Dreams, Healing, and Listening to Learn: Educational Movements in the Everyday

ABSTRACT

In this article, co-authors Eagle Shield, Munson, and San Pedro connect with and extend the new vision and direction as guided by Equity & Excellence in Education’s new editorial leadership. They do so by first historically framing the distinct differences between assimilative schooling systems and community-based educational resurgence efforts, and then centering Indigenous Knowledges in their stories of resistance and vitalizing efforts with their communities. Relying on collaborative storying whereby conversations are dialogic and reciprocal, the co-authors emphasize personal experiences of the ways educational movements are enacted in their everyday circumstances. Particular emphasis is placed on the way broad movements such as Black Lives Matter and Water is Life are connected to local community-based reforms. Eagle Shield emphasizes the lessons she learned while opening and directing the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa (Defenders of the Water School) during the Standing Rock Movement and how those lessons and dreams are continuing to be realized beyond the movement space. Munson details the ways she has been guided by tribal leadership to expand a teacher education program that emphasizes both language vitalization and the centering of tribal knowledges. Listening closely and carefully, San Pedro shares the ways their lessons connect to, extend, and support pedagogical theories and scholarship that forward BIPOC-centered and justice-driven movements. Their stories address the article’s central question: What does education look like when it is supported and directed by the dreams, hopes, and aspirations of community leadership?

We believe it fitting and appropriate that this journal is called Equity & Excellence in Education (EEE) for there is a distinct difference between schooling and education. One—schooling—has historically centered upon settler colonial logics and hegemonic norms meant to strip Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) of their life ways, languages, stories, and knowledges while replacing them with dominant understandings of what it means to be excellent in schools. At times in our nation’s history, that has meant forcibly removing/kidnapping Indigenous children from their homes, families, and communities and sending them to boarding schools, often hundreds of miles away, where teachers and administrators physically and verbally abused Native children for speaking their languages and practicing their life ways in an effort to assimilate youth into White hegemonic norms. At other times, including this moment, schooling has been more subtle in its assimilative agenda, relying on culture to feign interest in students’ homes, lives, and knowledges through what Sabzalian (2019) refers to as “legitimized racism” (p. xiii), while continuing to center a curricula that, as the incoming EEE editors stated in their introduction, “ … refuse to call us by our names”—or, in other words, a curriculum that refuses to center the lives, histories, and contributions of BIPOC.

The movement we are living in is a continuation of movements from the past—a fight for liberation, recognition, sovereignty, water and land rights, and simple, yet profound rallying calls: Black Lives Matter and Water is Life. From policies to policing, from curricula to school suspensions, our nation continues, through actions and deeds, to reveal its shaky and crumbling foundation—that we are a nation built upon stolen Indigenous lands, cultivated and profited by Black people forced into slavery, and kept beautiful by Brown bodies, all while legacies and inherited wealth continue intergenerationally, as does intergenerational poverty, which goes hand in hand. This inherent truth is excluded from celebratory class texts lauding the “achievements” of White men, while minimizing, silencing, or outright ignoring our past. This movement we are living in has amplified voices previously kept quiet. It is connected to the fight for clean water at Standing Rock where hundreds of Indigenous nations, as well as Black and other people of color, rallied to reject the construction of the disastrous Dakota access pipeline that, if a spill were to happen, would contaminate the waters for all peoples downriver from the Missouri including numerous Native Nations who believe, at their core, that water is sacred, that water is life. Such stories ought to be included in the education of all our youth.

