In beauty, I walk: toward a maternal praxis of Diné decolonization

Indigenous Decolonization;Higher Education;American Indian;Traditional Knowledge

Davidson, Charlotte

关键词: Indigenous Decolonization;    Higher Education;    American Indian;    Traditional Knowledge;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/46903/Charlotte_Davidson.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

This dissertation proposes a potential pathway to rethink how Diné matrilineal knowledge can work to inform a Diné female academic identity. In keeping with the decolonizing traditions of Indigenous scholars, I will use a Beautyway lens—as mediated by Diné traditional learning modalities—to explore how the narrations of three generations of Navajo rug weavers, Shimásáni (my maternal grandmother, Sally Yazzie), Shimáyázhí (my mother’s sister, Lena Yazzie), Shimá (my mother, Nora Wilkinson), and Shideezhi (my younger sister, Sallie Wilkinson), point to the contemporary criticality of the primacy of feminine agency—a heuristic and familial intelligence. To this end, I will engage the transformative possibilities that can dialogically emerge from a rewoven matrifocal understanding of the world, and its implications for conducting doctoral research, as well as how it informs institutional persistence as a Diné research doctorate.