Community-Based Participatory Research on Diet and Activity With an Indigenous Pueblo Community

Tribal Critical Race Theory (Brayboy, 2005) supports the use of decolonizing methodologies such as Community-Based Participatory Research when collaborating with Indigenous communities. This paper highlights the underlying processes in working with a Pueblo community on an intergenerational health project. Indigenous participants included 16 Piro Pueblo individuals who collaborated on a project examining healthy diets and activity in their community. The project involved providing information on the importance of activity and healthy eating of traditional foods to promote healthy living. Thematic analysis of open-ended questions exploring the role of culture in food and activity yielded important themes of gathering, resilience, history, honoring ancestors at mealtime, cultural ways, and activities such as dancing and drumming. The results suggest that projects addressing diet and activity collaborate to ensure cultural values, e.g., connectedness, cultural ways, e.g., gathering, dancing, and Indigenous knowledge are represented in the project and viewed through an Indigenous lens.

Indigenous Girls Write, Right!? Unsettling Urban Literacies with Indigenous Writing Pedagogies

This article begins with the fundamental premise that Indigenous adolescent girls are writers. Indigenous adolescent girls speak and write in multitudes of voices, yet their physical and literary presence is often unaccounted in educational research and writing. Guided by the theoretical insights of Chicana Feminist Epistemology and Tribal Critical Race Theory this paper illuminates how Indigenous Writing Pedagogies (IWP) emerged to acknowledge land and gendered relationships in urban schools. The author presents implications for Indigenous notions of literacies and relationships that can be elevated by educators working in and out of urban school spaces.

“We Can Do Better”: University Leaders Speak to Tribal-University Relationships

Wielding degrees of influence within educational organizations, university leaders are critical in determining how institutions enact their espoused missions and support severely marginalized campus communities. How do universities address and improve educational outcomes for the most severely underrepresented communities? This article presents emergent findings from an illustrative multiple-case study that examined the relationships between two public universities and local American Indian nations in California. As a preliminary step in understanding the present state of “tribal-university relationships,” I present findings on university leaders’ perceptions and knowledge regarding American Indians broadly and relationships with local Native nations specifically. Using tribal critical race theory as an analytical framework, I posit how colonization, federal recognition, and educational practices affect curricular, political, and economic relationships.

Converging Interests, Unequal Benefits? Tribal Critical Race Theory and Miami University’s Myaamia Heritage Logo

Miami University has used Native American imagery to promote itself since its founding. In 1929, Miami teams began using the racist term Redsk*ns. In 1996–1997, they changed the name to RedHawks. Despite the strengthening relationship between the university and the tribe, the racist mascot imagery remained visible in the university community. In 2017–2018, the university returned to Native American imagery by unveiling a new “Heritage Logo” to represent a commitment to restoring the Myaamia language and culture. In this paper, the authors used tribal critical race theory to analyze how the Heritage Logo represents a point of interest convergence, where symbols of the tribe signal acceptance and recognition of the Myaamia people, while institutional racism and the possessive investment of whiteness are left ignored and unaddressed.

Undocumented Critical Theory

Despite an increasing body of literature on undocumented immigrants and an improved access to academia by DACAdemics and undocumented scholars, the need for theories about undocumented experiences in the United States persists. In this article, I introduce the central tenets of a developing theory that I call Undocumented Critical Theory (UndocuCrit). Rooted in Critical Race Theory (CRT), Latina/o Critical Theory (LatCrit), and Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit), UndocuCrit introduces the lens to better understand the nuanced and liminal experiences that characterize undocumented communities in the United States. Although this initial rendering focuses on the experiences of Mexican immigrants and individuals of Mexican descent, UndocuCrit exhorts DACAdemics and undocumented scholars to contribute to this emerging framework by applying it to their experiences and those of other undocumented communities. As a theoretical framework, UndocuCrit challenges an immigrant binary rhetoric as well as embarking on a journey toward social justice and the empowerment of our communities.

Let Them Be Heard: Bringing Native American Experience Closer in Teaching

Teaching about Native Americans, especially as a non-Native person, involves a number of complications. The experience and histories of Indigenous peoples have often been presented from the point of view of the Euroamerican hegemonic power and complicated by a long pattern of colonization, including education. As a result, Native peoples themselves as well as outsiders have been mostly exposed to the dominant culture’s perspectives of Native Americans, often being stereotyped and reductive. The aim of the present paper is to examine the theoretical frameworks advanced by American Indian scholars and educators who demonstrate the methods which expose colonization and show the fundamental Native concepts needed to be involved in the pedagogies concerning Indigenous people. The primary consideration is to be guided by Native peoples' own concepts in trying to avoid perpetuating the colonizing pattern. Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (a Lumbee scholar and educator) advanced the Tribal Critical Race Theory, which offers a comprehensive framework which can provide useful guidelines for teaching about Native Americans. The paper also offers suggestions for implementing this framework in the classroom such as using contemporary Native American autobiographical writing, involving the concept of performance or digital resources like those developed by Craig Howe, an Oglala Sioux, and the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies. Exposing students to Native people through Indigenous people's own stories and resources may be helpful in presenting them as real people. Such an approach may help students to be able to hear and access Native peoples’ own voices sharing their lives, which can contribute to bringing their experience closer to students.