Indigenous Knowledges and the Story of the Bean

In this article, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy and Emma Maughn explore epistemic tensions within an Indigenous teacher preparation program where students question Western systems for creating, producing, reproducing, and valuing knowledge. Grounding their argument in a rich understanding of Indigenous Knowledge Systems,the authors advocate for an approach to training Indigenous teachers that recognizes the power of Indigenous Knowledge Systems, considers diverse knowledge systems equally, and equips teachers to make connections between various schooling practices and knowledge systems. Through the story of the bean, in which an Indigenous student teacher reconceptualizes a science lesson from a more holistic perspective,the authors illustrate the wealth of understanding and insight that Indigenous teachers bring to the education of Indigenous students, and they depict the possibilities for pre-service teaching programs in which university staff honor the inherent value of Indigenous perspectives

Indigenous Epistemologies and the Neoliberal View of Higher Education

In 1991, a woman who is a member of the Blackfoot tribe in Montana, named Eloise Cobell, was told by a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) offi cial to “learn how to read a fi nancial statement” when she raised questions regarding the state of trusts held by the federal government on behalf of American Indian tribal nations.1 She took the offi cial up on his recommendation, attended a local community college, and learned how to read accounting documents, spreadsheets, and business plans. Later, she determined what many in her community and other American Indian communities already knew. The United States federal government had abused its trust responsibility toward American Indian communities and mismanaged billions of dollars in trust funds from the sale of lands, natural resources leases, and other fi nancial endeavors.2 Recently, she successfully sued the federal government for its abuse of these trust responsibilities.3 Ms. Cobell’s investigation and subsequent fi ling of a lawsuit highlight the complicated relationship in which American Indians’ uses of formal structures of western education and initiatives help to assert sovereignty and self-determination for a larger group of Indigenous people. It is this relationship between the use of mainstream education, individual success, and community survival that allows us to critique neoliberalism through an Indigenous epistemologies lens

Learning to Take No for an Answer: Co-Designing Digital Experiences With Indigenous Youth in the Southwestern United States

Many Indigenous communities engaged in digital spaces are concerned with issues of sovereignty and intellectual property rights in relation to information that might be accessed online (Belarde-Lewis, 2013; Duarte, 2017). These concerns are further multiplied when Indigenous youth, who may not be fully aware of appropriate protocols for sharing information or maintaining its confidentiality, become producers in digital spaces. Yet, we know that youth becoming producers and not just consumers of digital technologies is an important aspect of access to and identification with STEM disciplines (Bell, Van Horne, & Cheng, 2017; Scott, Sheridan, & Clark, 2015), as well as a way to engage youth in aspects of culture they often perceive as “going dead” (Int., 6/15/17). In designing with Indigenous communities, how do we balance a desire for Indigenous youth to become critical producers of technology with community desires for privacy and protection of information, particularly around cultural heritage? In this paper, we explore what it means when an Indigenous community says “no” to researchers as part of the co-design process of developing culturally responsive computational making activities (Rode et al., 2015). Drawing on methodological approaches to design research with communities (Bang, Faber, Gurneau, Marin, & Soto, 2016; Brayboy, Gough, Leonard, Roehl, & Solyom, 2012; DiSalvo, Yip, Bonsignore, & DiSalvo, 2017; Smith, 2012), we frame our work in terms of the history of research in Indigenous communities that has led to such “no” moments. We then present data from a larger, five-year ethnographic engagement with a relatively small (10,000 enrolled members) Indigenous community in the Southwestern United States. Drawing on field notes, photographs, collection of relevant documents, interview transcripts, and youth-produced digital artifacts, we present two case studies of moments in the co-design process where community stakeholders, especially the community’s cultural relations department, told us no. In the first case, members of the research team proposed a superhero themed unit, which community stakeholders rejected because of a perceived clash of values between individual superheroes and the more communal-orientation of the community. In the second case, members of the research team proposed that youth would create virtual community tours of significant local sites, including the site of the first school in the community. However, stakeholders expressed concerns about youths’ respect for heritage and material culture. This led us away from working with the cultural resources department and towards working with the community relations department around engaging youth in documenting and sharing valuable aspects of their community with outsiders. Findings emphasize the importance of co-designing with community stakeholders and emphasize the value of taking a broader perspective on culture that moves beyond material and heritage culture to include expressions of contemporary Indigenous identities, such as tribally-owned business enterprises. Rather than viewing “no” as the end of the conversation, this paper makes a contribution to community-based co-design work by both recognizing the historical relationship between researchers and Indigenous peoples and demonstrating how “no” can be a productive locus for extending conversations into new directions

Cultural Repertoires: Indigenous Youth Creating With Place and Story

In this paper, we present an example of culturally-responsive making in the context of developing location-based community stories. Working with members of an Indigenous community in the Southwestern United States, we co-designed and implemented a two-week summer camp in which middle school youth used Augmented Reality and Interactive Storytelling (ARIS), a narrative-based programming tool, to create virtual community tours for the purpose of sharing the information they learned about tribally owned locations with others. We developed case studies of two groups of students who incorporated culture into their community tours of a tribally-owned golf course complex and stadium complex to address the following question: How did small groups of youth conceptualize culture and how did they integrate it into their community tours? In the discussion, we address what can we learn from youths\u27 design processes and completed products about designing culturally responsive learning experiences