Indigenous Education: new possibilities, ongoing restraints (with Sheila Aikman). Comparative Education, 39, 2 (original) (raw)
Related papers
When Indigenous and Modern EducationCollide
There are an estimated 300 million indigenous people worldwide, roughly 5% of the world’s population (UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, 2004). Despite this significant presence, national schooling systems have ignored, minimized, or ridiculed their histories pre- and post-Western contact, as well as their cultural contributions toward social and environmental sustainability. Only since the 1960s have ministries of education around the world, regional entities, and community-based groups set up education programs that seek to rescue and protect the values, practices, languages, and knowledge systems of indigenous groups, including their relationship to local ecosystems; social relationships within each group; subsistence-based production, such as agricultural, pastoral, and hunting and gathering techniques; and language, art, games and other cultural aspects (e.g., Barnach-Calbó Martínez, 1997; Hernández, 2003; May, 1999; May and Aikman, 2003; Neil, 2000). These educational efforts have sought to recover indigenous peoples’ own history and identity to help them resist the pressure to assimilate into the surrounding dominant societies.
Concluding commentary: reimagining education research from indigenous elsewheres
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 2018
The articles in this special issue resonate with and expand upon the work of Sandy Grande in the lead article, helping to reimagine how we understand relations of care, reciprocity, and mutuality in our research and life work. Grounded in Indigenous protocols and practices, these relations reflect and inform the development of Indigenous alterities that she refers to as taking hold in a space of 'elsewhere. ' In this concluding commentary, I put the search for Indigenous elsewheres in conversation with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's (2009) notions of dis-membering and remembering , as well as Sandy Grande's Red Pedagogy (2004, 2015), underscoring the work's implications for how we think about and 'do' critical qualitative education research. In Something Torn and New (2009), wa Thiong'o identifies the first act of the colonizer as renaming. Names, he points out, 'have everything to do' with how we identify, classify, and remember objects, places, and people (p. 9). 'The loss of name, ' he continues, 'linked to loss of memory, would help break, or at least weaken, the … resistance to the English-settler colonization' (p. 12). Thus, a 'European memory becomes the new marker of … identity, covering up an older memory or, more strictly speaking, burying the Native memory of place' (pp. 8, 9). This resignification is a prime tactic of colonial dis-memberment. Because language is the means or 'medium of memory' (wa Thiong'o, 2009, p. 40), to rename through the colonizer's language-and to destroy the autochthonous language, a universal requirement of settler colonialism effected through compulsory schooling-further starves a people's memory, 'rebranding' it with a Western European memory (wa Thiong'o, 2009, pp. 12-14). wa Thiong'o calls this linguistic famine or linguicide, 'the linguistic equivalent of genocide' (p. 17; see also Skutnabb-Kangas, 2000; Skutnabb-Kangas & Dunbar, 2010). Thus, says wa Thiong'o, 'Name and language loss are the necessary steps toward the loss of previous identity' and the imposition of a colonized identity (2009, p. 26). Sandy Grande similarly shows how the logics of settler colonialism function to erase Indigenous ways of knowing and being, naturalizing a process of removal, dispossession, and abandonment. Education, she writes in the tenth anniversary edition of Red Pedagogy, is 'the nexus between these capitalist … missions, manifesting the campaign to 'kill the Indian and save the man' under the auspices of schooling and … [becoming] the subtext for the appropriation of Indian land' (2015, p. 4). Education and education research are thus deeply imbricated in dis-memberment, 'inextricably linked, ' as Māori scholar-activist Linda Tuhiwai Smith notes, 'to European imperialism and colonialism' (2012, p. 1). This special issue both engages and pushes beyond settler logics and their complicity in dis-membering education practices, policies, and research. In Red Pedagogy, Sandy Grande emphasizes that we must begin with a critical analysis of settler colonialism and capitalist modernity; without this, any intervention, educational or otherwise, serves only 'as a deeply insufficient (if not negligent) Band-Aid over the incessant wounds of imperialism' (2004, p. 19). The task, she maintains, 'is to detach and dethink' Western notions of power (2004, p. 53), basing our work instead upon Indigenous notions of power that reside within ancestral knowledge systems and relations of mutuality, reciprocity, and care (2004, p. 53).
Leading and Managing Indigenous Education in the Postcolonial World
2014
In Leading and Managing Indigenous Education in the Postcolonial World, Zane Ma Rhea (2015) critically discusses educational leadership, educational management, and Indigenous education in the postcolonial world. The purpose of this book is to provide a critical, multiperspectival, and system level analysis of education services to Indigenous people by drawing attention to these academic fields in postcolonial Australia. In the multiperspectival approach, Ma Rhea provides in detail how and where these changes need to take place to engage Indigenous people in education. In system level analysis, Ma Rhea argues that mainstream education systems in Australia require changes need to be made at all levels to support Indigenous education. She critically analyses international Indigenous rights, social exchange, and complex adaptive system theories and highlights the Australian context. The author describes partnerships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people as social exchanges. With complex adaptive theory, the scholar explains how present education systems in Australia fail to engage Indigenous people because of colonial practice and power that exist in postcolonial Australia. She brings these theories into her discussion to argue that administrators, leaders, and managers of Indigenous education initiatives need to enhance their understanding of an Indigenist perspective. Ma Rhea emphasizes the rights-based approach in Indigenous education as a means of recognizing and honouring Indigenous people's economic, linguistic, and cultural rights in the postcolonial education system. There are five parts with 11 chapters in this book. However, my review does not follow a linear examination of each chapter. Rather, I provide a brief summary, explore key concepts, and critically examine the implications. I also state why this book is important for anyone interested in Indigenous education, and identify the shortfalls of the text.
For many years the contemporary Australian education system did not include Indigenous perspectives. The following paper will examine the impact this has had on both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal students, while exploring some of the more positive changes currently underway.
Global Review of Indigenous Education: Issues of Identity, Culture, and Language
Introducing a topic as broad and important as indigenous education is difficult to do in a series of volumes, let alone in a single book. The focus of our book and this chapter is to highlight the interconnectedness of indigenous peoples in families, communities, nation states, and worldwide. We begin by defining foundational key terms (indigenous, indigeneity, and indigenous education) to provide readers with the standpoint from which we ground the focus of this book. We also introduce three issues of paramount importance to indigenous education—language, culture, and identity. The chapter also examines indigenous education literature from a global perspective as well as from six major geographic regions. Next, we introduce the 21 additional chapters in this book. Finally, a clarion-like call to action is made to indigenous leaders, policy makers, and educators everywhere to underscore the need that indigenous peoples have for representation, equality, and the ability to preserve their languages, cultures, and identities.
Curriculum and the production of indigenous subjects
Acta Scientiarum. Education, 2015
The policy on school education has always been explicit in its intentions to produce identities for indigenous peoples. The Federal Constitution of 1988 broke with the assimilationist/integrationist/colonizing proposal of curricula imposed on indigenous people and recognizes the ethnic identities of indigenous people inserted within the context of their cultural relations and the right to their customs, values, traditions, languages and knowledge. The use of the mother tongue and of learning processes has been orienting categories in the curricula of their schools. With culture as the focal point of discussion, this text is supported on testimonies by indigenous teachers from Terena, Guarani and Kaiowá tribes, subjects living the ambiguities and conflicts as well as their identities and the identities of those looking for schooling in different communities. Despite the difficulties that the indigenous school still faces, indigenous movements question homogenous and colonizing schooling models. This school is part of their lives and plays its social role of working with knowledge without excluding cultures as producers of sense and meaning, their knowledge that guarantees the difference in curriculum, area of struggle, and in the production of indigenous subjects.