theories, and coproductive, participatory arts-based methods, her research explores how gender and sexual power shape children and young people’s peer cultures in settler and Indigenous contexts, how creative methods enable children and young people to safely address power in their lives, and how children’s experiences can be conveyed to wider audiences through scholarly activism (e.g. Huuki and Lanas 2019; Huuki, Kyrölä, and Pihkala 2022; Kyrölä and Huuki 2021).

The contributors to this volume span so-called Australasia, Europe and North America, comprising both Indigenous and settler backgrounds. The special issue thus involves collaborations between and among Indigenous, Black and non-Indigenous educational scholars in different positions and with differing histories and relationships in settler colonial states. The collaboration has been guided by the long-standing challenge in the field of gender studies to dismantle white supremacy and to think about gender and sexuality as racialised processes intertwined in colonialism. As part of the production process of this special issue, we have considered what kind of role white, non-Indigenous scholars and practitioners can play in the knowledge production on education in Indigenous and settler colonial contexts, when part of the problem is that Indigenous peoples have been pushed to the edges of their own cultures and knowledge production. At the same time, settler colonialism is a continuous, all-pervading structure that affects us all. Although as guest co-editors we acknowledge that many questions remain unanswered regarding these collaborations, we think that this work cannot be carried only on Indigenous and Black shoulders. Non-Indigenous and non-Black feminists – who, it must be noted, are situated differently – are also to take responsibility, and we have an ethical obligation to consider these implications together.

We wonder about the possibilities for and limitations of mutually beneficial scholarly and cultural collaborations when there is a historical (and ongoing) racialised, gendered and/or classed power differential at play. We question whose interests these collaborations ultimately serve. We also ponder if and how systems of cultural extraction, use, and abuse get swept under the rug by claims of collaboration. We contemplate what gestures, refusals and silences are embedded within these collaborations, and we wonder what elements are needed to increase the ethical carrying capacity (Pihkala and Huuki 2022) within collaborations among Indigenous, Black and settler educational scholars/practitioners. Although we do not have definite answers to these queries, as feminist scholars in education we feel obliged to engage in ethically sustainable change with respect and humility. What brings the authors in this issue together is a deep desire to think feminist and gender education beyond Western parameters.

We challenge ourselves to think differently, not just momentarily but pervasively: To promote Indigenous theories and knowledge could be the essential core of educational research. We have tried to understand how the processes of colonialism and racialization are interconnected and are created together with other categories of difference at the intersections of gender and sexuality in education. We have also wanted to keep in mind that the thinking of Indigenous peoples was posthumanist, long before post-humanism became a well-known term in Western academic research. We recognize that, as a collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous educational feminist scholars, this special issue might enable but also limit the project of challenging gender education.

Two things make Indigenous knowledge production highly sensitive. First, as noted above, Western and Indigenous knowledge production differ at their foundations, and Indigenous and settler scholarships may have somewhat different criteria for a high-quality article. For example, Indigenous knowledges are often localized and embodied (Harjo 2019) perspectives that have strengths exactly where many settler perspectives face challenges. Second, the long-term structures, practices and processes by which Western mainstream research is conducted and disseminated has perpetuated and been complicit in violence against Indigenous peoples (Tuck and Yang 2012). There were sharp reminders for us during the production process about the sensitivities involved in writing, especially those which are personal in nature. Indigenous scholarship must be measured against Indigenous insight in a way that does justice to rigorous Indigenous accounts. For these reasons we explicitly committed to exercising an ethic of care and respect, and paid special attention to the selection of reviewers, the tone of the review, and the sensitivity of the publication process.

In the remainder of this introductory piece we summarize each of the articles, sketch a brief outline of how this issue contributes to gender and education, and then address the pressing theme of affirmation put forth by Indigenous and Black feminist scholars.

