Honoring Our Own: Rethinking Indigenous Languages and Literacy

Abstract

Today Indigenous peoples worldwide are deconstructing Western paradigms, including the classic constructs of literacy connected to alphabet systems, and articulating and constructing their own distinct paradigms based on Indigenous epistemologies and rooted in self-determination and social justice. A vital aspect of these efforts is the “rethinking of our thinking” and a reexamination of our priorities as a means for reconstituting, reproducing, and validating our own intellectual traditions and cultural knowledge and processes.