Non-Indigenous Women Teaching Indigenous Education: A Duoethnographic Exploration of Untold Stories

Abstract

Identifying as non-Indigenous, we are often left considering our positionality and identity inIndigenous education, how we have come to be invested in this area of research, and what we seeas our contribution. In conversation with one another, we realized we choose to share certainstories and not others about our experiences working in Indigenous education, but were lessfamiliar with why, after working in the field for a sustainable period of time, we felt the need tocensor our stories. What did we fear might happen if we divulged these ‘untold’ stories? Whatfollows is a duoethnographic inquiry that seeks to attend to this question. We have chosen todialogically document, analyze, and probe our experiences as teacher-educators in Indigenouseducation to unpack why we refrain from sharing certain experiences we have encountered sincebecoming involved in teacher education. By responding to this question through duoethnographicwriting we hope to broaden how we come to understand and extract meaning from our experiencesworking in the area of Indigenous education.