This journal is not called Equity and Excellence in Schooling, and perhaps there wasn’t much intentional thought in that decision; however, we believe that centering education in the attainment of equity and excellence is essential because it deconstructs a harmful and false parallel: Education only happens in schooling spaces. It does not (see Eagle Shield et al., 2020). Yet, as educators, researchers, professors, administrators, or in whatever capacity and role served in connection to education we are in, we have been conditioned into this belief. Reject it. Education happens inter- and intra-generationally around dinner tables, in community gatherings, in tribal ceremonies, in movement spaces, and beyond the confines of schooling spaces that center the lives, challenges, knowledges, stories, and transformative actions for those involved. In many communities, the languages, customs, and teachings were protected, kept in the minds and memories of elders (Lomawaima, 1999; Sabzalian, 2019; Simpson, 2011). Shirley (2017) states that education is “Nation-building in Indigenous communities [and] is about sustaining our sovereignty in ways that are beneficial to our own community needs and aspirations (p. 168).”

And so we ask you to pause for a moment with us and sit with the following question:

When envisioning education beyond school walls,

When we practice our pedagogy in ways that remove

walls blockading and dividing school from community,

When we alter our perceptions that education

is central to nation-building—

What richness in languages,

in stories,

in history,

might breach that which separates us,

connecting us to a richer, fuller education

for our students?

This question has been one that each of us (Alayna, Michael, and Timothy) have devoted our lives seeking, understanding, and making a reality with the encouragement, partnership, and support from communities. The purpose of this article, then, is to share our developing answers to the above question, specifically the ways in which we are giving permission to attain the dreams once deferred. We do so by recording and sharing one dialogic conversation that centered the above question. In our conversation, we seek to share our hopes and dreams for our community as well as offer what we are doing now, in the present moment (at the time of this telling), to work toward those visions of what is possible. But before we engage in our story sharing, we believe it’s essential—as guided by Indigenous Research Methodologies and by those we love—to share who we are to our communities and who we are to each other, as well as acknowledging the ways current movements are fast tracking our own movements toward a better education for our youth.

Community connections

Alayna:

Mitákuyapi, Alayna Eagle Shield emáčiyapi. Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ na Akíčita Háŋska-ta imáčaǧe. Húŋkpapȟa Malákȟóta, Isáŋyathi na Bdewákhaŋthuŋwaŋ Damákȟota, na Pȟaláni hemáčha. [Hello my relatives, my name is Alayna Eagle Shield. I grew up on the Long Soldier District of the Standing Rock Nation (where I am also a citizen)]. I am Tip of the Horn Lakota, Lives on Knives and Dwellers of the Sacred Lake Dakota, and Sáhniš/Arikara. I am first and foremost Iná [mother] of three beautiful children: Tȟá Oníya Wakȟáŋ Wiŋ [Her Sacred Breath Woman] who is 11 years old, my only child with an English name, which is Kyyalyn; Waaruxti Nataree’ux Tawisa [Blue Thunder Returns] who is 7 years old, and my unborn child making their way from the stars, who we will welcome Earth side sometime in September 2020 with a traditional home birth and who we’ll name through ceremony when they arrive. I also am married to my life partner Red Rock Eagle Standing Perkins, who is a citizen of the Three Affiliated Tribes.

I have walked many paths throughout my short 30 years on this Earth and all of them have guided me towards the heart work I am able to embody today. I have been a language specialist for my Tribe and a Lakota language teacher for our immersion school, as well as a youth and adult language teacher and a health education director for my Tribe. I am currently working with amazing community members and allies of Standing Rock to develop a school based on our 13-month Lakota/Dakota calendar and land-based healing practices, as well as working to develop a non-profit holistic wellness center that will center Lakota/Dakota life ways. I am grateful to be in this work of reclaiming, reactivating, and reimagining our languages, ceremonies, and life ways alongside my people and chosen kin.

Michael:

I (Sélisš, Ql̓ispé, and other ancestories) was raised with Sqelixʷ values but apart from Séliš and Ql̓ispé cultural ways of being. My parents and yayáʔ taught me the importance of education, where education is all things that help you learn to be the person you are in the world. I was blessed to begin learning with cultural Elders shortly after becoming a teacher, but only once my heart, values, and intentions were assessed. My personal, professional, and academic journey led to building relationships with those who became instant family, as was the case with Tim and others throughout Montana and Arizona. I made it my intention to return to the Sqelixʷ values and intergenerational teachings given by family and Elders and returned to the mountains I loved so dearly. Since then, I have been focused on learning about Sqelixʷ education and leadership, language and culture vitalization, and works to contribute to collaboratively, reawakening language and culture to strengthen identity through community-based education for our tribal communities. I come to this work with a good heart—with good intentions. I am a mother to Mali, who is 4 years old.

