Indigenous Voices of Girls and Women in Educational Spaces

Centered around personal reflection and storytelling, this volume weaves together narratives of educational resilience, kinship, and auntie support to highlight the importance of Indigenous perspectives in all learning spaces. Bringing together the experiences of community members, students, mothers, aunties, and academics, it shows how the voices of Indigenous women and girls represent their ongoing survival within spaces often focused on assimilation and erasure, and puts forward a new way of thinking about the value of Indigenous knowledge. It does so using a storytelling approach which celebrates the experiences of Indigenous girls and women, and expands the definition of education to include more informal spaces of learning in order to address the contentious relationship between Indigenous communities and formal schooling. This celebration of presence accentuates and amplifies the degree to which Indigenous peoples and communities have successfully retained their values and authenticity, despite ongoing attempts at assimilation by the dominant culture. As such, it centers Indigenous perspectives in ways that affirm the experiences of Indigenous women and girls in educational spaces, and demonstrates how girls and women have overcome existing structures to ensure the survival of Indigenous knowledges, cultures, and authenticity. Presenting an innovative new approach to supporting Indigenous girls and women, and centering the need to create new modes of scholarship and thinking that exist outside of the academic system, this book is designed for scholars, faculty, graduates, and educators with interests in education, Indigenous studies, anthropology, sociology, and womens studies.