Voices of Resistance and Renewal: Indigenous Leadership in Education
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Voices of Resistance and Renewal: Indigenous Leadership in Education
236Paperback
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806148670 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2015 |
| Pages: | 236 |
| Sales rank: | 989,123 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
John W. Tippeconnic III, Professor and Director of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University, is the co-editor of Next Steps: Research and Practice to Advance Indian Education.
Read an Excerpt
Voices of Resistance and Renewal
Indigenous Leadership in Education
By Dorothy Aguileraâ"Black Bear, John W. Tippeconnic III
UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4867-0
CHAPTER 1
Sacred Places
Indigenous Perspectives of Leadership
LINDA SUE WARNER AND KEITH GRINT
OUR PLACE
For many Indigenous peoples in the United States, a sense of place represents who you are and where you come from as well as where you will go. Recognizing that "sense of place" has different meanings for different people, we describe "place" as a dynamic of indigeneity because it is actualized as honoring relatives, those who came before and those who will come after, and because it links the individual with his/her community. This chapter includes a focus on the geographic place that fosters Indigenous perspectives of leadership as well as the philosophical understanding that each individual holds to legitimize a place within a tribal community. We offer perspectives informed by Indigenous epistemologies as described by Native scholars. A sense of place is at the heart of our cultural identity, traditions, and practices. Our lands are the place of our ancestors and carry the spirits of our ancestors. According to traditions, the land lives just as humans do and that the land holds the spirits of our ancestors. We trace our lands and ancestors in the same lineage and traditional way that can be passed down over many generations. Our elders and spiritual leaders teach the traditional ways of living collectively with the land.
From a political stance, we argue that in this country, the sociohistorical impact of the federal government's land policies on the sovereign rights and lives of Indigenous peoples includes (1) denial of rights to land and use of and access to natural resources, (2) disruption of ties to the environment, and (3) loss or weakening of cultural knowledge, language, and identity.
In each of these three areas, we find that leadership systems have been destroyed. For example, a community leader who accepts the mainstream policies or laws that govern the land (perhaps even relocation) can be accused of betraying his/her people. Stories of "fort" Indians are examples of such characterizations. If leaders resisted mainstream policies or laws, then historically the government forced them to acquiesce. Leaders became powerless or martyred in these conflicts. The United States has a well-documented history of attempted separation of Native people from their traditional homelands. This separation from traditional homelands contributes to the designation of "sacred." We propose that what counts as sacred has been diluted through translation into the English language and within the legal parameters of the social institutions of invading governments. The loss of traditional lands and the establishment of reservation lands by the federal government with tribal nations through treaties is linked to that which has been profaned (i.e., the killing of local inhabitants by invaders); these barbaric acts of war transform the "traditional homelands," which held sacred status with ceremonial traditions for time immemorial, into places that have been profaned by the colonizing power — for example, when a place that is considered sacred by the local inhabitants is destroyed, such as an ancient burial site or other ceremonial site when there is construction over their sites' sacred edifices.
LEADERSHIP AND SURVIVAL
The history of the oppression of Indigenous people in the United States is marked by significant incidents of forced removal, specifically removal from places attached to sacred ceremonies and also to leadership or survival. The result of these geographic displacements requires rethinking and expansion of the idea of "place" from one defined solely by legal boundaries to one that includes finding a "space" for the sacred especially informed by Indigenous paradigms. This newer conceptualization moves place and leadership into a situational context. The link to sacred becomes more individualized and allows for the merger of leadership and place. While recorded history is more often than not written from the perspective of the oppressor, the result still matches Indigenous oral histories of removal and the ongoing attempts to recover tribal homelands and to maintain sacred sites. Of course, many of the Indigenous populations were not Indigenous to the land they were displaced from but had already been displaced by previous populations.
Our place, today known as the United States, represents a wide diversity of Native peoples. This diversity of Indigenous nations was thriving in 1491. Henrietta (Mann) Whiteman (1978) supports the perspective that Indigenous peoples have always provided a culturally rich education grounded in traditions. These traditions and education are also linked to geographical and spiritually sacred places. Whiteman articulates, "Contrary to popular belief, education — the transmission and acquisition of knowledge and skills — did not come to the North American continent on the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria. ... We Native Americans have educated our youth through a rich and oral tradition, which was — and is today — transmitted by the elders of the tribe" (p. 105).
