Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education

This book presents the Transformational Indigenous Praxis Model (TIPM), an innovative framework for promoting critical consciousness toward decolonization efforts among educators. The TIPM challenges readers to examine how even the most well-intentioned educators are complicit in reproducing ethnic stereotypes, racist actions, deficit-based ideology, and recolonization. Drawing from decades of collaboration with teachers and school leaders serving Indigenous children and communities, this volume will help educators better support the development of their students’ critical thinking skills. Representing a holistic balance, the text is organized in four sections: Birth–Grade 12 and Community Education, Teacher Education, Higher Education, and Educational Leadership. Unsettling Settler-Colonial Education centers the needs of teachers, children, families, and communities that are currently engaged in public education and who deserve an improved experience today, while also committing to more positive Indigenous futurities.

Book Features:

• Introduces the TIPM as a structure that supports educators in decolonizing and indigenizing their practices.
• Provides examples of how pathway-making across a variety of settings takes shape on the TIPM continuum.
• Highlights a diverse group of authors who are making major contributions to the transformation agendas of Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing.
• Includes a brief summary of the TIPM dimensions with examples of the challenges that educators face as they expand their critical consciousness toward decolonization.
• Follows Native oral traditions by sharing lessons, research, and personal lived experience.
• Identifies the deficit-based ideological underpinnings that frame Indigenous students’ school experiences.
• Employs a metaphor of wave jumping to illustrate how educators working to decolonize their practice can gain forward momentum with time and energy even while facing resistance.
• Provides a methodology to promote healing and cultural restoration of Indigenous peoples.

Cornel Pewewardy (Comanche/Kiowa) is the vice-chairman of the Comanche Nation and professor emeritus, Indigenous Nations Studies, at Portland State University. He received the 2022 NIEA Lifetime Achievement Award.

Anna Lees (Waganakasing Odawa, descendant) is an associate professor of early childhood education at Western Washington University.

Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn (Kiowa/Apache/Nez Perce/Umatilla/Assiniboine) is an associate professor and director of educational leadership and Indigenous education initiatives at the University of Washington Tacoma. She received the 2022 AERA Exemplary Contributions to Practice-Engaged Research Award.

“The work represented here is especially important now in the face of several state legislatures’ challenges to teaching related theories such as critical race theory (CRT)….The timeliness of this book is imperative to confronting these challenges and bringing critical consciousness to the public in order to provide a more thoughtful, caring, just, and inclusive society.”
—From the Foreword by Tiffany S. Lee (Diné and Lakota), professor and the chair of Native American Studies, University of New Mexico

“This brilliant collection of essays by prominent K–12 Indigenous educators provides a cohesive, paradigm-shifting framework and theory for decolonizing the ongoing settler-colonial education model in the United States. A must-read for every K–12 teacher and librarian, but also for parents and school board members.”
—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, historian; professor emerita, California State University, East Bay; author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

“The coeditors are highly respected and prolific scholars. Their personal experience as well as their professional and scholarly reach ensures that this book offers readers critical, timely, and multiperspective insights on the complexity of decolonization and the process toward transformation and Indigenizing teaching and learning across contexts.”
—Caroline Sotello Viernes Turner, professor, California State University, Sacramento

2022 AERA Exemplary Contributions to Practice-Engaged Research Award for Robin Zape-tah-hol-ah Minthorn