Education in Movement Spaces

Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square

Alayna Eagle Shield, Django Paris, Rae Paris, Timothy San Pedro, Alayna Eagle Shield, Django Paris, Rae Paris, Timothy San Pedro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367344610
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000062717
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book amplifies the distinct, intersecting, and coalitional possibilities of education in the spaces of ongoing movements for Native and Black liberation. Contributors highlight the importance of activist-oriented teaching and learning in community encampments and other movement spaces for the preservation and expansion of resistance education. With chapters from scholars, educators, and organizers, this volume offers lessons taken from these experiences for nation-state schools, classrooms, and spaces of teaching and learning that are most commonly experienced by Native and Black children and educators. Through attention to recent social movements across the United States—from Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter—this book demonstrates the vital connections between Native and Black communities' educational futures.

1
On Teaching, Learning, and Being in Native and Black Movement Spaces

Alayna Eagle Shield, Django Paris, Rae Paris, and Timothy San Pedro

Greetings! At the outset, we share our commitment to, as Alayna Eagle Shield has said, “Indigenous Peoples and Black Peoples seeing each other as relatives.” We believe what we have learned and can learn from the ongoing Movement for Black Lives and from the Standing Rock movement for Indigenous sovereignty, land, sacred sites, treaty rights, and a healthy Earth Mother for all people is central to any possibility of getting free on Turtle Island (the place most commonly referred to within ongoing settler colonialism as the nation-states of the US, Canada, and Mexico). We believe if we can see each other and understand our foundational connections through stolen land, stolen labor, and stolen lives and through ongoing resistance and joy, love and desire, that we as Native and Black people can, together and apart, offer the educational and cultural future we are living and that we need. It is important that we share up front the important fact that Native and Black peoples on Turtle Island are of course not mutually exclusive peoples, as we have many relatives on Turtle Island who are both Black and Native. And, of course, globally, Black peoples and Indigenous peoples are not mutually exclusive peoples.

Education in Movement Spaces: Standing Rock to Chicago Freedom Square is a collection that brings together scholars, educators, artists, organizers, parents, and youth (and some who share several of these identities) who participated in the ongoing resurgence and liberation movements that gained national and international attention and influence during the summer and fall of 2016 and into the winter of 2017. At Standing Rock, across the summer and fall of 2016, tens of thousands of Native people representing hundreds of Indigenous communities and sovereign nations across Turtle Island and globally as well as those in solidarity with them converged on massive encampments in Lakȟóta homelands on the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation. They had come to stand with the tribe in its efforts to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from encroaching on treaty lands and sacred sites and the potential destruction of the tribe’s source of clean and sacred water, the Missouri River. Nearly a thousand miles away in Chicago, Movement for Black Lives organizers of the #LetUsBreathe Collective had created their own community encampment to hold space in front of the infamous Homan Square police compound, which had been the site of various forms of police brutality for years. They called their space Freedom Square, and Black families lived and learned together there for 41 days across July and into August 2016.

In both contexts, families brought children and created locations understood as educational spaces. And still other teaching and learning was happening as adults, elders, and young people, too, learned about direct actions and legal rights and processes, about health, about histories of ongoing settler colonial violence and histories of ongoing resistance. Although these movements gained massive visibility in 2016 and 2017, it is crucial to see them as linked to Indigenous sovereignty and resurgence work and work for Black liberation that stretches back across the centuries and forward in the time ahead; as Lakȟóta historian Nick Estes frames the relationship between Lakȟóta (and more broadly, Indigenous) histories, movements, and possible futures for all people in the title to his extraordinary book documenting Lakȟóta resistance across the centuries up to DAPL, Our History Is the Future (2019). In this sense, what we learned in these movement spaces is both timely (as Black and Indigenous peoples continue to resist and exert powerful political and institutional influence) and timeless (as Black and Indigenous peoples have always and will always be central to any possible future).

