“Oh, it’s just them Indians”: Indigenous Case Study toward interrupting the manifestations of native student oppression

Abstract

This study introduces Indigenous Case Study (ICS) as a methodology poised to foster decolonized and anti-racist spaces. ICS is a weaving of TribalCrit, critical and Indigenous methodological approaches, and considers contemporary and historical contexts, simultaneously. In the current manuscript, ICS helps reimage campuses through revised policies and practices that work toward the creation of decolonized and inclusive institutions for Native students and communities. ICS allows for deeper analyses as we interrogate the dissonance between university president’s statements about race and inclusion, institutional policies and practices, and the experiences of Native students as shared through student stories. We explore historical documents, president speeches, campus events, individual interviews, and researcher auto-narratives in Sharing Circles over the course of five years. The findings situate historical and contemporary campus contexts as we reveal five manifestations of oppression experienced by Native students: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. ICS provides circular and methodical methods that offer the opportunity to think in more complex ways as we offer findings and discussions on the cultivation of decolonized and anti-racist spaces.