‘A space for you to be who you are’: an ethnographic portrait of reterritorializing Indigenous student identities

ABSTRACT

This article explores the discourse practices of an Indigenous, community-based charter school and its efforts to create space for Indigenous both/and identities across rural–urban divides. The ethnographic portrait of Urban Native Middle School (UNMS) analyzes the discourse of making ‘a space for you’, which brings together rural and urban youth to braid binary constructs such as Indigenous and western knowledge, into a discourse of Indigenous persistence constraining contexts of schooling. We use the concept of ‘reterritorialization’ to discuss the significance of UNMS’s community effort to create a transformative space and place of educational opportunity with youth. The local efforts of this small community to reterritorialize schooling were ultimately weakened under the one-size-fits-all accountability metrics of No Child Left Behind policy. This ethnographic analysis ‘talks back’ to static definitions of identity, space and learning outcomes which fail to recognize the dynamic and diverse interests of Indigenous communities across rural – urban landscapes.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous education
• both/and
• reterritorialization
• student identities
• ethnography

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the students, teachers and families of UNMS. We are grateful to all involved in creating and nurturing the school. We would also like to thank the editors of this special issue for their contributions to the various iterations of this article. All errors in this article are our own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Urban Native Middle School is a pseudonym. All individual names have been changed for pseudonyms to respect the privacy of those involved with this research. Additionally, all specific place names, such as cities, towns and institutions, have been changed to protect privacy.

2. Use of the terms Indigenous, Native, American Indian, Native American, Native and Indian will all be used interchangeably to refer to individuals and communities identifying as originating in the Americas in the near or distant past. We additionally use the term Indigenous marking it with a capital ‘I’ to signify a ‘nationality parallel’ as legitimate as other national identities such as ‘American’, ‘Irish’ or ‘Mexican’.