Disjuncture, modality, and institutional repertoire: (De)colonizing discourses at a tribal school

Abstract

The complicated ideological terrain of a tribal school11‘Tribal schools’ refers to schools in the United States that are controlled by federally-recognized tribes in conjunction with the Bureau of Indian Education (BIE). wrestles with aims of self-determination, academic success, and the legacy of settler colonial violence and theft through institutionalized schooling. One effect of these challenges is the ‘two-worlds’ approach to education for Indigenous students that categorizes linguistic and social practices as either ‘Indigenous’ or ‘modern’ (Lee, 2007; Wilson & Kamanā, 2009). Though this approach has long been recognized as problematic, it persists in Indigenous schooling contexts. This study employs a critical multimodal social semiotic (Kress, 2011a, 2011b) approach to language and sign to examine how school and community members invoke, reject, and reimagine ideologies from disparate cultural sources within a single event: one Ojibwe tribal school's kindergarten graduation ceremony. Contextualized with data from a larger ethnographic project, I extend Meek's (2011) work with disjunctures to call attention to the ‘institutional repertoires’ that shape the teaching and learning therein across multiple modes.