Resurgent Education as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Resurgent Education as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Leilani Sabzalian, Michelle M. Jacob, and Roshelle Weiser-Nieto

In this paper, we describe and analyze the ways in which we center the importance of kinship and relationality in an Indigenous education seminar. Throughout the seminar, we invite Indigenous teacher candidates to turn inward to see, learn from, and teach about the brilliance of their own lands, languages, and communities. We view our work as thinking with Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s beautiful vision of resurgent education. We do this work in collaboration with Tux ámshish Dr. Virginia Beavert, Yakama Tribal Elder, who serves as a mentor in our program. We focus on three key points that advance our vision of resurgent education as decolonial feminist praxis:

1) Relationality is power;

2) Land is a nurturing teacher who constantly extends power to us;

3) Creating space for resurgence requires challenging colonial relations of power. We conclude that our project is a form of decolonial feminist praxis and invite our feminist colleagues to see themselves as part of and responsible for this vital work.

Keywords: Elders / Indigenous education / Indigenous feminisms / Land / Relationality / Resurgence / Teacher education

Hanging on the wall of a small conference room in our Sapsik’wałá (Teacher) Education Program of ce suite is a beautiful blanket based on the ancient and complex Indigenous Northwest Coast practice of Chilkat weaving. A cultural reading of this blanket might emphasize the beauty and intricacy of the Northwest Coast formline design by Tlingit artist Richard Dalton III, who adapted the blanket design from a 19th century Chilkat blanket. Indeed, the blanket should be appreciated for its cultural aesthetics. A political reading of the blanket, however, would emphasize not only the beauty and skill woven into the blanket, but also the survivance Indigenous peoples have embodied

©2023 Feminist Formations, Vol. 35 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 195–220

so that Chilkat weaving could persist despite colonial policies and practices of dispossession and erasure. That the blanket was purchased from Eighth Generation, a Native-owned company that supports “Inspired Natives” rather than “Native-inspired” art, adds another layer of meaning. A political reading would also illuminate the contested space in which the blanket hangs, a small conference room that was transformed into a student room for our Indigenous teacher education program. This student room was not generously given to our program by benevolent university administrators, but strategically advocated for as part of Michelle’s job negotiations. The blanket also was not given to our program out of generosity but gifted to Michelle after a longstanding dispute over the institution supporting Indigenous education symbolically, but without nancial, scholarship or personnel supports to operationalize that expressed commitment. In this reading, the blanket re ects institutional neglect and betrayal, as well as a erce Indigenous feminist ethic and praxis of holding institutions accountable for Indigenous peoples' concerns and priorities.

Figure 1 Richard Dalton III (Tlingit), “Blanket of Knowledge,” adapted from a classic 19th century Chilkat blanket, Yaakoosge X’óow features Raven the creator. Courtesy of Eighth Generation. https://eighthgeneration.com/products/blanket-of-knowledge -throw-blanket

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As Indigenous feminists asserting our presence on a university campus, we relate to this blanket. Like the blanket, we have been admired for our beauty, but not our survivance, skill, or tenacity; we have been asked to talk about Indigenous cultures, perhaps give a land acknowledgement, but ignored or despised when we advocate for our political commitments to Indigenous peoples. And just as the blanket serves as a memory of colonialism and survivance we too remember the ways institutions have sought to erase or betray us.

As a symbol of the colonial context in which we work, as well as the brilliance of Indigenous knowledge systems, the blanket reminds us that even though we must advocate ercely for Indigenous education within the colonial contexts of the university, we also cannot let that advocacy overshadow or distract us from the vital work of nurturing Indigenous brilliance. The blanket is also an expression of resurgence, the focus of our next section.

Resurgent Education

Resurgence offers an important framework for decolonial feminist praxis in education. Indigenous studies scholars forward resurgence as processes and practices that can regenerate Indigenous lifeways and nations and realize Indigenous futurities (Aikau 2015; Corntassel 2012, Corntassel et al. 2018, Simpson 2011, 2017). Here we respectfully draw from Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson’s work, as her theory and practice of resurgent education shape our own goals within an Indigenous teacher education program. In her rst theorizing of resurgence, Simpson (2011) wrote that resurgence involves “signi cantly re-investing in our own ways of being: regenerating our political and intellectual traditions, articulating and living our legal systems; language learning; ceremonial and spiritual pursuits; creating and using our artistic and performance-based traditions. All of these require us—as individuals and collectives—to diagnose, interrogate, and eviscerate the insidious nature of conquest, empire and imperial thought in every aspect of our lives” (17–18).

Resurgence moves away from approaches to social change that center and contest colonial relations of power, toward practices of nurturing Indigenous relationality and systems of intelligence (Simpson 2017). As Aikau (2015) offers, “Indigenous resurgence focuses on those things that restore a sense of individual and communal responsibility for our language, histories, territories, ceremonial cycles, and intellectual practices” (656). Though settler colonialism can “explain how Indigenous peoples became disconnected from our lands, languages, histories, and ceremonial cycles,” it cannot explain “how to transform the system or to envision an Indigenous futurity” (Aikau 2019, 84). This is why, we believe, Simpson (2017) has advocated that for Indigenous communities, “our most important work is internal” (6).

Resurgence recognizes that alternatives to our present colonial realities will come, not from investing more time and energy into the state, but by nurturing

the alternative realities that lie within Indigenous intelligence and systems of relationality. Resurgence comes from the “reinvigoration of Indigenous systemic alternatives—alternatives that have already produced sustainable, beautiful, principled societies” (Simpson 2017, 49). For us, resurgent education involves helping future Indigenous teachers recognize the power of their own knowledge systems and embody and communicate that value to their students. As a form of decolonizing feminist praxis, resurgent education is about “making power” within Indigenous communities “to reclaim indigenous traditions, bodies, languages, and homelands” (Jacob 2013, 6). To do so, we are part of a longstanding tradition that Kiowa scholar Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Starr Minthorn and Wichita scholar Heather J. Shotton report in their study of Indigenous women in higher education, carrying “forward the teachings and values” of our Indigenous communities and utilizing them as “resources and inspiration” to guide our journeys (2019, 8). In particular, we emphasize the value of Tma’áakni (Respect) (Jacob, Gonzales, Finley, and RunningHawk Johnson 2019).