In ‘Sovereign Women: Why Academia? A Journey Gathering Word-Gifts and Heart Berries’, Gamilaroi scholar Amy Thunig approach the themes of this volume from the perspective of Indigenous research methodologies. Drawing on her doctoral research on/with Indigenous academic women as an Indigenous academic woman, Amy considers ethical and methodological affordances and challenges in employing and embodying Indigenous and storytelling research strategies. The first strategy, inclusion of Indigenous voices and perspectives, means preferentially citing Indigenous research to make justice for the voices and experiences of Indigenous women who are included in those studies, refusing comparative examination of Indigenous and settler women as unfruitful, and communicating not only the positive stories but also the mistreatment of Indigenous women in academia by non-Indigenous scholars. To voice and share the storying of Indigenous academic women, Amy has developed an Indigenous storytelling methodology of ‘sitting still and listening deeply’, as she puts it. For Amy, employing a storytelling methodology works as a counter-narrative to the colonial mindset and a way of making connections between Indigenous and Western ways of engaging in research. It is an empowering way to disrupt what is counted as knowledge and how that knowledge is understood in academia. Moreover, Amy’s Indigenous storytelling expands data generation to include listening to place and space, journeying, pace, imaginaries, embodied expression and other elements, and data analysis to include poetic transcription. The article highlights the principle of sharing – Wuurri-lay, in Gamilaraay language. The principle of Wuurri-lay requires that all her academic publications be translated into plain language and/or presented in an accessible space and made freely available to readers outside academia. In this methodological approach, Wuurri-lay is, however, always accompanied by refusal. Refusal is a tool for striving toward ethical sustainability by recognizing and honouring the responsibility of a researcher as an insider knowledge holder – that is, that not all knowledge accessible to the researcher is intended for publication. The article shows how employing decolonizing methodologies of active resistance against the conditioning of the systems of Western ways of knowing can sometimes be risky. It might risk one’s opportunities for employment or to publish papers, especially as an early career researcher. However, as Amy maintains, what is key is keeping the obligations to one’s Indigenous ancestors and community and prioritizing Indigenous research methodologies and practices within the work.

In ‘A Critical Analysis of Māori Cosmologies and the Tyranny of Epistemic Western-centrism’, Māori scholar Mere Skerrett discusses and theorizes wayfinding as a metaphor and method/ology in the cocreation of Māori knowledge. The article carefully guides the reader to understand why and how Māori knowledge systems, especially ancestral navigational knowledge and its linkages to gender, are formed in relation with the earth and its elements. The article first offers an overview of the processes and practices involved in the gradual transformation of Māori into British economic, political and family structures over the last centuries, with a consequent loss of Māori lives, lands, language/s, knowledge base and natural resources. These processes by Britain of colonizing Aotearoa to become New Zealand, including the traumas produced by such destruction, have stimulated the work to revitalize the mātauranga Māori culture and knowledge. In this piece, Mere presents wayfinding as a symbolic and methodological tool, or a signpost, into the future. The roots of wayfinding reach back 1000 years to Mere’s ancestors, the first Polynesian/Māori explorers, who developed and used a special system that she calls socioecological mapping. This system comprised a star compass and knowledge base that were built and fine-tuned over time and passed on intergenerationally through the language of navigation. The system enabled the Māori to navigate successfully more than a millennium before their Western counterparts, and it was characterized by the navigator being an organic part within the compass, not outside it or detached from it. The article concludes with a reminder that the star compassing methodology shares a number of intellectual and practical activities of systematic, scientific observation and gathering of data with elements typically connected to Western knowledge production, albeit the earliest Māori voyagers employed them long before Westerners achieved the methods. Mere argues that wayfinding as methodology is a part of sophisticated, ancient onto-epistemologies of being, doing, relating and knowing together with stars, land, sea and intuition. Wayfinding challenges Western educational thought systems and recentres Māori knowledge by providing an alternative ontology of pluriversality based on ‘human activities in the rhythms, cycles and frames of nature’ and grounded in Indigeneity.

