Sirûş. Revelation.

Years ago I started a process of writing about the contributions of Elena Avila, the author of a unique book on curanderismo called,'Woman Who Glows in the Dark.' In this process, two different pieces of writing emerged: One is more typically academic and the other is more descriptive. Here I am going to share a bit of the second, more descriptive version. This one is focused mostly on interviews and has some auto-ethnography, based on principles I work with from the indigenous research paradigm of Shawn Wilson. In that way of thinking, I must situate myself and my relationship to Elena and the subject because knowledge doesn't stand alone and without relationship. In the journal article I am resubmitting right now, most of this material is lost, which I thought  was unfortunate, and so now we have these two different approaches to the same subject. In the whole inquiry the basic question has been to try and look at what was unique about Elena. In this piece there is a ...

So there has been an intention with this blog to share more about the process of native and non-native people working together in education and the kinds of indigenous knowledge that emerge in my classroom. Without getting too theoretical at this point, I would share that I find the writing of indigenous scholars Shawn Wilson and Gregory Cajete to be the most interesting on this front. Two discussions in my anthropology classes over the last months have stuck out, particularly about indigenous knowledge in the classroom as something very practical that emerges in a dialogical way while studying material, rather than the more clumsy banking method (As Freire refers to it). While, as a non-native person I cannot claim to be decolonized, as such, I do feel that I am recognizing what happens when there is a democritization of knowledge in the classroom, particularly in an environment of historical inequality. Almost all of my students come from families touched by the boarding school kid...