Raiding and Alliances: Indigenous Educational Sovereignty as Social Justice

Abstract

This article addresses the ways scholar activists interrupt Indigenous marginalization in institutional education. Grounded in our personal and professional experiences as public scholar educators, and speaking from both Indigenous and non-Indigenous positionalities, we approach everyday social justice through an interactional framework. Our collaborative vison of power appropriation and power-sharing—raiding and alliances—conceptualizes efforts to enact Indigenous sovereignties in the academy as an enduring struggle. Our personal vignettes offer on-the-ground instances of interrupting the marginalization of Indigenous peoples are engaged through social justice scholarship and teaching. We propose that the raiding and alliances framework broadens our understanding of the local negotiations to respond to historic tensions with a view of scholarship and teaching as daily opportunities for interrupting entrenched inequities. The end goal of this work is to humanize educational processes from an Indigenous and intercultural perspective.