Still Flourishing: Enacting Indigenizing Language Immersion Pedagogies in the Era of US Common Core State Standards

Abstract

Since the common schools movement, the struggle for the American curriculum is the struggle for the means of (re)producing national identity. For Indigenous peoples, state-sanctioned standards and curricula, no matter how progressive, have always served to naturalize and reinforce the settler-state and Indigenous erasure. Yet, language immersion schools have become widely popular tools in efforts to revitalize Indigenous lifeways in North America and beyond. In this chapter, we discuss the controversial relationship between education and revitalization within the context of North American, and specifically Ojibwe efforts to reclaim school spaces for the enactment of Indigenous ways of knowing (epistemologies). We describe common tensions that arise in designing curricula that aim to simultaneously revitalize an Ojibwe land-based and relational epistemology and meet local and national standards in Wisconsin, USA. We recount examples from a Prekindergarten-5th grade Ojibwe language immersion school in order to illuminate the ways standards attempt to (but never successfully) reproduce students and teachers as colonized subjects, pulling them into a complex of state rules, unstated expectations, and discourses. Through our examples, we illustrate the ways immersion teachers and students must resist daily the universalization of Western epistemologies within the standards and, correspondingly, students’ and teachers’ own erasure. We conclude by offering considerations and future directions for research and practice that can help us to better understand the contradictions and complexities of working within education institutions that aim to revitalize Indigenous lifeways.