Troy A. Richardson

Navigating the Problem of Inclusion as Enclosure in Native Culture-Based Education: Theorizing Shadow Curriculum

This conceptual essay explores how Gerald Vizenor’s (Anishinaabe) literary discussions of “shadow survivance” provide opportunities to work against the containment of Indigenous knowledge in mainstream and culture-based curricular practices. More specifically, the essay considers how constructivism is deployed as an opening to the inclusion of Indigenous epistemologies, yet also contains Indigenous epistemologies within a materialist and more specifically, Marxist and Hegelian philosophy. The author suggests that an implicit “shadow curriculum” has been articulated within the literature of Native culture-based curriculum which works against these forms of containment, but has rarely turned to Native American literary figures to elaborate the philosophical and theoretical differences they represent.

Indigenous Political Difference, Colonial Perspectives and the Challenge of Diplomatic Relations: Toward a Decolonial Diplomacy in Multicultural Educational Theory

This article considers how diplomacy can be refined and amplified within the field of multicultural education. Focusing on Native American peoples in particular, I argue that the multiculturalist emphasis on cultural diplomacy overlooks the political difference of First Nations peoples. In contrast to a multiculturalist cultural diplomacy, the article develops diplomacy according to a decolonial framework that seeks to dismantle colonial perspectives of Native American political difference. Drawing upon theorists and historians of diplomacy, as well as Indigenous and decolonial writers, the article seeks to provide the terms through which teacher identifications as decolonial diplomats can be fostered toward Native Americans.

Indigenous knowledge and the machinist metaphors of the bricoleur researcher

This paper explores the intersection between critical methodologies and Indigenous knowledge. It is especially concerned with the ways in which the metaphors associated with the bricoleur researcher – tools and production – conceptualize Indigenous knowledge to that of an ecology and environmental work. This limits the appreciation for and engagement with narrative, and the ways in which “ecological” knowledge is embedded in narrative practices and interpretive processes. The author puts the work of Anishinaabe novelist and theorist Gerald Vizenor in conversation with the writings of J. Kincheloe as a way not only to contrast the central metaphors in critical and Indigenous methodologies, but similarly to highlight the differences between a bricoleur language of research and an Aboriginal language of survivance.

Between Native American and Continental Philosophy: A comparative approach to narrative and the emergence of responsible selves

This essay explores some of the affinities between current theories of North American Indigenous trickster narratives and continental philosophy where they are both concerned with the question of responsibility in subject formations. Taking up the work of Judith Butler, Franz Kafka and Gerald Vizenor, the author works to show how both continental and Indigenous intellectual traditions work against any assumed stability for the ‘I’ in the narration of the self, yet toward responsible relationality. Such affinities, however, emerge from differing socio‐cultural and linguistic horizons that are not reducible one to the other. This is particularly so with regard to the natural world and the ways in which Indigenous narratives are developed to foster responsible subjects to a larger biotic environment. Through discussion of such affinities and differences, the author seeks to broaden and multiculturalize contemporary debates in philosophy.

The Ethical Stakes of Collaborative Community-Based Social Science Research

This multivocal essay engages complex ethical issues raised in collaborative community-based research (CCBR). It critiques the fraught history and limiting conditions of current ethics codes and review processes, and engages persistent troubling questions about the ethicality of research practices and universities themselves. It cautions against positioning CCBR as a corrective that fully escapes these issues. The authors draw from a range of philosophic, African-centric, feminist, decolonial, Indigenous, and other critical theories to unsettle research ethics. Contributors point toward research ethics as a praxis of engagement with aggrieved communities in healing from and redressing historical trauma.