Philip Stevens

In 2020, a three-day Tribal Nation Building in Higher Education Convening was held at the University of Idaho. This gathering brought together Indigenous professors, administrators, and allied collaborators to engage in deep discussion of nation-building as a framework for supporting Indigenous nationhood in higher education. This white paper details the findings of the dialogue drawing on a qualitative survey, over eighteen hours of discussion-based audio conversation between participants, and artifacts created by participants during the convening. The participating nation builders centered their engagements in Tribal Nation building in higher education around four salient concepts: decolonization, sovereignty, importance of place, and context specificity. Speaking from this foundational worldview, convening findings underscored collective struggles and successes in Tribal nation building efforts with and through institutions of higher education. We outline the struggles as emerging from six distinct but connected barriers to Tribal nation building: Bureaucratic obstruction; Gatekeeping; Leadership instability; Institutional isolation; Limited Indigenous faculty; Insufficient investment and prioritization. While consistent across contexts, barriers manifest differently determined by local context. Details about successes in Tribal nation building in higher education provided evidence to identify seven principles, or pillars, for higher educational systems that directly attends to the health and wellbeing of Tribal Nations and Native peoples: Representation, Community Building, Tribal Nation Involvement, Collaboration, Committed Leadership, Student Involvement, and Sustainability. We conclude this report with the seven principles as tangible structures to build strong university-Tribal relationships toward investing in thriving Tribal nations and changing the conditions of higher education for Native peoples.

Edgewalkers is a collection of diverse experiences in and apart from the westernized university. Through observations and positionalities narrated from various vantage points, authors recount the ways that the westernized university serves the knowledge enterprise of coloniality while considering its transformative possibilities. Presented in four sections— Section I: Land, places, and economy, Section II: Authority, power, and institutions, Section III: Normativity, being, and society, and Section IV: Knowledge, subjectivity, and praxis—the volume moves beyond traditional critiques of the westernized university structure and conventional connections between scholarship and social responsibility. Through scholarship that engages multiple lenses of ethics, politics, and poetics, authors explore the multiple ways that knowledge and spaces of knowing are produced as they share pellucid meanings of social and epistemic justice, decoloniality and embodiment, and vivid re-imaginings of what the university can be.

In globalizing landscapes, Indigenous ways of knowing and being persist in their connectedness to specific geographies, even as they are transformed by migrations, both forced and voluntary, and dynamic exchanges. This paper presents narratives of Indigenous and ally scholars which explore what it means to enact language and culture reclamation from a place of hope—by Indigenous peoples, for Indigenous communities—and in connection with distinct historical, political, and geographic sites. By naming the identities the authors represent—Chickasaw, Nez Perce, Eastern Shoshone/Northern Arapaho, Hopi, San Carlos Apache and Euro-American—we use a framework of hope to counter damaging assumptions of homogeneity of Indigenous communities while also searching for common themes to advance an agenda of decolonization across positionalities. Understanding that Indigenous sovereignties are built on “contingency with the beliefs, and understandings of the past” (Grande 250), we interrupt settler-colonial narratives which portray Indigenous languages and cultures as deficient and vanishing. Further, through narratives, we explore how disciplines such as linguistics, anthropology, education, and cultural studies can be interwoven to highlight experiences of identity reconciliation, spirituality through language revitalization, and storytelling as narrative reclamation. A critical culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy unifies the narratives and provides a framework for attending to “asymmetrical power relations and legacies of colonization” (McCarty and Lee 8). In this way, Indigenous narratives of persistence and optimism find relevance in the global and local here and now while emphasizing the relevancy of hope as a rooted practice of relationality in Indigenous language and cultural education. Sharing narratives of hope acknowledges the experience of colonization, while privileging the hope in Indigenous knowledge as a return to the community and generator of new narratives. Transmotion, Vol 5 No 1 (2019): Native American Narratives in a Global Context - guest edited by Eman Ghanayem and Rebecca Macklin