How Indigenous Scholarship Changes the Field: Pluriversal Appreciation, Decolonial Aspirations, and Comparative Indigenous Education

Abstract

As a project of state political and economic agendas, the schooling of Indigenous peoples has historically tended to reflect everyone else’s values, standards, and objectives but our own. However, for Indigenous communities, education is part of an array of long-term self-determination strategies that serve Indigenous autonomy, which is undergirded by Indigenous knowledge systems that encompass the political, economic, environmental, health, social, and cultural lives of Indigenous communities. Accordingly, Indigenous education in its many designs is founded in Indigenous struggles for interlinking forms and realizations of justice that recognize environmental dignity as indivisible from human life. Furthermore, the philosophies and enactments that sustain Indigenous autonomy in one place are never removed from other Indigenous places and the efforts of their people. This bridging across Indigenous worlds and our distinct and collective decolonial and interepistemic meanings of education constitute comparative Indigenous education, which is the focus of this themed issue.