Indigenous elsewheres: refusal and re-membering in education research, policy, and praxis

This special issue began with an invited talk Sandy Grande gave at the University of California, Los Angeles, entitled, ‘Biopolitics, Aging and the Struggle for Indigenous Elsewheres.’¹ Five Indigenous women, all members of Teresa McCarty’s ‘Indigenous Education’ and ‘Academic Writing and Publishing’ seminars, prepared written responses. Their words and sentiments were so profound, they literally brought the audience to their feet and to tears. Each student shared intimate stories about family, elders, and ancestors and their struggle to forge and maintain relations of care across miles, illness, generations, community, and educational contexts. Their powerful work suggested to everyone present that something untapped and important was at play. Though we were not quite able to name it in the moment, in retrospect, what we touched upon was the shared experience of negotiating the affective economies of settler colonialism at same time we refused its imperatives. Our very existence evidences the ongoing struggle for Indigenous alterities: for elsewheres.

Shortly after she returned home, Sandy received the invitation from QSE to curate a special edition on Native American/Indigenous issues, a query we all took as a sign that the work was meant to be carried forward. We were particularly drawn and animated by the prospect of publishing in QSE, the journal which published one of Sandy’s very first articles. It seemed a bit like a coming home and excellent fit for the intimate yet exigent words of the young Indigenous scholars. Following the decision to move forward, multiple conference calls, Skype meetings, online writing accountability sessions, and gatherings ensued.

As the special issue unfolded, each of us encountered ‘interruptions’ to our work, or at least that’s how we experienced the delays in the moment. More specifically, in addition to being students and professors, all of us serve in caregiver roles of one kind or another – as mothers, sisters, daughters, granddaughters, aunties, mentors, and life partners – and, thus, are often pulled by our responsibilities. Within the context of the academy, such pulls are often made to feel like a pulling away rather than toward.

Then, Standing Rock happened. Some of us were called to the ‘front lines’ while others worked off-site, organizing teach-ins, sending supplies, calling representatives – all of us were pulled in. During this time, writing seemed like both a necessity and a distraction. We were, along with the rest of the world, compelled by the historic gathering. What started with a small prayer camp formed by a handful of inspired and determined youth, swelled into an international site of Indigenous resistance, which at its height became home for over 10,000 water protectors. Beyond the spectacle, however, Standing Rock provided the opportunity for a hard reset, a literal re-grounding and ‘re-membering’ (wa Thiong’o, 2009) of Indigenous relations and relationality as the grist of the past and hope for the future. The Lakota teachings of mitakuye oyasin (we are all related) not only withstood but prevailed against the violences of neoliberal capitalism and settler colonialism. It is the antidote.

These teachings helped us to see our writing process in a different light. We re-membered that the caregiving responsibilities that were made to feel like ‘interruptions’ to our work-life were actually not interruptions at all. Rather, they were and are the work. The life work. This set of articles is offered as a testament of our life work. First and foremost, they represent a collective refusal of settler colonialism and its entailments of chronic crisis, desubjectification, and precarity.² The notion of refusal, as developed by Mohawk scholar Audra Simpson, is undertaken across the works. As articulated by Simpson (2016), ‘refusal’ is both a stance and a theory of the political that emerged through her observations of the Kahnawà:ke people and their historic and ongoing refusal to consent to the apparatuses of the state. As a stance/method, the concept of ethnographic refusal reflects Simpson’s own ethical commitment to refuse to tell the ‘internal story of their struggle’ while consenting tell ‘the story of their constraint’ (2016, p. 328). Equally, though, the special issue is an act of Indigenous resurgence enacted through the process of ‘re-membering.’ Gikuyu literary scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o defines re-membering as a process that pushes past the intended severings of coloniality, encouraging us to re-vision our research and the project of education itself. This, we propose, represents a paradigmatic shift – a methodological and pedagogical elsewhere. Each of the contributors approached their work through this lens.

We begin with Sandy Grande’s anchoring article, ‘Aging, Precarity, and the Struggle for Indigenous Elsewheres,’ in which she presents an Indigenous counter-narrative of aging born of her own deeply transformative experience of caring for and hospicing her beloved mom, Ona. In much the same way that wa Thiong’o analyzes colonial practices of dis-memberment, Sandy’s article shows how the logics of settler colonialism construct ways of seeing and not seeing. Specifically, elders and aging are viewed as subtractive and expendable, illness is normalized as individual moral failing, and health as ‘the ability to care for oneself (without dependence).’ Within Indigenous communities, elders are held with esteem and relations of care are, more generally, constructed through teachings of mutuality, responsibility, collectivity, and reciprocity. She argues that (re)centering such principles will ‘move us closer to the “decolonial option,”’ beyond the logics of capital and toward an Indigenous elsewhere defined by relations of well-being.