As an Indigenous teacher education program that relies upon funding secured by faculty in competitive federal and state grant competitions and that is enmeshed within state licensure requirements that are deeply entangled with and invested in coloniality (Tuck and Gorlewski 2019), we recognize the contradictions and limits of enacting resurgent education within such an institutional and colonial context. We recognize the complexities and messiness of decolonial work and do our best to repurpose universities to advance Indigenous desires (la paperson 2017; Smith 2012), including desires for self-determination and nation building (Brayboy, Fann, Castagno, and Solyom 2012; Brayboy, Solyom, and Castagno 2014). We also hear Simpson’s critique that “postsecondary education provides few useful skillsets to those” wanting to shift relations between Indigenous nations and the state, or “learn to think in the most complex ways possible within the networked system of Indigenous intelligence” (14). While it remains an open question for us whether we can further resurgent education within a predominantly white institution, we are driven by a sense of relational accountability to both the Indigenous students we serve and the Native nations who are our partners in this work. As Smith and Smith (2019) have argued, “Indigenous work in the academy is an important part of the process of decolonization because the academy plays such a signi cant role in the production and legitimation of knowledge” (1085).

Having a say in who will become a teacher in our communities and how they will be prepared to support the next generation of Indigenous children is a project that we take seriously in order to counter the ongoing epistemic violence of settler colonialism and create space to reclaim Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Though “turning away from the state” is a core tenet of resurgence, it “does not mean complete disengagement”; rather, it requires self-re exivity on our part of “the limitations of certain strategic engagements with the state” (Corntassel 2021, 75). For us, this involves working to decenter state power in

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the process of determining who is quali ed to become an Indigenous educator. We have accomplished important work in this regard, advocating successfully for the removal of high stakes content knowledge exams and creating an alternative, holistic assessment to evaluate content knowledge, which has been accepted by our state’s teacher licensure commission. These strategic engagements with the state have helped create space to foreground our own values and visions of Indigenous teacher education.

Our decolonial feminist praxis is driven by a sense of hopefulness and a practical desire to see what we can do to support Indigenous education within whitestream academic spaces (Grande 2015), as we are not yet willing to cede these spaces to the institution. We try to use the time and space we have with future Indigenous educators to help them reconnect with their own systems of intelligence and power, so that they, in turn, can do the same with their future students. Internally to our university-based program, we support the Indigenous educators we prepare to think critically and carefully about the purpose of education and what counts as knowledge. This involves helping future Indigenous educators realize that “[e]ducation cannot just be about shifting our children into the urban middle class,” but “must be about turning our children inwards” (Simpson 2017, 80) toward the brilliance of their own lands, lifeways, and systems of intelligence. This is challenging work given the layers of federal, state, and university colonial bureaucracy we navigate, but we remain hopeful. We note on an ongoing basis that the struggles we engage and labor we undertake bene t Indigenous students, and all students. Indeed, creating exibility within rigid oppressive bureaucracies is a primary way that we can “diversify the educator pathway,” which state bureaucracies claim is one of their highest priorities. Our efforts highlight a relationship between insurgent and resurgent education (Corntassel 2011). While careful to not let external advocacy overshadow our internal work, outward-facing efforts to “educate policymakers and the general public on the history of indigenous self-determination” are often critical to creating spaces for resurgence (Corntassel and Witmer 2008, 147). Said differently, our decolonial feminist praxis within a whitestream institution engages in anticolonial and decolonial praxis (Patel, 2016) to unsettle coloniality and create physical and curricular space to recognize and nurture Indigenous brilliance. Our desire-based approach (Tuck, 2009) to Indigenous teacher education recognizes that complexities, contradictions, and hope are core features of decolonial feminist praxis within whitestream institutions. We are engaged in important Indigenous futurity work, recognizing that “our institutions will never change if we do not dream big and take critical steps toward those dreams” (Lipe, 2018, 165).

In this article, we share examples of how we engage this precious and liberatory work. We detail how we approach this work, acknowledge our successes and limitations, and conclude with our vision of Indigenous futurities in teacher education. Our Indigenous communities have longstanding traditions of inviting

guests with “good hearts” to listen and learn from us. Following this tradition, we share information here that we believe will be bene cial to a broad audience. We invite you to sit with us, learn with us, and take what we share to further your own work to repurpose universities to advance Indigenous desires.

As we describe in this article, this is ongoing and imperfect work: we smuggle in Indigenous values, practices, and thought wherever we can. We prioritize relationality in our work with each other and with students. We work to strengthen the sense of kinship students feel with each other and within their own communities. We ask students to interview youth and Elders in their communities, to teach each other about their nations, lands, languages, and lifeways. In this way, we are af rming an Indigenous feminist practice of honoring “our extended kin networks . . . largely managed by women through an ethics of inter-relationality and responsibility” (Anderson 2019, 123). We remind students that the state’s public education system is so new, so young compared to their communities’ understanding and practices of education. And most importantly, we model this by fostering an intergenerational community and valuing Elder knowledge. We created a new position in our College, Distinguished Elder Educator, now held by Tu xámshish Dr. Virginia Beavert of the Yakama Nation (hereafter Tu xámshish), who as we share below, guides and supports our work.

Context of Our Program

Students in our program are completing a rigorous master’s degree and teacher licensure program of study. The coursework and requirements are set by whitestream educators who usually do not have a meaningful relationship with any Indigenous communities. In the past, Indigenous students were required to attend seminars and workshops outside of the whitestream curriculum, but it was all extracurricular, and none of that work was credit-bearing or even visible on a transcript. One meaningful change, then, was to claim space in the curriculum by having the year-round seminar count for credits, with the option to replace one class in the whitestream curriculum. Notably, the seminar is also the only opportunity for most students to have an Indigenous instructor in their graduate career. The seminar, then, is the space that anchors much of what we discuss in this manuscript. One of the ways we use the seminar space to nurture Indigenous brilliance is to help students see how they already have vast knowledge of effective educational systems that they have witnessed and experienced in their families and communities. For example, we discuss the role of Elders as our most revered culture keepers and teachers within our communities. We then note how within Western education systems it is most common to have classroom spaces that exclude Elders. Such a practice is limiting and epistemically violent. How can students become highly quali ed teachers if they themselves have no opportunity to engage with Elders? It is becoming more common for universities

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to create positions like Elder in Residence. At our academic institution we are fortunate to have two such positions. We created one position, Distinguished Elder Educator, and we are grateful Tu xámshish chooses to collaborate with us through her serving in this role. Tu xámshish attends seminars, speaks at university events, and in non-COVID times, regularly attends meals and gatherings at the longhouse on campus. She lives on campus during the academic year, and students often take her food and gifts, a beautiful practice of relationality from our home communities. Tu xámshish is patient with us as collaborators, and with our students. She reminds them of the importance of working with Elders in their home communities and families—that she can share what she knows, but she is only one person and they should be seeking out and working with other Elders. Tu xámshish regularly reminds us of the importance of kinship as a foundational part of any Indigenous education effort. Our work directly supports “amplifying and renewing Indigenous family leadership and engagement in systems of education that aim to support Indigenous communities’ resurgence” (Bang, Montaño Nolan, and McDaid-Morgan 2019, 789).