In ‘Visiting as an Indigenous Feminist Practice’, four Indigenous scholars from three different communities – Eve Tuck, Haliehana Stepetin, Rebecca Beaulne-Stuebing and Jo Billows – address visiting, a queer, relational, anticapitalist practice connected to accountability, vulnerability and mutuality and rooted in the cosmologies of North American Indigenous communities. Each of the scholars shares some of their practices of visiting in feminist Indigenous ways informed by Unangax^ collectively held ways of thinking about the universe. They gather their thoughts on how visiting operates in their work as practice through theme areas of pedagogy, arts, community practices, medicinal herb gardening, everyday materialities and relationship to land and water. From Jo’s account, we learn about visiting as part of art making, gardening, walking, writing and other practices of being in relation. They contemplate visiting through their relationship to urban lands and waterways in ways that exceed the limitations of time and place. They write how visiting with buried river sand creeks can be about imagining pasts and futures otherwise. For them, visiting is a way to redevelop, revive and sustain relationships momentarily lost in the course of urbanization and industrialization of land and water. It means carefully listening, learning and imagining through the waters where they have always been and still are – although currently disrupted and pushed below the surface. And there is a solid, affirmative echo: ‘If they are blocked by obstructions, when those are removed, they will no doubt resume their course’. For Haliehana, visiting is an embodied practice and a way to connect and transmit Indigenous histories, values and knowledge across generations and across time and space. Rebecca approaches visiting through medicine-plant gardening to understand the role of plants as more-than-human relatives and of human kin members as elder teachers, understanding human roles as helpers, learners and listeners and ‘coming to know what it means to care for the land and all who are living there’. Eve, referring to a set of her previous articles, contemplates the relationality between visit, visiting and visitation as an Indigenous feminist way of relating to her collaborative cowriters, which include place, the past, and more-than-human persons. Importantly, visiting is guided by the idea of visiting our children’s future homelands, where we are guests.

In ‘“Show Yourself”: Indigenous Ethics, Sámi Cosmologies and Decolonial Queer Pedagogies of Frozen 2’, Tuija Huuki and non-Indigenous feminist media studies scholar Kata Kyrölä investigate how Sámi and queer Indigenous thought and cosmologies intertwine in the film Frozen 2 and its production process, probing its potential as decolonial queer pedagogy. Drawing on Indigenous educational studies, queer and feminist Indigenous theories, and research on affect and trauma, they interrogate Frozen 2’s production process as well as its narrative and aesthetics. The analysis weaves around three axes of examination. First, the authors look at the ways in which the film popularizes Indigenous Sámi nature-based culture and cosmologies in a way that is approachable for children, youth and adults, and how it deals with and attempts to repair the cross-generational transmission of settler colonial trauma and its affective hauntings. Connectedly, the analysis then investigates how the film’s Indigenous sensibilities entwine with its queer sensibilities, and how human and nonhuman creatures and forces can form diverse kinship constellations. It shows how Frozen 2 gestures towards and insists on queer Indigenous existence through centreing nonheteronormative relationships and kinship connections between human and nonhuman characters, some of which are not gendered in Western binary terms. The third axis attends to the film’s production process, which entailed collaboration between the Disney production team and a Sámi advisory board. The analysis demonstrates how the settler-Indigenous collaboration took place, particularly in terms of the portrayal of the Northuldra tribe, who were directly inspired by the Sámi, in ways so as to offer a respectful account of Sámi culture. The article proposes that Frozen 2 allows its viewers to engage with and learn about Indigenous ethics, Sámi cosmologies, and more-than-human understandings of gender and sexuality in respectful and easily approachable ways.

Emerging from distinct geo-political-historical-cultural narratives (yet sharing similar colonial inheritances), as a whole, these four articles uniquely contribute to the insufficient and fragmented scholarship produced on the axes of gender, education and Indigeneity. According to Norwegian Indigenous gender studies scholar Torjer Olsen (2018), in exploring identity and power in Indigenous studies, different sociocultural categories have been considered, employing, for example, intersectional or holistic approaches. Nevertheless, there is a tendency, particularly in Indigenous methodologies, to de-emphasize questions of gender (Olsen 2017). Even more than that, gender and Indigeneity have remained largely unattended in the context of education and young age. Gender, Indigeneity, education and youth thus form a sociomaterial entanglement and a challenge that needs to be addressed. This special issue aims to take up this challenge and contribute to this scholarship gap.

Moreover, this special Issue resonates with the discussion in the recent themed issue of Gender and Education titled Decolonizing Gender and Education Research: Unsettling and Recasting Feminist Knowledges, Power, and Research Practices (2019), which addressed the interfaces of feminist and decolonizing research by seeking ways of decolonizing research at the nexus of gender and education empirically and theoretically. Special focus was on the exclusion of marginalized groups as knowledge producers; knowledge hierarchies within which Indigenous and other marginalized epistemologies and knowledge have been denigrated in mainstream research (Manion and Shah 2019) are problematized.