Timothy:

I am Filipino-American and grew up on the Flathead Indian reservation in Western, Montana. I have always been keenly aware that the histories of my friends from the Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles tribes were distinctly different from my own. It is important to state that I am not Native American because if you were to imagine otherwise, it would compromise the love and trust established in my relationships. That said, my friends, including Alayna and Michael, have offered spaces of relational building and brought me into their families and life ways in ways appropriate for who I am. This positioning of being in relation as a Filipino-American on Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles lands has instilled in me how crucial it is to prove, time after time, that my heart is devoted to the causes, purposes, and efforts of my friends-turned-family as well as offer ample time for new relationship to grow.

Enacting our Community Dreams: A Conversation

Timothy:

We gather together in this conversation to talk through the ways education occurs in our communities within and beyond school walls and what education can be and ought to be in this time that we’re living in with many concurrent movement spaces like Black Lives Matter and Water is Life or #noDAPL as well as this new reality where Covid-19 is running rampant in our communities, forcing us into difficult situations. You’ve both been very involved with educational spaces in your respective communities and have dreams of what that looks like as well as what you’ve done to attain those dreams in the work you’ve done and you both have children who are navigating schooling spaces. Alayna, to get us started, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about your work during the Standing Rock Movement and your willingness to answer the call to co-construct a school in that movement space?

Alayna:

Sure! So, when the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe opposed the Dakota Access pipeline, we put out a call to stand with us in this resistance, and people came from everywhere to join us. During this swell of people, the aunties and grandmas within the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Camp gathered and expressed the need to start thinking about how we’re going to band together and educate the children who were standing with their families in this movement space. I heard their call and ended up taking on the organizing of this school; it ended up just taking on a whole life of its own! The youth, in coordination with elders, named the school Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa, which translates to the Defenders of the Water School.

It was also during this time that I was contemplating my own daughter’s education. It was late August, I was so busy with starting up this school in this movement space and her regular school the Lakȟól’iyapi Wahóȟpi [Lakota language immersion nest] wasn’t in session yet, and I thought it was a good time for her to attend “regular” school, or public education, so I enrolled her at the Standing Rock Elementary School. At the time it was just to try it and put her into school while we were facilitating camp organizing and developing the movement school. I enrolled her just to see how she would do, but on the first full week, I was dropping her backpack off before heading to camp because she forgot it, and her teacher asked to talk with me in the hallway and scolded me. I remember it vividly. She said: “Your daughter can’t read! She can’t write! She’s in the second grade! What have you been doing with her!?”

I remember being so upset I just cried. I felt so sad and ashamed. And I felt scared that I had failed my daughter somehow. I called my mom, who is a feisty rez mom, and she immediately called the principal to set up a meeting before the day was over. Soon after, we were sitting with the principal in her office. My mother said to her, “You don’t know how much my granddaughter knows. She knows how to read! She knows how to write, just not in English yet! If you’re on a reservation, you should be valuing those attributes, not scolding my daughter for teaching her daughter her Lakota language and way of life.”

That was my first real eye opener to realizing how much our languages and culture are not valued in school, even schools on my own reservation where we have a Lakota immersion school. All this was happening while I was starting up Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa. I had all these thoughts stirring in the back of my mind of how the state and our society devalues our life ways and our language and all of the knowledge that we do hold about plants and ceremonies or whatever it is that our kids know that we were centering in the immersion school, and would be centering in the movement space school. All of that is still nothing compared to their own system of White culture that they feel we should know front to back. That was the biggest eye opener for me— this realization that White culture and language tries to hold this hierarchy over our own language and culture. I felt like in that moment, I understood; I got it now.