A Note on Methodology

What follows are lessons we have learned from our work engaging resurgent education within our institution. We came to these insights by sharing and listening to one another. Just as Muscogee poet Joy Harjo (1994, paragraph 1) has written that “The world begins at a kitchen table,” so too did our paper, a methodology embodied by other feminists (Lyiscott et al. 2021). Below, we highlight key ndings from our talks together, which include our emphasis on relationality, the importance of land, and the advocacy work required to create space for resurgent education within whitestream institutions.

Resurgent Education as Decolonial Feminist Praxis

Relationality is power

Relationality lies at the heart of the Sapsik’wałá Program and our work with future Indigenous educators. Our program speci cally fosters relationality through three types of Indigenous community— Consortium, Cohort, and Communities of Practice. Our program operates in consortium with the nine federally recognized tribal nations in Oregon, a process that fosters meaningful relationships and shares power with Native nations in the state. Our students form a cohort of Indigenous educators within the broader cohort of students within the master’s program, to reduce their isolation and foster a sense of community within one another. Moreover, our students learn within an Indigenous community of practice, an Indigenous education seminar where students process with one another their unique experiences and aspirations of becoming Indigenous educators of Indigenous youth.

Our emphasis on consortium, cohort, and communities of practice helps contextualize how relationality is embedded within our program, a value and praxis that complements our efforts to nurture a higher educational environment rooted in respect, relevance, reciprocity, and responsibility (Kirkness and Barnhardt, 1991). In this section, we focus primarily on relationships fostered within our Indigenous education seminar. Supporting students to recognize that relationality is a form of power and to strengthen and sustain relationships among students and their relationships to their families, communities, and homelands, is core to our understanding and practice of resurgent education.

Relationality with each other

Public schools and universities typically reproduce and reward a sense of individualism and competition among students (Grande 2015), colonial and capitalist logics rooted in scarcity that undermine relationality. Universities in particular can also be cold, competitive spaces that neglect students’ cultural knowledges and community connections (Fong et al. 2019). Our program structure is grounded in a decolonial feminist praxis that recognizes and nurtures relationality, a counter to colonial and capitalist logics typically privileged within universities. It is a space where we engage in the Indigenous feminist practice of visiting, “a relating that is imbued with accountability, vulnerability, and mutuality” (Tuck et al. 2022, 2).

Our cohort within a cohort model is a structural commitment to offering Sapsik’wałá students a space where they can remain true to their Indigenous values, cultures, and familial beliefs. Guided by Tu xámshish, who has advised us to focus on kinship within the Indigenous education seminar, we work to foster and strengthen the sense of relationality students feel with each other in their cohorts, with the Indigenous faculty and Indigenous graduate students who support them, and with the broader network of alumni they will be part of upon graduation, a community that now includes over 100 other Indigenous educators. We intentionally nurture a sense of extended family among students and faculty during their time on campus and away from home, a practice that re ects higher education research ndings that “replicating the extended family structure within the college culture enhances the student’s sense of belonging and leads to higher retention rates” (HeavyRunner and DeCelles 2002, 29). For us, our focus on kinship also embodies a decolonial feminist praxis of refusing heteronormative and biological understandings of family, and instead, recognizes family as “big, beautiful, diverse, extended multiracial families of relatives and friends that care very deeply for each other” and that includes “a web of connections to each other, to the plant nations, the animal nations, the rivers and lakes, the cosmos, and our neighboring Indigenous nations” (Simpson 2017, 8– 9). Our intergenerational learning community provides a nourishing space focused on reciprocity, as we all learn from one another and the people and places that are important to us. We believe the importance placed on relationships contributes

signi cantly to the success of the program and the Native graduates who return to tribal communities to be educators.

As a Sapsik’wałá alumni returned to the program as a graduate employee, I (Roshelle) can also testify that the connections developed through the program have been vital to my own success in academia and those relationships have been long-lasting. Existing in an Indigenous body on campus can be a culture shock and feel isolating, however, our program was where I could fully and authentically be myself. I could talk about my struggles, spirituality, and feelings of imposter syndrome, and I knew my professors and fellow cohort members would be able to resonate with and support me. Indigenous erasure is a structural feature of many universities (Shotton, Lowe, and Waterman 2013), but our presence as a cohort de ed that erasure and served as a source of strength and power. When we walked across campus or into one of our classes as a group, we felt powerful, a rare feeling on a predominately white campus. We could take up the sidewalk space instead of being forced aside or even run into on some occasions. When someone would say something problematic in class, we did not feel like a lone voice speaking up. Feelings of community and care from my cohort members and faculty carried into my career as an educator as well. I often reached out to my cohort members when I needed support, whether it was school-related or not. We stayed in touch, celebrating life milestones, promotions in our careers, and got to be aunties and uncles to each other’s children.

As a program, we feel a sense of responsibility to nurture that sense of relationality among our alumni, recognizing that our responsibilities do not end when students graduate. Beyond arranging for paid mentors for our students during their rst two years of teaching, we created an Alumni Network and hosted an Alumni Summit in which our alumni could come together, reconnect, network, and share ideas. The keynote speaker at our rst summit was Tu xámshish who encouraged us all to keep going and emphasized the importance of continuing our work in education with a good and strong heart. Many of our attendees commented how supportive it felt to be in relation with fellow Indigenous educators and were grateful to have the time to come together, reconnect, and spend time in conversation. Our alumni encouraged us to keep up the momentum of collective learning, and our program has continued this tradition by making the summit an annual event.

