(Re)Imagining and Enacting Just Educational Futures for Indigenous Educators and Students Through Codesign with the Native Auntie Collective

Abstract

Western educational systems built from colonization, white supremacy, and assimilation are deeply ingrained in schools today (Brayboy, 2005; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006; Sabzalian, 2019). Native educators and teacher candidates navigate the tensions and realities of these systems daily. This dissertation explores the ways a group of six Native educators on Coast Salish lands (the Native Auntie Collective) imagined and enacted just Indigenous futures for themselves and their students in a self-determining space and through codesign. Introducing an umiak conceptual framework, this study explains the ways we cultivated relationality (Wilson, 2008) and grew our Indigenous praxis using the Transformative Indigenous Praxis Model (Pewewardy et al., 2018; Pewewardy et al., 2022) to design toward a collective aim. We engaged in the iterative and ongoing process of solidarity-driven codesign (Ishimaru & Bang, 2022) to theorize and design with our dreams and enactments of Indigenous futures across our contexts. Enactments came alive through the relation and Indigenous praxis of two educators at a tribal school and through the class books they created with students cultivating land, language, and culture relations. This study also explores how educators navigated the tensions of working within the colonizing structures of formal schooling and concludes by pointing toward the possibilities of cultivating relationality and praxis within and despite those systems. This study has research implications for schools, leaders, educators, tribal schools, Native communities, and those who are looking to be in solidarity with Native people and educators to imagine and enact outcomes where Indigeneity and Indigenous lifeways are thriving.