Timothy:

That experience, that realization you experienced, Alayna, in hearing and knowing Michael’s story and how she’s navigated her daughter’s schooling system, it sounds eerily familiar.

Michael:

Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it! Those things are coming up really heavily with one of my non-Native coworkers right now who is amazing and has been a mentor, friend, and kind of like an auntie to me for a long time. She’s been working in our community for a long, long time but has never lived in our communities. She is very good at what she does, but unfortunately, she also thinks that the immersion school isn’t teaching literacy the way they should be. She claims that they can’t read English. She’s right! They may not read English at the same time monolingual students do; however, that’s because they are working in a bilingual system where students are learning to speak and read both English and Salish or, in your situation Alayna, Lakota/Dakota, in different ways and time spans. So, I hear her. But she’s been on the fight about it the last couple of months and stresses often that anything other than the professional strategies she uses to train teachers in our public schools are not good enough for our students. I was just talking to my boss about it. This is happening at our tribal college! Even we are dealing with those things. The good news is that people are listening to us and supporting the work we do in spite of her criticism.

Alayna:

Yeah, and I don’t even think I answered the initial question, but the whole point of my story was that I put my daughter in public school, and she ended up testing really high! She was learning really quickly to whatever standards were set with their English language learning program. She ended up mastering everything! Same with my son. And so now my daughter picked up reading and writing, no problem, because, of course, she could read and write in Lakota. It was transferable. I remember that people always said that to me, “The language is transferable,” and I was like, “What does that even mean, that it’s transferable?” I just didn’t understand it. But it’s true! When they learn sentence patterns and sounds in one language, it makes it easier to learn in another language. Plus, English is all around them. It’s the dominant language; she spoke it clearly. And so, I think for me, it has continuously shown me how much our language and our culture and the things that we teach them carries forward in all things they do, especially public schooling, it’s just that there’s no “standard” to compare it to, so they assume the students are failing. They’re just upholding the wrong standards. It’s through our own lens and through our own teachings; how could they know? We’ve been so accustomed to a system that makes us push who we are aside daily. And so I think when families understand that our language and culture teaches history, teaches math, teaches language, we don’t have to rely on the White culture to have to attain their standards of excellence or whatever.

Timothy:

I mean, what you’re both saying really links up with recent educational research. You both know that educational research has a racist and troubled past. For example, for the longest time, White scholars published work stating that Native American students who fully assimilated into White culture were the ones who were most successful in school. But that has been fully debunked. More recent research—for example, research from amazing scholars like Tsianina Lomawaima, Teresa McCarty, Megan Bang, Bryan Brayboy, Jeremy Garcia, Valerie Shirley, Julie Kaomea, Hollie Kulago, Eve Tuck, Tiffany Lee, Sandy Grande, Amanda Tachine, Patricia Quijada Cerecer, Mary Eunice Romero-Little, Marlinda White-Kaulaity, and so many others—state that the reverse is actually true. Those students who are more fully immersed in their language and their culture, in the histories and stories of their communities, they are the ones who are succeeding even in dominant White-centered schooling spaces. So like what you said, Alayna, your children are far beyond their peers because they’ve been immersed in their culture and in their language. And so I think that this is an important contribution to this conversation for this EEE special issue—the acknowledgment that bilingual and multilingual immersion schools are better for our youth. It’s not stripping away or taking away, it’s adding to their understanding of themselves in this world and how to navigate the different spaces they enter into including public schooling spaces.