Relationality with our Elders

“Imínk nam pinatkinanita ttáwaxt wiya’ utpa.” This quote by Tu xámshish hangs on the wall adjacent to our beautiful blanket in the Sapsik’wałá student conference room our program worked so hard for and means, “Look to your roots for guidance.” Elders are our traditional knowledge and culture bearers, and it is an honor and blessing to learn from and look to Tu xámshish for guidance (Archibald 2008). She comes to all of our seminars, listens thoughtfully to our students, and advises students and staff with stories, re ections, and instructions

from her own experiences and traditional knowledge. She models humility and wisdom, often expressing, “I don’t know everything, but I am happy to share what I do know.” Tu xámshish urges all of us to engage our Elders and encourages students and teachers to work with Elders from their Tribes and families. One of the student’s seminar homework assignments is to connect with a cherished Elder in their life and have a conversation with them. Students then share what they learned from Elders in their communities, including lessons on taking care of our health, encouragement to do well in school, and reminders to walk with respect, humility, bravery, and love.

For us, centering Elders and Elder knowledge is an important counter to the Eurocentric and epistemically violent practice of excluding Elders in education and privileging academic knowledge. Our decolonial feminist praxis draws on the strengths of Elder knowledge, through structural changes, such as the Distinguished Elder Educator position we created, as well as privileging Elder speakers and writers, such as Tu xámshish (Beavert, Jacob, and Jansen 2021; Beavert 2017) and Kussamwhy (Wilkins 2008), among others. Fostering an Elder-guided, intergenerational learning community has been core to our decolonial feminist praxis as Elders often hold important knowledge that can compel “ ightpath[s] out of settler colonialism” (Simpson 2017, 17).

Relationality with youth

“Maybe if we call attention to the young generation they might also help make things better” (Beavert 2017, 160). Our emphasis on fostering an intergenerational learning community not only involves valuing Elders, but perhaps most importantly for future Indigenous teachers, involves fostering relationships with youth. Tu xámshish shares that we have much knowledge to gain from the youth in our communities, and af rms the importance of developing and maintaining relationships with our young people. We actively resist a “top-down view” or “savior complex” around what it means to be in relationship with our youth (Bird-Naytowhow 2017, 3). In contrast to pedagogies rooted in adult supremacy, our decolonial feminist praxis foregrounds reciprocity when developing relationships with young people, understanding they teach us just as much as we teach them (Wilson 2008). For this reason, another seminar homework assignment is to have our Sapsik’wałá students reach out to and connect with a treasured young person in their life. Some insights gleaned from the youth in their lives included stories of humor, pride, strength, and lessons of the importance of being a role model and making wise choices to stay on the right path. Our emphasis on recognizing the brilliance of children aligns with Indigenous understandings of kinship that cherish children and recognize their rights, responsibilities, and capacities to make important contributions to the community as a whole (Simpson 2017).

Relationships with families

“Family is seen as of utmost importance for many Indigenous people. Family is what holds us in relationship as individuals and bridges us as individuals into our communities and nations” (Wilson 2008, 86). Through seminar, we encourage students to be kinship-centered and put family rst, a value Indigenous faculty model to ensure the future Indigenous educators experience the importance of developing strong relationships with not only their students but also the student’s families and communities. Aligned with Tu xámshish’s guidance to focus on kinship, our resurgent educational approach also centers knowledge passed down from generation to generation. Through our seminar assignments, we encourage students to share the traditional and cultural knowledge embedded in their family histories, stories, and communities. This invitation counters epistemic supremacy by showing students we value their familial and community knowledge and that we can all learn from their valuable teachings. Our students often share stories of their loved ones, and we enjoy seeing pictures of students’ families and precious teachers who share these knowledges, including their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and children. In valuing students’ families, we af rm who our students are and where they come from, sending the message that our students’ cultural ways of knowing and being are important forms of knowledge. By af rming that families are a key context in which Indigenous education and everyday resurgence occur (Bang et al. 2019; San Pedro 2020), we encourage students to recognize that the “teachers” in their families and communities are important knowledge keepers, and the students themselves are important in this circle of relations because they are learners and sharers of this important knowledge.

Our Sapsik’wałá seminars are also a place where families are welcome. When we were able to meet in person, students were welcome to bring their children. We would have meals and our students and staff could bring their loved ones, and these times were full of laughter, connection, and joy. When we moved to remote learning due to COVID-19, we would still see each other’s families, human and more than human, in the background and give them a smile and wave. Seminars are a space where we could be together with fellow Native-kin which was especially important while we were all remote. Some of our students and staff experienced signi cant losses during that time and were not able to travel home to gather for important ceremonies. We were able to support one another, listen, and care for one another as we processed our grief and isolation. These are all small, yet important, ways of af rming Indigenous identity and making space for the power of Indigenous culture and knowledge in Western education settings. We are taking back education through resurgence and placing our people and knowledges at the center.

Our emphasis on relationality is core to our decolonial feminist praxis of resurgent education. By nurturing the vast and beautiful networks that connect students to each other, the youth and Elders in their communities, and their

families, we are reaf rming relationality as a key source of Indigenous power. Further, by foregrounding relationality in our everyday work with Indigenous educators, we are nurturing futurities in education that value relationality. Our emphasis on relationality also includes students’ relationships to Land, and the vast network of life those lands sustain.

Land is a Nurturing Teacher Who Constantly Extends Power to Us

As we shared in the previous section, family stories are one way to share landbased knowledge. Students share how they learn about their homelands, traditional stories, and build meaningful relationships with sacred foods through listening to, observing, and remembering the teachings their grandparents, aunties, uncles, parents, siblings, and friends generously share with them. This is, of course, how education has always taken place in our Indigenous communities. It is a joy to witness students sharing the deep base of knowledge they bring with them. Such knowledges are not always honored, af rmed, or even noticed in Western education settings. This is a Eurocentric and epistemically violent trend in whitestream education that we enjoy disrupting in our program (Battiste 2000; 2013; Kuokkanen 2007). Our program counters this violence through the decolonial feminist commitment that “story is Indigenous theory” (Million 2014, 35) and the belief that the Indigenous theories that inform our students’ lives are vital to their future practice as Indigenous educators. Building upon the strengths of family and community teachings that students bring with them, we also take up resurgent education by engaging Indigenous land education (Tuck, McKenzie and McCoy 2014). COVID has provided us with the opportunity to engage students in this work in diverse ways. For example, we engage traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) as homework and sharing assignments. One Diné/Navajo student completed her TEK homework assignment by creating a beautiful set of slides that taught the spiritual, relational, technical, artistic, scienti c, and cultural signi cance of the processes involved in gathering, preparing, and completing a rug weaving. The student learned this process from her grandmother. In the sharing of her assignment, it was clear that the photos of her grandmother’s sheep farm brought the student an overwhelming sense of love, strength, and gratitude. Seeing her beloved Indigenous homeland and having the opportunity to share it with her classmates and program faculty and staff was a gift to honor and af rm the deep wisdom and knowledge her grandmother had shared with her, as well as a gift to all of us who witnessed the homework presentation. We were struck by the vast amount of knowledge it takes to properly sheer and prepare sheep wool, identify, gather, and process the plants used to dye wool, and to expertly weave the wool once all the materials are prepared. In this one assignment, we were gifted with ideas of how to use TEK in classroom lessons for science, math, English, ethnic studies, social studies, and we had concrete ways of how