In the United States, the disregard for sacredness of the land to Indigenous peoples is linked particularly to Locke's (1960, p. 329) proselytizing that allowed Europeans to displace Indigenous people by deceiving themselves into thinking that the land was "empty" or that ownership of land was derived from "working the land." Hämäläinen's (2008) book describes the Comanche empire, which surpassed the European rivals in military strategy and in political, economic, and cultural force from 1750 to 1850, and challenges historical perspectives. He tells the story of an Indigenous nation's people who "expand, dictate, and prosper, and European colonists resist, retreat, and struggle to survive" (p. 1). Pekka Hämäläinen states:
Herein lay the ultimate paradox. While initially Comanche adjusted their traditions, behaviors, and even beliefs to accommodate the arrival of Europeans and their technologies, they later turned the tables on Europe's colonial expansion by simply refusing to change. By preserving the essentials of their traditional ways — by expecting others to conform to their cultural order — they forced the colonists to adjust to a world that was foreign, uncontrollable, and increasingly, unlivable. (p. 16)
As one piece of evidence for his theory, Hämäläinen reviewed the replication of Stephen Austin's map of the American Southwest in which Austin depicted a Eurocentric bias about the era and "diminished and delegitimized the power and territorial claims of Indigenous inhabitants" (p. 195). The erroneous idea that Indigenous people were not using the land properly allowed widespread theft, legalized by white man's laws, but nonetheless constituting human rights violations by most societal standards.
Leadership in these diverse communities can be found in just as many diverse contexts. American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian tribal leadership models range from elected, regional representatives — a governance model attributed to Native people and described as the template used by American revolutionaries to create the U.S. Congress — to traditional hereditary chiefs. Leadership models in those communities, like any large, contemporary organizations mirror appointed and elected leadership activities. Culturally, there is evidence of traditional patriarchal societies among Native peoples, as well as traditional matriarchal societies (Terrell and Terrell, 1974, p. 28).There is further evidence to suggest that diverse leadership models flourished prior to white contact. The Iroquois Confederacy has been described as the purest form of matriarchy ever to have existed in modern or ancient times (Anderson, 1981).
Each of these models, however, is culturally based and as a result is "place based" to the traditional geography of these diverse nations. In many traditional tribal communities, each band was considered autonomous and determined its own social, governance, and ceremonial structures according to its own interpretation of tribal histories. These histories are the intellectual property of the spiritual leaders of a tribal community and this, again, reinforces the connection between "sacred" and "leadership" in the context of place.
As we define "sacred" and connect it to place, we begin with a fundamental acknowledgment that in North America today, Indigenous people consider certain places or homelands to be sacred and as integral to the practice of ceremonies connected to their spirituality. The land or Mother Earth constitutes a significant component of Native spirituality. The recognition that all things have a spirit and that all these living spirits are connected and sustained by Mother Earth allows us to postulate that these sacred places are relevant to Indigenous peoples' fundamental philosophical belief in how the world operates.
We cannot enter a discussion about sacred places and American Indians without first having an understanding of the policies that have historically affected the identification of "place" within tribal communities. In some communities, Native people refer to this land as Turtle Island (Snyder, 1999) and use it as a reference to oral histories that link the beginnings of the people to native spirituality, essentially a creation story. Each Indigenous society has an oral history that defines a creation story, which identifies a geographical location and connection to Mother Earth. The historical link to spirituality and the context of sacredness in leadership may not be as clear today as it was in early documentation and the original context, which did not distinguish the two as separate.
Early in the nineteenth century, the federal government's "civilization" policies attempted to Christianize American Indians. In part, this included fiscal support of over two hundred mission schools. The Dawes Act of 1887 specifically prohibited the practice of American Indian religious traditions, a policy and practice that remained intact and unwavering for over fifty years (Friends Committee, 2005). This early assimilation practice sought to replace Indigenous religions and conceptual ideas about spirituality with Christian values. Christianity as a religious ideology has established its own sacred place as a church, whereby individuals collectively conduct ceremonies that spiritually connect them to a higher power; however, most Christians would agree the realm of spirituality does not reside within a building but rather inside the person. The ceremonies are conducted by religious leaders and religious organizations informed by Western rational paradigms that frame U.S. mainstream social systems (i.e., business models for leadership, capitalism) and shaped the Euro-American worldview. Captain Richard H. Pratt (1892), perhaps the country's best-known assimilationist, acknowledged the "pretense" of the anti-Indigenous practices and linked it to place by describing Jefferson's advocacy for removing Indigenous peoples from their lands. His advocacy of boarding schools as places to assimilate Native Americans created a legacy that today is a cornerstone for conscience dialogue, including the Gulag Museum in Russia and the District Six Museum in South Africa among the 183 member museums around the globe. These contemporary sites of conscience dialogue represent the shared work among member museums to commemorate past struggles for democracy through programs that stimulated civic participation and dialogue on current social issues. An example of a current social issue is the hope for the U.S. government's true commitment to protect the religious freedom of all people which arguably extends to American Indians; however, protection for sacred sites or places is uncertain and intermittent at best. For example, the federal courts do not apply either the First Amendment or the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, PL 95–341 (42 USC 1996) in the safeguarding of or access to sacred sites for tribal people. Despite recognizing that certain activities, for example building a road through a cemetery, would "destroy the ... Indians' ability to practice their religion," the Supreme Court has consistently failed to protect religious freedoms for American Indians (Lyng, 1988). On November 16, 1990, the U.S. Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), Public Law 101–601 with the intention of ensuring that ancestral remains and sacred objects will be returned to tribes. In spite of both of these laws, there is little current legal protection for certain categories of sacred places and there is no specific cause of action to defend sacred places against desecration or destruction. Examples that we cite later in this section have these limitations.
