Chapter 7: Finding Face, Finding Heart, and Finding Foundation: The Making of an Indigenous Teacher

The professional identity construction of indigenous¹ teachers is shaped in relation to the history of American Indian education, educational histories of individual teachers, contemporary contexts of Indigenous communities, and the influences and responsibilities each teacher envisions within their role as a teacher. It is important for indigenous teachers to examine their identities in relation to the structural effect of the long history of settler colonialism as this analysis reflects the choices and decisions made in the classroom as teachers. A critical analysis of what schooling has been for Indigenous peoples in the United States has deep implications for the ways in which indigenous teachers contextualize their identities. Likewise, the contemporary relations with settler colonialism have an impact on Indigenous teacher identities. For example, Indigenous teachers are impacted by the structures of patriarchy and gender violence so how might an analysis of missing and murdered indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) play out in the classroom? How might these teachers make sense of disrupting and responding to such omnipresent yet invisible structures? Each of these spaces of analysis contribute to how identities are interconnected within the relationship to colonialism, decolonization, and indigenization. Reflexivity is critical to the process of examining and reshaping positionalities as Indigenous teachers begin to gauge decolonial and transformative approaches to teaching. Thus, in order “to decolonize, one must first start from within oneself in a reflective process” (Wane, 2009, p. 171). The process of decolonization and engaging in reflexivity has certainly impacted my positionality in becoming an Indigenous educator.