As exemplified by the articles within, the special issue at hand continues and enriches the above discussions with several central and emerging themes in the field of gender and education as well as scholarly feminism. First, it brings more volume in the research on the axes of gender, Indigenous studies and education, and as part of this, renders visible Indigenous voices in educational research that have remained marginalized within Indigenous scholarship. However, as Norwegian Sámi scholar Astri Dankertsen has pointed out, our Indigenizing project ‘must involve more than just the inclusion of marginalised voices; it must also include a complete transformation of feminist knowledge production and activism’ (Dankertsen 2021, 137). Secondly, the contributions of this special issue also participate in Indigenous methodological and epistemological debates that challenge the universal application of Western gender theory and gender research in the education field across nations and cultures. Instead, it brings to the forefront ways of applying diverse Indigenous theories in order to understand the Indigenous worldviews and to produce knowledge in ways that support Indigenous people’s well-being in and around educational contexts. Third, as discussed below, it moves beyond damage-based frameworks. Instead, by working through the oppression and injury, it gestures towards proliferation, possibility and forward movement, asking how we could do things in productive and affirmative ways to invoke reparative visions and ethical modes of relating, and what more Indigenous collective wisdom can be and become in the nexus of gender and education in various places and times.

More broadly, the special issue connects to the transformative movement of decolonizing Western ontology as a universal truth and rupturing its transmission by restoring and reclaiming Indigenous knowledge production, education and culture for future generations.

In ‘Centering Black Life in Canadian Early Childhood Education’, Fikile Nxumalo and Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw (this issue) challenge multiculturalism’s reductionist and othering constructions of Black presence. Drawing on the work of Black feminist scholars, the authors observe how the neoliberal multicultural logics that frame education in Canada maintain and contribute to anti-Black racism. They boldly propose an abolitionist stance for early childhood education that ‘embraces the experimental work of imagining and practicing liberation’. Such an abolitionist proposal not only needs to take place outside of the confines of anti-Blackness (and thus of child development) but also requires taking seriously the dreaming of other worlds. The authors engage this task through storytelling for Black life.

Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw add to the existing Black feminist scholarship in Gender and Education (e.g. Chilisa and Ntseane 2010; Edwards, Baszile, and Guillory 2016; Farinde-Wu, Butler, and Allen-Handy 2022; Nyachae 2016). Although these growing contributions are important, more can and needs to be done to challenge feminist and gender education to respond to anti-Black racisms. Doubtless, key legacies from Black feminism to gender education need recognition. The work of Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), in particular, loudly resonates for us as it has bestowed feminists in education powerful ways of thinking about the politics of location. It is not possible today for feminists to think about gender and education without thinking about intersectionality (Ali et al. 2010). As Mirza (2018, 1) aptly writes, ‘it is imperative to understand the nature of power relations and the ways in which racialised, classed and gendered boundaries are produced and lived through black/postcolonial female subjectivity in our places of learning and teaching’. Black feminist epistemologies examining ‘the differentiated and variable organizing logics of race, class and gender and other social divisions such as sexuality, age, disability, culture, religion, and belief’ (Mirza 2018) in fact underpin much of our scholarship and that of the authors in this collection. In addition to rethinking the politics of location, Black feminisms have been crucial for feminists in education to open up dynamic conceptualisations of resistance and collectivity. As Suku Ali explains, ‘Black feminism invoke[s] a particular kind of political project that involves both practices and processes, then it becomes a sign under which we can collectively organise’ (Ali et al. 2010, 652). Challenging essentialisms through resistance projects, Black feminism continues today to push the boundaries of what transformation through pedagogy could entail. Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw (this issue) offer an example.

Affirmative engagements

We offer this collection as a way to pursue ethical, affirmative transformation in feminist educational knowledge production and praxis arising from both Indigenous feminist studies and Black feminisms. This move, appreciably, does not intend to conceal or erase the occupation of stolen lands, genocides, slavery, anti-Black racism or other violences and injustices against Indigenous and Black peoples. These cannot be ignored. Pursuing affirmative transformation insists on ‘agency, strength and survival despite the ongoing violence of colonial, patriarchal power’ (Coburn 2020, 434).