In the second article, Kapua Chandler re-members the knowledge of her ancestors as a means of refusing the hegemonic ‘overvaluing’ of ‘new knowledge’ within the Western academy (Grande, 2015a). The daughter of fishermen and fisherwomen in a ‘fishing, farming, and hunting dense community,’ the reef was Kapua’s first classroom. However, it wasn’t until much later in life that she fully apprehended the value of the knowledge gained in this learning space for contemporary education practice. Transmitted orally through cultural practices, she notes how Indigenous knowledges ‘are all around us no matter where we are … evident and valued in every setting.’ Her research asks us to radically re-imagine higher education through Indigenous Hawaiian notions of ‘āina, ‘that which feeds’; ‘ohana, family; and piko, the trunk or ‘umbilical cord of ancestral knowledges.’

In ‘To My Relations,’ Nora Cisneros presents an Indigenous Epistoloary Methodology (IEM) rooted in a personal and collective genealogy of land, culture, and ancestors. Through IEM she explores the use of writing as a form of refusal, unsettling ‘dominant forms of writing and research and the suppositions that inform them.’ Originating with letters written by her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother, Nora uses IEM in the form of letters to her young daughter, capturing the rich details of ethnographic fieldwork. Building upon this base, she carries the use of IEM into her work with Indigenous high school students enrolled in a university-based college preparatory program, scaffolding their writing as a means of building their sense of community. As a way to gather, analyze, and re-present data, IEM enables researchers, teachers, and students to ‘practice reflexivity as they reify their intersecting identities.’ In this sense, Nora develops IEM as both a methodology and pedagogy.

In the fourth essay, Temryss Xeli’tia Lane takes us to the frontline of Standing Rock. Combining in-depth interviews, qualitative vignettes, and photography as a way of witnessing and telling, this compelling account illuminates the relations among Indigenous peoples, water, language, medicine, and land. She focuses on the women of Standing Rock, developing a ‘portraiture of refusal.’ Her privileging of the visual pulls us viscerally into the space of ‘the frontline.’ As Victoria Muñoz (1995) writes, viewing photographs ‘as if listening to a story offers insights into an understanding of identity as told through images’ (p. 67). The story that Temryss develops provides insights into the frontline as both a metaphor and lived reality, a state of being that ‘extends to all spaces where we choose to resist and exist.’

Next, we move to a different frontline, one occupied by Indigenous women working as student affairs practitioners in predominately White postsecondary institutions. In this essay, Theresa Ambo draws on her experience as a daughter, granddaughter, researcher, Indigenous educator, and student affairs professional to examine ‘how practices of communal care reflect Indigenous epistemologies,’ demonstrating spaces of ‘radical love and refusal in the academy.’ Even though all academic institutions in the U.S. sit on Indigenous lands, Indigenous students and programs continue to fight for survival in often hostile campus climates. In an effort to help Indigenous practitioners working in this environment process the disjunctures, Theresa uses journaling to gather their experiences. Through poetic transcription (Glesne, 1997), Theresa shows how these practitioners transform alienating campus environments into ‘homesteads’ of care and support.

The final article by Christine Vega, ‘OtherMotherWork: Testimonio and the Refusal of Historical Trauma,’ demonstrates the ways in which photographs and cuentos (stories) can commence a process of generational healing. She uses a ‘few selected fotos (pictures)’ archived by her late grandmother María, ‘as memory-seekers to retell cuentos’ from her father. For Christine, OtherMotherWork, a notion introduced by Black feminist scholar-activist James (1993) and developed by Tellez (2014), is the vehicle for re-connecting and re-membering generations in a journey of understanding and healing with apá, her father. The special issue concludes with an epilogue by Teresa McCarty, in which she returns to the themes braided throughout the articles, highlighting the significance of their work for the ‘frontlines’ of education research, policy, and praxis.

In the spirit of Christine Vega’s ofrenda (offering), this collection invites readers into dialog around what it means to ‘frontline’ love, caring, and mutuality in education. What follows is an extraordinary array of complementary approaches – ancestral knowledges, Indigenous epistolary methods, photographic vignettes, poetic transcription, testimonio, and cuentos – that achieve exactly that. We thank the editors of this journal for providing the opportunity to share this work, and express our profound gratitude to the five Indigenous women scholars with whom we have been privileged to think and to write. Together, we dedicate this special issue to all those who served on the frontlines at Standing Rock, especially the women-warriors and water carriers, who then and always have compelled our gaze elsewhere.

Sandy Grande
Professor of Education and Director of the Center for the Critical Study of Race and Ethnicity,
Connecticut College, USA
[email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4562-5149

Teresa L. McCarty
GF Kneller Chair in Education and Anthropology, and Faculty, American Indian Studies,
University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Notes

1. The lecture was given in February, 2016 and was co-sponsored by UCLA’s American Indian Studies Center, REPAIR: A Health and Disability Justice Organization, and NetCE, an online education provider for health professionals.

2. Precarity is defined here as the ‘embodied experience of living under a regime of economic uncertainty, increased militarization, and environmental destruction’ (Grande, 2015b, pp. xv–xvi).