Homelands of tribes today for the most part are not the same as their traditional homelands prior to white contact. The cultural resiliency of tribes, who were forcibly removed to make way for white settlement with the advent of Manifest Destiny, can be gauged by the extent to which tribal languages and religions exist today. Tribal territories, languages, and religions are components of the culture of the tribe. If one removes the components, as Pratt attempted to do with assimilation policies and practices that realistically spanned approximately seventy-five years in the United States, the culture changes. Land, or place, is not an artifact of Indian culture, but rather of the history and evolution of a people and their cultural identity — knowledge of which is connected to land. This sense of place is embodied within Indigenous peoples. Much of the research literature describes the generational loss of cultural knowledge, particularly within the context of Indigenous nations/peoples who have been dispossessed of their homelands. Land, language, and culture are all relevant to sustaining a people's collective citizenship and identity, as are the social systems that establish structures and processes to reinforce culture-based education across generations that effectively support and protect these inherent rights of Indigenous communities.
RESISTANCE AND EDUCATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY
In this section, we present examples of Indigenous nation communities and their leaders who have led the organized resistance to anti-Indigenous policies by federal and state governments.
The Iroquois Confederacy
Some tribes, like the Iroquois Confederacy in upper New York State, remain in the vicinity of their traditional homelands. Other descendants of this tribe were removed to Indian Territory in Oklahoma and occupy the northeastern part of that state. Additional relatives moved out ahead of the removal to regions around the Great Lakes, regions whose ecology was similar to their own homelands and whose people had similar lifestyles. Traditional languages and governance, and even resistance, can still be found in the Iroquois Confederacy. The people of the Six Nations call themselves the Hau de no sau nee, meaning People Building a Long House. Originally the Six Nations was five and included the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca. The sixth nation, the Tuscarora, migrated into Iroquois country in the early eighteenth century. Today, these peoples comprise the oldest living participatory democracy on earth, a recorded eight hundred years. This system provided the model that Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson used in the conception of the federal system that would become the United States. Onondaga was the Iroquois Confederacy capital because of its central location that made it equidistant for all tribes to travel. The leadership of the confederacy established in this place also was equally accessible to all. To link "the sacred" to this place, it is only necessary to equate all tribal governance (and leadership) to the language, to ceremony, and to the culture. It is essentially equivalent to stating (or restating the obvious) that the pope practices leadership with a spiritual connection in a designated place. Other nations link tribal governance and leadership to place as well.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Voices of Resistance and Renewal by Dorothy Aguileraâ"Black Bear, John W. Tippeconnic III. Copyright © 2015 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University.. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
Contributors,
Introduction, Dorothy Aguilera–Black Bear and John W. Tippeconnic III,
Part I: Leadership Informed by Indigenous Epistemologies within Community Contexts,
1. Sacred Places: Indigenous Perspectives of Leadership, Linda Sue Warner and Keith Grint,
2. Woksape: The Identity of Tribal Colleges and Universities, Cheryl Crazy Bull,
3. Guiding Principles of Indigenous Leadership from a Hawaiian Perspective, Alohalani Housman,
4. A Raven's Story: Leadership Teachings for an Indigenous Teacher Education Program, Jo-ann Archibald,
Part II: The Way Forward: Preparing Indigenous Leaders for the Future,
5. Theory Z + N: The Role of Alaska Natives in Administration, Ray Barnhardt,
6. Native American Doctoral Students: Establishing Legitimacy in Higher Education, Dana E. Christman, Donald Pepion, Colleen Bowman, and Brian Dixon,
7. Getting the Right Leadership: Ten Things We Learned about Being a First-Year Principal, Joseph Martin,
8. Native American Innovative Leadership: Motivations and Perspectives on Educational Change, Linda R. Vogel and Harvey A. Rude,
9. Indigenous Knowledge and Culture-Based Pedagogy: What Educators Serving Native Children in Mainstream Educational Institutions Must Know, Lisa Grayshield, Denny Hurtado, and Amileah Davis,
10. Concluding Remarks: Exploring Indigenous Leadership in the Journey to Self-Determination, Dorothy Aguilera–Black Bear,
Notes,
Index,