Indigenous language could be integrated throughout: naming the plants, seasons/ months when different activities take place, relationship/kinship terms, verbs for the different actions involved, and even simple things like numbers (of sheep, of plants, of steps of the weaving process), as well as colors. For some of us, the southwestern desert does not automatically seem to be a place with a vast array of plant dyes available. The student’s presentation disrupted this assumption, and it taught us about the wealth of resources in her homeland and the good care her people have always taken to be in good relation with their more than human relatives. It invited us to notice the tremendous resources we have all around us, which we can only engage if we are aware, humble, and willing to be in good relation with our environment.

Through the TEK homework assignments, students are provided with an opportunity to learn about and share their cultures, and important resources to their people. The seminar is structured so that each student shares in every class gathering. Kinship is a main theme for our seminar that our Elder mentor, Tu xámshish Dr. Beavert, has encouraged us to use. By inviting the students to think and share about important TEK resources for their Indigenous communities, we are reminding them of their more than human kinship network. As Tu xámshish reminds us, when we are mindful of all the precious relatives surrounding us in our environment, we can avoid struggling with feelings of loneliness or alienation. She reminds us: You are never alone; your kin is always around you.

In the seminar, we require students to read Tu xámshish’s book, The Gift of Knowledge. This beautiful book is based on Dr. Beavert’s dissertation. She came back to school in her 80s to earn a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Oregon. In doing so, she stepped into leadership roles at the Northwest Indian Language Institute and Department of Linguistics, and she created the Ichishkíin Language Program at the university, which is the leading institution in the world for training students to speak, read, and write Ichishkíin, an endangered Indigenous language. A full two years of the language is offered and Tu xámshish’s students are leading in elds of linguistics, history, and education. We share this information to af rm that Elder-in-Residence positions, which are becoming more common at universities, are critical because of the high standards and rigor to which Elders hold themselves and us. We like to remind our students, who sometimes re ect on the challenges and dif culties of graduate school that yes, it is tough. And Tu xámshish did that, and more, in her 80s and 90s. It is a joy to discuss Tu xámshish’s book with the students and having Tu xámshish participate and witness this. In one section of the book, Tu xámshish discusses the traditional practice of seeking one’s power (similar to what other Tribes call a vision quest). At one point in the seminar, students had the courage to share they had not gone through that traditional practice, and they wondered if somehow their identities were lacking in some way. Tu xámshish has a beautiful, nurturing, and af rming way of responding. She shared with us: Power is in the

world and in you. She gave us important homework: Go outside and be quiet. There is power around you!

As we mentioned, this important teaching happened in the context of students discussing seminar reading about seeking one’s power. Students re ected that they hadn’t done this, that this component of cultural teachings was not present in their upbringing, and there seemed to be a sense of loss or perhaps a questioning of whether one’s identity was somehow weaker because of decisions that parents/guardians made to not engage that particular traditional practice. And Tu xámshish shared that one component of that teaching is always available to all of us—if we simply go out onto the land (“go outside”) and be open to the teachings (“be quiet; pay attention”). In this generative way, Tu xámshish reminded us to not be limited to focusing on what we don’t have, rather, to have the courage and bravery to acknowledge what we do have available to us. In this case, she challenged us to connect to the power of place af rming the longstanding Indigenous pedagogical principal that land is an important teacher (Styres, 2011).

Creating an intergenerational learning community that values Elders, land-based knowledge, and Indigenous languages is one of the ways we disrupt whitestream education at our university. We recognize that schools have been “spaces of [w]hiteness, [w]hite rage, and [w]hite supremacy, all of which function to terrorize students of color” (Love 13). For Indigenous students in particular, education has been used as a weapon of settler colonialism to eliminate Indigenous peoples as Indigenous peoples, re ecting the “monocultural aspirations” of the nation-state (Simpson 2014, 22), and the settler project of dispossessing Indigenous homelands and undermining Indigenous nation building. One way to resist this ongoing oppression is to provide space for Indigenous students to reclaim the relationships, knowledges, and practices that settler society has intentionally tried to sever. We do this in multiple ways. For example, students share phrases and sentences in their Indigenous languages, and we all practice listening, learning, reading, and speaking each other’s Indigenous languages. Due to the diversity of our cohorts, we typically have 5 Indigenous languages represented, nearly all of which are endangered due to the assimilationist and violent history of Western education in Indigenous communities. We also share TEK resources/relations of the day with students re ecting on how they are relating to their own Indigenous homelands—e.g., water, snow and acknowledging that our fresh drinking water is connected to the snowpack in the mountains in our region; the health and well-being of that land is connected to the health and well-being of all peoples and more than human relations downstream. Finally, we feature a Kinship term of the day that connects students with their languages and provides opportunities for sharing about relatives who are important teachers to them. Often these assignments and activities will prompt students to call or visit relatives and friends they have “not had time to connect with” but they’ve prioritized these connections due to the homework in our seminar. What a joy

it is to hear about a loving phone call with a parent, grandparent, or auntie. Any use of Indigenous language is a step toward healing the wounds Western education has in icted in our communities. As Tu xámshish states, “Language is important for everyone. That is part of your spirit of life” (Beavert 2017, 159). One of the main inspirations for our seminar is the point that our strength and healing always comes from our Indigenous lands, communities, and cultures. Each moment that our students (and we) can engage and live this is a step forward in resurgent education as decolonial feminist praxis.

Creating Space for Resurgence Requires Challenging Colonial Relations of Power

Our nal takeaway we share in this manuscript is that the spaces forged for resurgent education within universities must continually be fought for and defended. Creating space for resurgent education requires challenging colonial relations of power. Colonialism is constantly “shape-shifting” in its methods to eliminate Indigenous peoples (Corntassel 2012). Indigenous erasure has a gravitational pull. Even as universities express support for Indigenous programs, institutional policies and practices that underfund programs, overwork program faculty, or disregard the knowledges, experiences, and political commitments of Indigenous faculty subtly work to undermine these programs. We know this pattern intimately.