This special issue takes inspiration from Unangax^ scholar Eve Tuck’s (2009) idea of desire-driven research. Tuck maintains that while it is crucial for scholars to expose different forms of oppression in Indigenous communities in order to notice and change them, it is equally important to move away from seeing Indigenous communities as defeated and damaged, so as not to create a hopeless vision for the future. Tuck provides an alternative critique, a move that does not disregard trauma and damage but uses them as engines for imagining alternative visions for the future; she proposes an epistemological shift towards a desire-based framework for research in education to better understand the multiplicity, intricacy and contradictions of relationality in Indigenous communities and cultures, even in the face of massive forces like racism and colonization.

A desire-based research study recognizes desire as multiplicitous; it motions towards sovereignty and the will to resist dominance, conducting research that effects change towards ethical sustainability, builds on the work of Indigenous peoples, and follows guidelines that protect cultural, intellectual and sacred Indigenous community knowledges from being appropriated or handled in disrespectful ways. Such a study develops mutually beneficial means of collaboration between academic scholars and Indigenous communities so as to nurture positive outcomes for communities. The political and analytical intention of this special issue can be understood through Tuck’s vision of desire – that is, to draw on collective, accumulated wisdom from various Indigenous communities, times and places, encouraging educational gender studies scholars and practitioners to make intentional, affirmative attempts to foster and maintain ethical relationality, create good relationalities and envision alternative theories of change and visions of futurity.

As three of the articles in this issue make visible (Tuck et al.; Thunig; Huuki and Kyrölä), this focus on the affirmation is done with caution and care. There is an intentionality regarding what is shared and how cosmologies/onto-epistemologies are offered, signalling that not all knowledge needs to be equally available for all and that a right to know requires more than just a demand to know it. It is also clear (and refreshing) that the authors choose not to participate in a Western academic culture of critique but build instead on the work of Indigenous scholars, appreciating and honouring the voices and stories that have been intentionally silenced throughout academia. We might say that the contributions share what Zoe Todd (2016) and Vanessa Watts (2013) have called for in the academy: ‘embodied expressions of stories, laws, and songs as bound with Indigenous-Place Thought’ (Watts 2013, 31) or Indigenous self-determination (Todd 2016, 9).

Black feminist scholars also advocate for navigating ‘the tricky work of theorising harm without fully describing or rehearsing violence and racism’ (McKittrick 2022, 3). Geographer Katherine McKittrick’s (2021, 2022) work is paramount in this regard. She strongly refuses methods and methodologies that dehumanize Black peoples, and argues for capacious engagements with Black life. She writes:

My methodological premise, or assumption, is that black people have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore, and story the world, because thinking and writing and imagining across a range of texts, disciplines, histories, and genres unsettles dismal and insular racial logics. By employing interdisciplinary methodologies, and living interdisciplinary worlds, black people bring together various sources and texts and narratives to challenge racism … For me, then, black methodologies signal both a way of living, and an enlivened analytical frame, that is curious and sustained by wonder. (McKittrick 2022, 5)

Nxumalo and Pacini-Ketchabaw (this issue) invoke McKittrick’s methodology as they work ‘towards imaginaries and enactments of liberatory practices in Canadian early childhood education’. They speak of ‘conceptual disobedience’ by propounding an ‘ethos of abolition’ that experiments ‘with radical imaginaries of what might be possible when carceral practices, systems and structures that dehumanise Black people are no longer in place’.

We end this editorial with a point that has become evident for us as coeditors of this special issue. The sensitivities involved in writing and editing academic articles that engage with Indigenous and Black cosmologies, onto-epistemologies and practices require care. Many of the articles offer intimate and community perspectives that question Western notions of doing research. At times, the contributions are incompatible with Western academia, as they are based on completely different premises. We caution readers not to measure Indigenous and Black cosmologies against Euro-Western logics. Instead, we invite readers to notice the rich offerings Indigenous and Black perspectives have in our contemporary damaged worlds. As feminists, we are committed to exercising an ethic of care.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Academy of Finland: [Grant Number 322612].