We Still Want a Lifelong Commitment, Not Just Sweet Words

Asserting an Indigenous Vision for Education

Abstract

In this article, I engage in storytelling as an act of resistance and an act of love, following the ways that Linda Tuhiwai Smith discusses storytelling as an Indigenous research project and methodology. The stories I share in this article are about on-the-ground examples of decolonizing education within colleges and universities, across multiple institutional settings and geographic locations. In these stories I portray certain administrators as trickster figures, and while I do not use actual names of administrators, their names could easily be researched. Their individual identities, however, are not the point. As critical scholars such as Aileen Moreton-Robinson have taught us, the problem of whiteness encapsulated in the white possessive has to do with systems of historical and ongoing dispossession of aggrieved communities.