Every few years, the federal government opens a new grant competition to support Indigenous teacher education, and every few years, we request (then remind, then demand) support from our college, Provost, and President’s of ce to make our grant application competitive, and more importantly, our program stronger and more sustainable. Strongly worded emails, public shaming, letters of support from our constituents, even threats to resign are all strategies we have used to secure basic support for our program. We have been successful in securing support from the university, in part, because our program operates in consortium with the nine federally recognized tribal nations of Oregon, and we believe university administrators hope to remain on good terms with these nations. While grateful for the support we have received, we also wish that we didn’t have to spend so much time and energy reminding the institution of its responsibilities to support Indigenous students and Indigenous education.

Predominantly white institutions are not hospitable spaces for us as Indigenous feminists, or for our knowledge systems (Kuokkanen 2003, 2007); whitestream institutions are not good hosts. Hospitality, as Kuokkanen (2003) writes, is a “fundamental openness to the other” (267) and requires relational accountability, responsibility, and reciprocity. Universities re ect society’s broader structures of imperialism, colonialism, and Indigenous erasure (Patel 2021) and “often have systems and practices that maintain and reproduce this situation and the privileges infused within it” (Smith and Smith 2019, 1093–1094). To create space

for resurgent education within the university, we have had to engage in what Ahmed (2021) calls complaint as feminist pedagogy (7), the “counterinstitutional work” of complaint activism. We have had to name and complain the speci c ways institutional policies and practices reproduce Indigenous erasure and work against the aims of our program. We have had to make visible the institutional mechanics (25) that undermine Indigenous education and go to “work on the institution” (282).

Just as we must be critical, strategic, and self-re exive of our engagements with the state, we must also have a critical relationship with our own institutions. “Trying to address an institutional problem means inhabiting the institution all the more” (Ahmed 2021, 275–276). Even as we recognize the potential of the academy “to facilitate the positive transformation of Indigenous life and aspirations,” we must also recognize that “it can also be a major in uence in the continued colonization and oppression of Indigenous Peoples, their knowledge, language, and culture” (Smith and Smith 2019, 1077). Presuming our complicity, rather than “our own criticality” (Ahmed 2012, 5), by understanding the potential for university work to reproduce existing relations of domination is necessary so that we remain re exive about our own complicity, committed to subverting this colonial legacy, and answerable (Patel 2016) to our students and communities in the process.

Universities are colonial, but they are also sites that re ect Indigenous feminist praxis and survivance. The types of resurgent educational spaces we have described—whether a physical space, like the student room where students can smudge or gather, or curricular spaces, such as time with a Distinguished Elder Educator or the four-credit seminar that provides students time and space to re ect on their responsibilities as Indigenous educators—have not been granted to us benevolently by the institution, but were created and advocated for by us as Indigenous faculty. These spaces re ect the various ways we have tried to “hotwire” the institution to support Indigenous desires and re ect the reality that “[w]ithin the colonizing university also exists a decolonizing education” (la paperson 2017, xiii). Given that the settler colonial drive to erase and replace Indigeneity is a structuring practice of the university (la paperson 2017; Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández 2013), these spaces must be protected and defended.

Indigenous education within the context of colonial institutions requires such advocacy given that, as Mvskoke scholar Tsianina Lomwaima (2000) has written, “the history of American Indian education can be described in three simple words: battle for power” (2). That battle for power permeates the legacy of our own program. As Rosiek and Snyder (2020) have documented, our program was initially founded in 2002, funded by a professional development grant from the Of ce of Indian Education. However, three years after its inception, Native students in the Sapsik’wałá Program became frustrated with the racism they experienced from students and faculty, and the program’s inability to prepare

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them to be Indigenous educators. Students worked through the prescribed departmental and college protocols and channels to address their concerns, including con ict resolution with an external mediator who agreed the College had a responsibility to make program changes; however, the College buried the report and ignored their concerns. In response, the students organized a protest where they publicly shamed the very institution that recruited them, a protest that was joined by students from across campus, community members, and local educators and activists who had long felt ignored and betrayed by the College. The public protests eventually led to the removal of the department head and Dean, substantial structural changes to curriculum within the master’s program, four new degree programs, and the hiring of an Indigenous faculty member to lead the program. These complaints came at great personal cost to some of the students who would never personally reap the bene t of the resources they helped secure for future students. But the future-oriented praxis of these students was not just a “no” to the College. As Ahmed (2021) observes, “to make a complaint is often to ght for something” (26). Sapsik’wałá students were not only contesting their own oppression; they were complaining for of the type of education that they and future Sapsik’wałá students deserved. Our own work is indebted to this legacy of courageous and creative student organizing, and we take seriously our responsibilities to continue this work. We worked, as Ahmed described, to “become a feminist ear”: “Becoming a feminist ear meant not only hearing the complaints; it meant sharing the work. It meant becoming part of their collective. Their collective became ours. I think of that ours as the promise of feminism, ours not as a possession but as an invitation, an opening, a combining of forces” (6 –7). Being a feminist ear is a responsibility. We see ourselves in relation to a broader “complaint collective” (Ahmed 2021) committed to Indigenous presence within an institution predicated on Indigenous erasure. Supporting resurgent education within the colonial context of the university requires active, critical, and conscious work to contest Indigenous erasure and forge what Lomawaima and McCarty (2014) have termed “zones of sovereignty.” Zones of sovereignty describe the spaces actively carved out by Indigenous peoples to protect and promote “expressions of Indigeneity” and that nurture “practices of creative self-determination toward goals of equity, justice, tolerance, and mutual well-being” (65– 66). Zones of sovereignty must also be understood in relation to what Lomawaima and McCarty (2006; 2014) have termed the “safety zone,” a framework of ideologies and institutional practices that constrain and manage “acceptable” or “safe” Indigenous cultural difference. We have had to defend our programmatic and curricular spaces from elimination, and we have witnessed the ways our perspectives as Indigenous feminist faculty are heard only when they do not threaten the overall ideology of the institution or the status quo, all examples of the logics of elimination and containment that characterize the safety zone (Lomawaima and McCarty 2014). For us, decolonial feminist praxis requires subverting the boundaries of

the safety zone and continuing to forge “places where it is safe to be Indigenous on Indigenous terms” (Lomawaima and McCarty 2014, 64).