In April of 2017, many of the contributors to this volume participated in a session at the American Educational Research Association Annual Meeting in San Antonio, Texas. Tim San Pedro and Hollie Kulago had envisioned the session (with an invitation from Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang) as an opportunity to think coalitionally about the ways education had occurred for Native young people and their families in the encampments at Standing Rock and for Black young people and their families at the encampment at Freedom Square. The session offered scholars and practitioners the opportunity to remember and imagine forward the distinct, intersecting, and coalitional possibilities of education in the places and spaces of ongoing movements for Native resurgence and Black liberation. It also gave us a space to begin to think about the lessons we took (and can take) from education in movement spaces into the nation-state schools, classrooms, and spaces of teacher learning that are most commonly experienced by Native and Black children and educators. It is also true, as we have come to believe through our engagement in this project, that all education for Indigenous and Black people happens in movement spaces, as the work of upholding Indigenous sovereignty, of revitalizing lifeways, of forwarding the value of Black life is never absent from the schooling experiences of our communities, whether we are on the front lines of a protest or in the classroom of a public school. The following pages, then, are an offering to scholars, educators, families, youth, and other community members about what we taught and learned at Standing Rock and at Freedom Square and what it means for Black and Native education and lives across the contexts of our work.

Coming to the Movements: On Invitations and Relationships

The four of us editors came along different paths to the ongoing movements for Indigenous sovereignty, treaty rights, a clean Earth Mother for all people and beings, to the movement for Black lives, and to the joining of movements for Black liberation and Native resurgence. Alayna is a Lakȟóta/Dakȟóta/Sáhniš (Arikara) woman, mother, cultural worker, and educator who was born and raised on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation. Rae is a Black woman writer and educator born and raised on Tongva homelands in Carson, California, with roots extending to New Orleans, Louisiana. Django is a Black man, educator, and scholar born to a White mother and a Black Jamaican father on Ohlone homelands in San Francisco, California. Timothy is a Filipino-American man, educator, and scholar, born on Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho lands and raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. In what follows, we offer a window into these journeys to the movements that have brought us together in this project and this life.

Alayna

I am a descendent of Chief Sloháŋ (Crawler) and his daughter Tȟašína Máni Wiŋ (Moving Robe Woman), also known as Mary Crawler, a female combatant of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Mary received another Lakȟóta name after the battle, Hóčhoka Khutépi Wiŋ (Shoots at Her in the Midst/Middle), which is the name I carry. I am honored and humbled by the Lakȟóta/Dakȟóta teachings and lifeways I’ve been raised in. Our traditional lifeways have healing powers, and every day, I walk with that medicine in my cellular memory. This is where my story begins. I grew up with Lakȟóta teachings and stories that our people would once again bring nations together from all over the world for a great cause. I never imagined it would be in my lifetime.

With no official tribal consultation and no environmental impact statement or consent of the tribes along the Missouri River, Energy Transfer Partners bought land south of the urban city of Bismarck, North Dakota, the original proposed site of the pipeline construction, and began construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline. The Dakota Access Pipeline, also known as DAPL, is a 1,172-mile-long pipeline carrying crude oil (Moving America’s Energy The Dakota Access Pipeline, n.d.) underneath the Missouri River, which contains the main aquifer for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and also drinking water for eight million people downriver. This would forever change the trajectory of my life and the lives of all who were fortunate enough to experience the Water Is Life movement at what came to be known as the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Camp.

On April 1, 2016, a camp was set up by Ladonna Brave Bull-Allard called Sacred Stone Camp at the edge of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribal community known as Cannonball. This camp was set up to bring awareness to the proposed pipeline and to bring unity to our people to stand together. On August 11, 2016, construction began just south of the original surveyed site because there were activists blocking the original site. Multiple arrests had been made the first day, and on August 12, 2016, my husband and I made it to the construction site early in the morning with many others. We were praying and singing traditional songs when a caravan of cop cars came over the hill from the north on Highway 1806 and then a large group of police marched into a line on the middle of the road in front of where we were praying. They threatened everyone to move to the right or left of the orange construction fence in three minutes or get arrested. An Indigenous man told all the women and young ones to get in the middle and instructed the men to surround them and told everyone to move together slowly. He said when buffalo are in danger, this is how they protect the females and babies. Everyone began to move, and I volunteered to sit down in front of the gate so the trucks couldn’t drive through. Two other Indigenous men told me they knew my brothers and didn’t want me to get arrested alone. We were all arrested for not moving from the pathway. This was a pivotal time for me because I knew this was much bigger than I. This was a fight for our lives and our lifeways.