Michael:

Absolutely, absolutely! That’s where the work and the way we choose to live our life is central. Like Alayna, you’re living your work, right?! And this is something that Stipi [Michael’s partner] and I talk about a lot, especially in relation to Mali [Michael’s daughter] and our schooling, and the fact that we are always working. He’s working on a research project right now talking about exactly what you were just talking about, Tim. He’s looking at the vitalization of language, culture, and identity within ourselves. And how having that grounding in our culture, our language, and our identities just propels us to be the best we can be for our communities as well as within dominant societies. There’s a ton of research proving those things now. Thank Tupyé! It’s so much fun because I can use that research to say, “Hey, look! I respect you as my auntie in academia, but what you’re saying is wrong. And this is how we can prove it.”

Timothy:

It seems like for both of you, that a lot of the work that you are doing is thinking through how to be great mothers to your children, but it’s not just that. Like, yes, you are invested in education because your children are going through the schooling systems, but you are also considering and thinking about all the youth within your tribal communities and what’s best for all of them. So I’m wondering if you might want to talk about the projects you’re both engaged with that are underway that are driven by who you are as mothers, and also by who you are as members of your tribal communities.

Michael:

Absolutely. Just to give a little bit of context—I grew up off of our reservation and then started working with our Sélisš-Ql̓ispe Culture Committee when I was just starting to be a teacher off of our reservation. Our Sélisš-Ql̓ispe Culture Committee, alongside the Kootenai Culture Committee, has been working for almost 50 years to “preserve, protect, and perpetuate the living culture and traditional way of life of our people” (Sélisš Ql̓ispe Culture Committee [SQCC], 2015). At that time, I had a deep desire in my heart to not only give back to our community in some way, but also to learn about our people and our ways in an even deeper way than I had been given previously. Through that process, I was really blessed because not only did I have the amazing value system that my yayáʔ [maternal grandmother], and my mom and dad had raised me with, which was our traditional value system, but a couple of elders also took me under their wings, as well. Through that process, they made sure I understood a couple of major things.

Number one: All of the work that I do should come from my heart, and number two it should be guided by the elders, so that, ultimately, what I do is with them. It is their work and the community’s work. It’s not my work. It’s not for me or outsiders to profit off of; it’s for our community to be the best we can be, basically. I’m very thankful for that because it’s kept me grounded. It’s helped me to remember that, even as I went on to get my masters and my doctorate—it was those ways that I was guided by, what the Elder Advisory Council of the Culture Committee felt was right. I’m fortunate to still be able to work with them closely in this work. And so, as a result of that, the work I get to do really came at the request of Nk̓ʷusm, which is our Salish language immersion school, and at the request of the Culture Committee.

So, back in 2016, they came to a few of us in Salish Kootenai College’s (SKC) Division of Education and said, “Look, we’re working on this grant proposal, and what we’re finding is that we have young educators who are learning the language through our apprentice program, but they don’t have teacher skills just yet. They don’t feel like they understand how to be a teacher in the best way. They feel like they aren’t adequately prepared. And, at the same time, we also have amazing educators who have teacher credentials, but don’t have as much of the language as they, and we, would like them to have.” So they asked: Can you help us provide some kind of professional development that will help meet both sets of needs? Through this collaborative process, with all of the three entities, SKC, Nk̓ʷusm Salish Language School, and the Culture Committee, we have strategically worked together to build what has ended up being an associates degree and will very soon be a bachelors degree in Native Language Teacher Education with a specialization in Salish Language Educator Development. The beauty of that is that we have additional Salish culture classes. We have additional Salish music classes. We have Language and Literacy in the Native Language Education classroom.

So, we have a very specific curriculum that we are developing as a team. That includes curriculum and instruction. It includes assessment and planning. It includes human growth and development and includes all of the teacher skills. But our courses are designed to meet the cultural and linguistic needs of the children of our communities. They are immersed in the culture and the language—the ways of being of our people. And, our traditional ways of educating are at the center. It’s so much fun!