Our advocacy for the Distinguished Elder Educator position now held by Tu xámshish is a prime example of this work. Seeing the need for our students to have more sustained engagement with Elders and recognizing the bene t that Elder guidance could have on our department and college, we proposed a Distinguished Elder Educator position for our College. Our Dean and the Assistant Dean of Equity and Inclusion for our College approved, but as an informal title and in name only. Recognizing that Elder Educators, like other faculty, deserve to be compensated, Leilani utilized her startup funds to offer a modest salary for Tu xámshish. Over time, we negotiated and expanded this position by writing a formal job description and requesting a direct appointment for Dr. Beavert, whose position is now written into the federal and state grants that are crucial funding for our Indigenous teacher education program. As the position is reliant on grant funding, it remains precarious, rather than a formalized institutional commitment; but we continue our advocacy, hoping to create a more permanent and sustainable role for Elders in our College.

We share this story to illustrate one of the many crafty and creative negotiations that decolonial feminist educators must employ in their own work. In university contexts that want us to “ ll a gap . . . merely by being present, embodying cultural difference without signi cant change to the status quo” (Bunda, Zipin, and Brennan 2012, 941– 942), we must continually create space for our priorities and struggles to be heard on our terms. We, alongside the Indigenous graduate students we mentor, experience isolation, a lack of institutional support, and racism (Brayboy, Fann, Castagno, and Solyom 2012). We openly share our experiences as Indigenous faculty with our Indigenous teacher candidates because we recognize that they may also need to “practice a subversive pedagogy” and “work in opposition to the system that employs them” (LadsonBilings 2009, 140). They, too, may need to engage in “creative insubordination” to racist and colonial education practices and “develop the political knowledge and their propensity to take risks on behalf of students” (Gutiérrez 2016, 53). We model this for them, while also learning from them whether our political work is experienced as supportive.

Our insight that Indigenous peoples must actively contest our own erasure within colonial institutions and create space for our own experiences, struggles, priorities, and aspirations is not new. Indeed, a wealth of literature on Indigenous student and faculty experiences within higher education supports our assertion (Brayboy et al.. 2012, Brayboy and Maughan 2008, Frawly, Larkin, and Smith 2017, Kirkness and Barnhardt 1991, Kulago 2019, Kuokkanen 2007, Minthorn and Shotton 2018, Shotton, Lowe, and Waterman 2013, Smith and Smith 2019; Waterman, Lowe, and Shotton, 2018; Tachine 2022). We situate our work within this legacy and reiterate our takeaway that spaces for resurgent education must be continually created, protected, and defended because we have witnessed

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growing support for Indigenous initiatives within the university. This support, however, often reproduces colonial patterns of erasure and extraction: support for cultural programming, but not our political commitments; support for land acknowledgments or Indigenous Peoples’ Day proclamations, but not tuition restitution for Indigenous students, tenure-lines for Indigenous faculty, or the creation of Indigenous-centered spaces on campus. Moreover, rather than a “ ‘whole of institution’ approach to improve Indigenous outcomes” (Rigney 2017, 45), universities often place the responsibility for Indigenous educational initiatives on the shoulders of Indigenous faculty who, like us, are often few in number. To be clear, we view the “Indigenous work” we do in the academy “as an honorable responsibility, rather than a burden’ ” (Smith and Smith 2019, 1076). We engage in the practical work of being “disloyal to colonialism” and asserting our presence and “decolonial desires” (la paperson 2017) because we see our work in relation to a longstanding Native feminist practice of “bearing an Indigenous future into existence out of a genocidal present” (Morrill 2017, 15). As Simpson (2014) has written: “If the academy is concerned about not only protecting and maintaining Indigenous intelligence, but revitalizing it on Indigenous terms as a form of restitution for its historic and contemporary role as a colonizing force (of which I see no evidence), then the academy must make a conscious decision to become a decolonizing force in the intellectual lives of Indigenous peoples by joining us in dismantling settler colonialism and actively protecting the source of our knowledge—Indigenous land” (22). We see the project of dismantling settler colonialism and protecting Indigenous land as multifaceted. For us, a major strand of this project is educational. Working within a teacher education program to prepare future Indigenous educators that can support Indigenous students in understanding the brilliance of their own lands, nations, and knowledge systems is one way we approach this long-term outcome. We do this Indigenous work within the university because we view higher education, and more speci cally the preparation of Indigenous educators that will serve Indigenous youth and communities, as a key to nation building (Brayboy et al. 2012; Brayboy et al. 2014). We believe, too, that holding others, including our institutions, accountable for supporting Indigenous students is a form of respect and an expression of love.

Our hope in highlighting the landscape of erasure we are up against, as well as the active and sustained labor required to create and protect spaces for resurgent education, is to enlist all feminists working within institutions built on Indigenous homelands to share this honorable responsibility. “Indigenous work is inherently political and is overtly pro-Indigenous” (Smith and Smith 2019, 1085). Indigenous work and resurgent education should be led by Indigenous peoples, but this work within university contexts also requires co-conspirators and accomplices (Rohrer 2018) who are willing to create and protect space for Indigenous education within the academy; it requires that feminists see themselves as decolonial “complaint activists” and be “willing to cause damage”

(Ahmed 2021, 286) to the institutional logics and processes that undermine Indigenous peoples. As Arvin, Tuck, and Morill have offered, “Native feminist theories demonstrate that feminisms, when allied with other key causes, hold a unique potential to decolonize the ascendancy of whiteness in many global contexts” (2013, 11). For us, this is an invitation for all feminists to see themselves as responsible for decolonial praxis and supporting “Indigenous work” in the academy. It requires that all feminists raise problems about their institutions, even if speaking up means that they might now be viewed as a problem (Ahmed 2021). We are tired of our colleagues pulling us aside after meetings, telling us privately that they support us; we need feminist colleagues who voice those critiques publicly, despite their discomfort or the risks involved. We need feminist colleagues who take up the academic and activist commitments decolonial praxis requires because the changes we need within whitestream institutions are systemic and require each and every one of us to commit to this honorable work.