Shortly after the first couple of days at the construction site, people were beginning to show up from all over the country and, soon after, the world. On August 16, 2016, along the Cannonball River, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Camp was created when seven thípis were set up to represent the seven sacred council fires of the Lakȟóta people and then the council lodge, which is where the leaders meet to discuss important issues pertaining to the people and the lifeways. With this camp being set up and people coming from all over, there was a lot of talk about the children and their education. The women of the camp were having meetings daily, and one thing we all agreed on was that the first thing the government comes after, when a group of people stand up for their rights and make a statement, is the children.

When we look back in history, we see the same type of harsh treatment and resistance go hand-in-hand across geographical boundaries, races, and ethnicities. The Civil Rights Movement helped to spark the American Indian Movement, and in that same sense of resistance, freedom schools were created across Black and Brown communities. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee launched Freedom Schools in Mississippi in the “Freedom Summer” of 1964 in response to the poor quality of education and the violent White reactions to desegregation (Freedom Summer, n.d.). Those schools helped to spark Native Freedom Schools across Indian Country. We saw this in 1971 when three Indigenous mothers who were frustrated with the public school systems and inspired by the takeover of Alcatraz Island exercised their treaty rights, occupied an abandoned Coast Guard station on Lake Michigan, and formed what later became known as the Indian Community School of Milwaukee (Krouse, 2003). In 1979, the Akwesasne Freedom School was started because of the fight for sovereignty and self-determination of the Mohawk nation and a standoff with the New York State Police that pushed the Mohawk nation to reclaim their education (Akwesasne Freedom School, n.d.). It’s not a new phenomenon to Indigenous people and other peoples and communities dispossessed by colonial systems that when we stand up for our rights, the government threatens us at our core: our children.

On August 29, 2018, the Mní Wičhóni Nakíčižiŋ Owáyawa (Defenders of the Water School) was started at the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Camp with the naming of the school by the future students with the help of a Lakȟóta elder translating. The young people wanted it to be known that they were protecting and defending the water as well as standing with their relatives in opposition of the DAPL. I remember the first day of the school so clearly because I wasn’t sure what I had gotten myself into, nor was I sure that I was the right person to take this on. About 15 young people and their families showed up bright and early. We smudged with sage, and an elder started our day with a prayer. A woman named Marcella “Marcy” Gilbert shared her story of growing up in activism and attending the We Will Remember Survival School, which was an alternative school developed for Native people to help them heal from intergenerational trauma (Castle, 2003) and the long legacy of these types of schools being created organically in Indigenous history. The young people were proud and excited to be able to get the education they deserve in a place that was rightfully theirs.

Many people came and left the camp, and all of them received help in various ways: healing, guidance, love, prayer, activism, growth, or simply to stand for a cause bigger than themselves. The success of the school is attributed to a community of educators, singers, knowledge keepers, fire-keepers, cooks, new and old relatives, and many more. The relatives who made a significant contribution of their time, knowledges, energy, and love were Tȟuŋwíŋ Teresea Dzeiglewics, Lekší Jose Zhagnay, Lekší Blaze Starkey, Lekší Steve Tamayo, and Lekší Travis Harden, as well as so many others. They are forever in our hearts and in our prayers for their contribution to the success of the school and their aid in helping young people to grow and evolve into the amazing people they all are because of being a part of this movement.

I love my people so much, and I knew just as well as anyone that the young people were ultimately leading the fight and will continue to lead long after the Water Is Life movement has finished this particular stage. Water and young people will always be the way forward for our people.

Rae and Django

We write this exactly three years after we first arrived to stand in solidarity with our Lakȟóta relatives on their homelands at Standing Rock, a time that forever altered our understanding of the possibilities of education in the project of decolonization and possible futures for all people. Let us begin three years earlier, though: Django, sitting in a hotel room where he was working in Asheville, North Carolina, waiting for the verdict to be read in the trial of the man who murdered Trayvon Martin. The anguish and rage at the acquittal sent Django and many others into the streets that evening in Asheville and across the nation as the #BlackLivesMatter movement was on the cusp of being born through the visionary organizing of Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi. We could also begin this sect...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editors’ Introduction
• 1 On Teaching, Learning, and Being in Native and Black Movement Spaces
• Section 1 Black and Indigenous Solidarities
• Section 2 Defending the Waters and Lands: Education at Standing Rock
• Section 3 Breathing Liberation: Education at Chicago Freedom Square and Beyond
• Author Biographies
• Index