Raced Relations

This qualitative study investigates Aboriginal high school students' negotiation of identity and identifying with school and community in relation to other representations. Within the literature cultural and racial discourses provide contrasting, essentialized theories of Aboriginal students and schooling. Each of these discourses has conceptual limitations. Recent discourses engage complex articulations of identity, culture, class, and race with racialized students' negotiation of/engagement with/ and alienation from schooling as performative identity. The methodology combines Aboriginal theorizing on decolonized public education with border theory and uses multiple methods with a sample of Aboriginal students and educators at a high school, Northern Heights, over the four months of the study. Findings suggest youths' identities and identifications are relational and performative and intersect with representations and racialization within the bordered sites of the school and the city. Conclusions follow.