We have this incredible cohort who work so hard because they believe in this. And they’re all in. They learn the language during the day, all day long, in the apprentice program. Then, they go to school at night. They do it every day, all year long. Their level of dedication, effort, and passion is incredible! So just getting to do this work that has been guided by a request from our community partners and elders has been wonderful. They said, “Look, what do we want our language and culture to look like in the future?” So we started with a 20-year plan, but within just that first 20 years we realized we need more than 40 highly qualified educators who can use the Salish language as the medium of instruction in a strong and highly proficient way. That’s huge! That’s to fill our early childhood classes, to fill our public schools. That’s to fill the new community schools we’re working on building capacity for.

Timothy:

That’s so beautiful, Michael! I’m over here getting goosebumps thinking about how the work you’re doing now creates ripples impacting future generations! Both of your stories have so many connections. When I was listening, Michael, I was reminded of when a group of scholars went to Standing Rock and we learned from Alayna and the group of educators there about the Defenders of the Water School.

Alayna, it reminded me of the story you shared with me about all the unlearning that you needed to do because of what schooling was and wasn’t for you. One of those lessons you wrote in the introduction to our co-edited book with Django and Rae Paris (2020) titled Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square was about how you and Jose and Theresa and Blaze and Steve (the other teachers at the school) realized after a short time that it was really hard to separate disciplines, to separate history from language, to separate science from math. But in addition, in that movement space, it was also really difficult to separate by age groups like early childhood and then middle and then high school. You realized that education that’s rooted in place and in community should merge together, rather than be chunked into separate parts or separate age levels.

Alayna:

Yeah, what still resonates with me about the camp at Standing Rock and the Water is Life Movement—sheesh, that was four years ago, already!—was that we all came together and stood up at the same time. We knew we didn’t want that pipeline, and people from all over the world came to stand with us to finally say, “NO! We’re not going to allow the pollution of our sacred waters.” And in the process, we weren’t going to allow them to take our land, or take our language or take our cultures or traditions or our life ways. When we stood up, we realized, “Wait, we can do that? We can center our own languages and cultures in our schools and health programs.” Because for so long, we were told that we couldn’t. The Standing Rock Movement was a big eye opener: We realized that we can lean into our own life ways. And there was some anger that came along with that because we realized what’s been kept from us, stolen from us, beaten out of us for so long. There were so many things that we didn’t know we could do. Things that I’m doing now, things that I’m so passionate about.

So, we’ve also been meeting with our elders throughout these past four years, and getting an idea of what our communities would like to see again, and there has been plenty of unlearning and anger in different ways, but we’ve learned to not take things personal. The western ways of thinking about education might recognize things as “project-based learning,” but what it’s really doing is just leaning more into our traditions and life ways and developing the needs of our communities first, and then adding science and engineering or whatever we need to build up our community to develop the projects we need to sustain our life ways.

The work I’m doing is developing the Mní Wičhóni Clinic and Farm that was first started at the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Camp. So when the camp was first gearing up, a medic healer clinic also started up where they offered these different alternative medicines—whoever was coming through the camp would just share whatever wisdom they had in health care or holistic healing and wellness. When camp shut down, I was working on the school project at the time trying to figure out how to keep that moving in our community. At the same time, people were trying to keep the clinic moving after camp as well. So right now we’re envisioning ways that the school and the clinic can merge together because those are both projects that I’m very, very passionate about.

My dad is a member of this group on Standing Rock called the Elders Preservation Council and recently they’ve been feeling really frustrated because they have not been fully recognized or heard by our Tribal council. The purpose of that group is focused on the question: How are we enacting our life ways in our own community in ways that keep our people safe and healthy, while following the traditional protocols of the Lakota/Dakota people?

There’s just so many things that intertwine around language and culture and health care, and I think now is the time to do it since we’re learning to heal again and learning to call our spirits back. We can start having these conversations again. Especially now, there’s a pandemic going on and there’s this huge social justice movement towards Black liberation. So we need to ask ourselves: How are we showing up as relatives for each other? How are we working towards our health in a good way and not just coming from anger? We have had that time for anger. Now, we need to ask: How do we move forward in good ways as good relatives?

