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Chapter 8 - Decolonizing Agency

Future-Making with Indigenous Communities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 November 2023

By
Aydin Bal  and
Aaron Bird Bear
Edited by
Nick Hopwood  and
Annalisa Sannino
Nick Hopwood
Affiliation:
University of Technology, Sydney
Annalisa Sannino
Affiliation:
Tampere University, Finland
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Summary

In the USA, Indigenous youth are punished more frequently and severely as compared to their White settler peers. Hyperpunishment of Indigenous youth should be understood in the cultural history of a settler-colonial nation. In this chapter, we present a formative intervention, Indigenous Learning Lab, implemented at an urban high school in Wisconsin through a coalition of an Anishinaabe Nation in Great Lakes, the state’s education agency, the Wisconsin Indian Education Association, and a university-based research team. Indigenous Learning Lab including Anishinaabe youth, families, educators, and tribal government representatives and non-Indigenous school staff examined their existing system and designed a culturally responsive behavioral support system. In the following year, the team worked on the implementation of the new system. We utilized transformative agency by double stimulation with a decolonizing approach to facilitate the process. Our decolonizing approach was based on sovereignty and futurity and utilized funds of knowledge in Indigenous communities.

Keywords

decolonizationtransformative agencysystemic transformationculturally responsive systemfuture-making
Type
Chapter
Information
Agency and Transformation
Motives, Mediation, and Motion
 , pp. 183 - 208
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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