Remembering That Our Ways Are Wise

In this article, we outlined how we have taken up the project of resurgence within a university-based teacher education program. We highlighted the complexity and contradictions of engaging resurgent education within a university context, as well as some lessons and insights we learned along the way. We shared the importance of relationality and land to our conception of resurgent education as decolonial feminist praxis, and suggested that spaces for this work must be continually advocated for, as well as protected and defended. Recognizing the colonial context of university work, yet unwilling to cede these institutional spaces to colonial desires, we illustrated how we have tried to “hotwire” the university to support our decolonial desires and feminist praxis (la paperson 2017). We also invited other feminists who work within institutions built on Indigenous homelands to join us in this “honorable responsibility” (Smith and Smith 2019)

Our purpose in sharing our efforts is not to offer the model for decolonial feminist praxis, but to highlight one way this Indigenous work can be taken up in the academy. We have been “pushing ourselves to go beyond the why of settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, and heteropaternalism to the how of decolonization... includ[ing] envisioning alternative preferred futures for the generations yet to be born” (Aikau, as qtd in Aikau et al. 2015, 87). We hope our readers take something meaningful away from our efforts to embody Indigenous survivance and decolonial feminist praxis in the academy. We have much to learn as we engage the complexity and messiness of this work within our institution, but we have been committed to “giving our best effort and trying our best to do right” by Native students within our university (Sabzalian, Malliett, and Helms 2020). We invite other feminists to nd the decolonial “complaint collectives” (Ahmed 2021) at their respective universities and join in the work.

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We have intentionally centered Indigenous teacher education in our manuscript, in part because it is the work in which we are engaged every day. However, we hope readers will be inspired to see connections between our analyses and broader scholarship by Black and Brown feminist theorists, including the many and varied ways decolonial feminists engage in the “oppressing ↔ resisting process,” a process that is “continually resisted, and being resisted today” (Lugones 2010, 748) by decolonial feminists across the globe. As Indigenous feminists working in the United States/North America/ Turtle Island, we are deeply indebted to Black feminisms in particular as this important work helped make possible the newer eld of Indigenous feminisms within our academic institutions. Our own academic training and growth as feminist scholars was done with the guidance and nurturing of Black feminist scholarship. We continue to bring this work into conversation with our own praxes, building curricula around the phenomenal work of Bettina Love and the promise of abolitionist teaching (Love 2019). We also remain committed to enacting forms of resurgent education that do not replicate antiblackness (Simpson 2017). As scholars and teachers who engage intersectional feminisms, each time we think, teach, and write we are indebted to Kimberlé Crenshaw, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, and bell hooks, to name several of our Black feminist in uences (Crenshaw 1989; Hill Collins 2000; hooks 1992; Lorde 1997). “Intersectionality” supports us in centering Indigenous women’s experiences in our analyses, “in order to contrast the multdimensionality” of their experiences of oppression “with the single-axis analysis that distorts these experiences” (Crenshaw 1989, 139). Hill Collins’ caution that “a matrix of domination contains few pure victims or oppressors” and that each of us “derives varying amounts of penalty and privilege from the multiple systems of oppression which frame everyone’s lives” (287) reminds us of our privileges and responsibilities as seasoned or emerging academics working within elite institutions. Lorde (1997) reminds us that anger, when “[f]ocused with precision...can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change” (280). We feel a sense of kinship with Black feminist struggles for liberation, which often have deep resonance with our own. Our commitment to inviting Indigenous educators and students to turn toward the brilliance of our lives, for example, echoes hooks' (1992) commitment to “loving Blackness as political resistance.” We share these connections to highlight the ways in which Indigenous liberation is always tied to Black and Brown liberation in the settler colonial academy (and society), for as Audre Lorde (1997) has taught us, “[We are] not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from [our] own” (285). As Arvin (2019) echoes, “building alliances grounded in this kind of Indigenous feminist world building, in concert with other forms of intersectional feminism, holds the promise to bring forth not only new methods of combatting settler colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy, but also new relationships that could make such ghts

more sustainable for all of us” (340). These connections, alliances, and loving struggles across our communities always enrich all of us. Our resurgence is collective.

Returning to the blanket that we described at the beginning of our article, we are reminded again of Indigenous brilliance. Though beautiful, that blanket is not merely aesthetic. As we described, it represents the politics of advocating for “zones of sovereignty” (Lomawaima and McCarty 2014) within the university; our erce advocacy for physical and curricular spaces in which we can see and value one another and the brilliance of our respective communities. The blanket also represents a beautiful vision for resurgent education. That blanket would not exist without an education that turned its maker toward the brilliance of their own lands, knowledges, and lifeways. And the blanket re ects not only the efforts of the individual weaver, but also a collective who stood with and by them. As Diné scholar and weaver Amanda Tachine (2021) reminds us, “a woven rug … takes more than the weaver to complete.” We recognize that much of what is important to our communities will not (and should not) be learned within universities, but we also recognize that we can and should play a role in turning Indigenous students toward the brilliance of their own communities, a sentiment expressed in the Alutiiq value piciipet uswituu’uq, our ways are wise (Drabek 2013). That fundamental premise—that our own lands, communities, and lifeways are wise—is a teaching and commitment that permeates our decolonial feminist praxis of resurgent education.

Leilani Sabzalian (Alutiiq) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies in Education and Co-Director of the Sapsik’wa ł á Program at the University of Oregon. Her research utilizes Native feminist theories to create more just and humanizing spaces for Indigenous students in public schools. Her research also prepares educators to challenge colonialism in curriculum, policy, and practice, and implement important Indigenous-led initiatives, including Tribal History/Shared History, a law that mandates curriculum on tribal history and sovereignty in all K–12 public schools in Oregon.

Michelle M. Jacob loves imagining and working toward a future in which kindness, erceness, and creativity saturate our lives and institutions in delicious and inviting ways. Dr. Jacob is an enrolled member of the Yakama Nation and is Professor of Indigenous Studies and Co-Director of the Sapsik’wa ł á Program at the University of Oregon where she is also Af liated Faculty in the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and in the Environmental Studies Program. Dr. Jacob delights in encouraging writers to reach for their dreams in her popular The Auntie Way Writing Retreats. Michelle has published eight books, numerous peer-reviewed journal articles, and has a strong grant writing track-record. Her research interests include Indigenous methodologies, health, education, and Native feminisms.

Roshelle Weiser-Nieto (she/her/hers) is from Klamath Falls, Oregon and is Modoc and Yahooskin Paiute of The Klamath Tribes and Chicana. She is a 4th year doctoral candidate at the University of Oregon in the Critical and Sociocultural Studies in Education program. Her research is focused on Indigenous pedagogy, praxis, curriculum, Ethnic Studies, and historical healing.

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