So that’s where I feel like we’re at now with the work of the clinic and school. We’re at the listening stage right now: We’re going to be having this virtual gathering September 11–13, 2020 (hopefully my baby doesn’t come before then!) and we’re going to be really discussing and asking the elders: How do we move forward in a good way? We want to create a safe, virtual space where we can wipe away the tears of our people and figure out how to move forward.

I’m just so thankful that what I’m doing now is driven by love, not just for family, but for community for hundreds of years down the road. To get these things we believe in going before we don’t have our speakers anymore, before we don’t have our knowledge keepers anymore. I think that that’s a big drive for a lot of us.

Timothy:

That was really beautiful. A couple of the things that really stood out to me: One was this connection between movements and dreaming. These movement spaces that have been created allow us to dream forward and beyond the systems that we operate within, like the ways that settler colonialism limits and strips us from language, from culture, from identity, but in these movement spaces, like you were saying, Alayna, there was this epiphany that allowed you and others realize, “Oh, we can do this! We can have these dreams and can work to make them come to life.”

And then the other idea that stood out was the importance of healing in relation to education. It takes me back to the dissertation work that I did in Arizona where I worked with students in a course called Native American Literature where, for many of them, it was the first time in their schooling that they were taught their histories and stories, they were taught the injustices that were done to them and to their people. And I remember that, as they were learning, there was this deep hurt that happened when they became conscious of what has happened to them and their peoples and continues to happen. I mean, they already knew a bit, but to have those stories, to have those histories included within the curriculum, it just really hit home for many of them. And one of the lessons they taught me was that a crucial part of developing this critical consciousness with students was that there also needs to be a space to have productive outlets, and healthy ways in which they can enact the changes that they want to see, and also spaces for them to heal, not just in school, but also in their communities and in their lives. We need to consider, more fully, theories of healing in relation to education. We need to not only acknowledge the harms and hurts that people have gone through, but we also need moments to support each other through that process so that our dreams can become a reality and not get caught in the pain. Healing is so necessary and essential if we are to work forward and to move forward in productive ways.

Anyway, that was just a long-winded way of saying, you’re both amazing! Thank you for the work that you’re doing. It’s really helped me to envision and imagine. You’ve heard the saying, we are living in a moment. Well, right now, I think it’s more appropriate to say, we are living in a movement.

Michael:

That’s right! We’re living within the Black Lives Matter movement. And also Alayna has been working within her own community’s movements. Each of us has our own community-based movements that are happening all the time as well. So, that’s where the movement space that I am blessed to get to work within comes from. It is for justice. It is for bringing educational justice for our children, specifically. That’s what my elders keep emphasizing.

At this moment in our conversation, Mali joins us on camera. She holds up a work of art she’s created.

“Hi, Mali! Wow, that’s beautiful! What did you draw?” Timothy asks.

“Blue!” Mali says as she points to her blue heart.

“What’s blue in Salish?” Michael asks Mali.

“qʷay, mestm’s favorite color!” Mali answers.

“Yeah! And what’s on the backside?” Michael asks.

Mali turns the paper over and says, “Pink! I hen!” providing both the English and Salish words for that color.

“That’s my favorite color, I hen!” Michael says.

“Thank you for sharing that with us, Mali. It’s beautiful,” Tim says.

Mali asks to get down after sharing her art.

Timothy:

I have been getting goosebumps throughout this entire session, that being one of them! I mean everything that we’re talking about, the hopes, the dreams—enacted through that one little lesson that you just had with Mali, Michael, the translation of colors and what those colors mean to her, and what they mean to other people, shared in the Salish language.

And what I heard from you, Michael, is the importance of listening, to learn not just from our elders, but from everyone, from our littlest ones, because we are all continuing to learn throughout our lives. And it’s important to center the experiences and the feedback and the understandings throughout that spectrum you know, when we are born and when we move on.

