Epistemologies and Enactments of Self-Determination in South Dakota

Abstract

In the State of South Dakota, and across the so-called United States in general, political forces continue to attempt to control Indigenous identity, land relationships, and power, despite the characterization of the current policy era as one of Tribal Self-Determination. This critical ethnographic study examines the ways in which these policies are felt and experienced as acts of coloniality and continued attempts at racial and cultural erasure. Epistemologies of decoloniality, however, serve as sources of resistance to hegemonic state violence. The findings of this study explore the main epistemic frames that educators and other education stakeholders use to situate their opposition to coloniality, thereby creating a vision for self-determination that is distinct from that of the federal government. In this study, three main themes emerged as ways in which educators and education stakeholders epistemically de-link from colonial constructions of Indigenous education, each of which forms a unique pedagogical perspective that guides both theory and practice. These pedagogies, of relationality, of resistance, and of sustenance, act as the ways in which some educators establish counter-hegemonic discourses, practices, and outcomes in their work.