You both continue to teach me in the ways you learn with your kiddos. You’ve taught me that education is intra- and intergenerational and that learning happens at all these different levels and movements happen at all different levels concurrently. It reminds me of what Margaret Kovach (2009) calls “self-in-relation,” which asks of us: How are we in relation to others? How are we in relation to our communities? Part of that answer must center the respect, the reciprocity, and the relationship that we have to them as well as our commitment and passion that we have for doing the work that we’re doing and recognizing that it takes everyone, it takes everyone with all different passions with all different interests to enter into this work collectively. We are the movement!

The other thing that I loved from both of your stories was this idea that it’s really essential to love oneself in order to love others, and I think within that, Alayna, you mentioned this need to wipe away tears, not just tears of others, but your own. It connects on this continued thread throughout our conversation of healing, right? That if we are to be the best for our children, or if we are to be the best for our communities, we need to engage in this process of healing within, of accepting who we are, where we come from and also the new lessons that are entering into our lives so that we can be the best for ourselves, love ourselves, in order to love others. To contribute to our families and to our communities, we must take the time and energy to do that.

You both are such beautiful examples of all of those lessons in the work that you do with your clinic and school, Alayna. And, Michael, your help in preparing teachers both in the language and in the culture so that they can be the best educators for their youth. It’s just been such a beautiful conversation. I just want to thank you both for taking the time to share your visions and to share what you’re doing now in order to attain those dreams.

Alayna:

I really appreciate how you conceptualize and reinterpret things back to us. You really help me understand my own thinking.

Michael:

Yeah, I’ll echo that, Alayna. Lemlmtš, Tim, for all you are and do, with all of us.

Acknowledgement

Alayna gives all the thanks and gratitude to her thiwáhe (immediate family) na thiyóšpaye (extended family) for defending and carrying our Lakota/Dakota lifeways forward so beautifully, to the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa Owáyawa (Defenders of the Water School) family for believing in education rooted in Mitákuye Owás’iŋ (we’re all related), and to all the knowledge and language reclaimers across Makȟóčhe Wašté (equivalent to what other Indigenous nations call ‘Turtle Island’) who never give up. Michael gives thanks to T̓upyeʔ, my nk̓ʷusm our x̣ʷlčmusšn and p̓x̣ʷp̓x̣ʷot Tim, Alayna, and all of those who believe and support our community-driven work. Tim would like to thank the powerful Indigenous mothers and their children who have welcomed him into their families and have shared their stories of language and cultural vitalization, specifically Alayna Eagle Shield, Michael Munson, Kristina Lucero, Tara Dowd, and Faith Price and more generally, to all those who fight, every day, to protect what is sacred and to pass on that sacredness through education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alayna Eagle Shield

Alayna Eagle Shield is Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta and is a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She is also Dakȟóta and Sáhniš. Alayna is a mother of three beautiful children and married. She holds a bachelors of science degree, is an eminent scholar in the Lakota language, has her masters degree in public health, and is a doctoral student at the University of Washington. Alayna is currently the Co-Executive Director for the Mni Wiconi Clinic and Farm.

Michael M. Munson

Michael M. Munson, EdD, is passionate about improving education to strengthen identity by reawakening and re-centering Sqelix^w education, language, and culture. She has taught within the Division of Education and Native American Studies Department, serves as Director of the Native Language Teacher Education (NLTE) Program and its Salish Language Educator Development (SLED) specialization, and is working with the Séliš-Ql̓ispé Culture Committee to collaboratively build a language and culture vitalization program at Salish Kootenai College.

Timothy San Pedro

Timothy San Pedro is an associate professor of Multicultural and Equity Studies in Education at Ohio State University. His scholarship focuses on the intricate link among motivation, engagement, and identity construction to curricula and pedagogical practices that re-center content and conversations upon Indigenous histories, knowledges, and literacies. He is an inaugural Gates Millennium Scholar, Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow, a Ford Fellow, a Concha Delgado Gaitan Council of Anthropology in Education Presidential Fellow, and, most recently, a Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow.