As a Native American scholar, I am the first in my family to receive my Ph.D. and to become an Associate Professor. I grew up in a small community of Kayenta, Arizona on the Navajo Nation in which it was unheard of for a Navajo to be an Associate Professor. In my career, I’ve worked at the federal, state, tribal, and grassroots levels developing policy impacting Native Americans. I believe my scholarship fosters the values of our Native American Studies Department’s goal of Community-based scholarship, which extends from community engagement by directly involving community collaboration in research and produces scholarship that directly benefits community, organizations, or entities. My career and community-based scholarship has been pivotal in shaping my research areas of Nation Building, Tribal Sovereignty, and Indigenous Education. This research work has culminated into a combination of sixty-two reports, resolutions, contracts, websites, and presentations for my community-based scholarship. My community-based scholarship has served as the basis for my sole authored book (Spring 2022) and a forthcoming co-authored book (Spring 2023). I also have one published journal article (2018) with three forthcoming journal articles and three forthcoming chapters within edited books.
As a scholar operating in a new pandemic reality, my scholarship has endured delays due to the COVID-19 restrictions, my recovery from COVID-19, and mastering the migration of our courses to online. Even with our unique academic reality, my scholarship inquiry has sharpened. During my six years at University of New Mexico, two central questions have guided my entire scholarship framework with more urgency:
· How do we rebuild our tribal nations, especially through Indigenous education?
· How are tribal nations protecting their tribal sovereignty?
Each of these have formed the basis of my three scholarship areas.
My Nation building scholarship examines the current debates of how tribes have worked to rebuild their constitutional framework, set up tribal laws, enact decision making, and ensure accountability systems are in place within tribal governments. My first book examined how these tools of governance that are poorly established have caused a confusing educational structure for Navajo Nation. After ten years of research and community-based scholarship, I developed a research-based response to disentangling and reconfiguring the Navajo Nation’s educational structure to construct its (our) own unified education structure that would require a revamping of the tribe code to clarify lines of authority to ensure a strong tribal law framework. Through my community-based scholarship, I’ve presented these ideas through community meetings (prior to the COVID-19 restrictions) throughout the Navajo Nation to understand community and educator responses to the proposed structure. During these intensive community dialogues, I’ve uncovered the source of decolonization anxieties from community members that fear exerting their sovereign rights to build an educational system in their own image, which I believe is a detrimental setback for Nation Building. But I believe there is a need to strengthen the Navajo Nation’s tribal code framework to build back their jurisdictional authorities and tribal sovereignty. This work, “A History of Navajo Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body” (University of Arizona Press, 2022) captures my native nation building scholarship. With the completion of this book, the UofA Press recommended a follow-up manuscript. Specifically, one that examines and makes recommendations to develop the process from making tribal policy change from the perspectives of the community to nation building pre-emptively titled, “The Process of Disentangling Our Sovereign Body: A Guide to Native Policy and Nation Building”.
My Tribal Sovereignty scholarship is a central analytical and theoretical framing for my research. Tribal Sovereignty is the tribe’s jurisdictional authority over its own people, property, and resources. Although this definition is placed into concrete tribal law or federal law, I show how tribal sovereignty is not just a policy goal but includes the decolonization of our Indigenous education spaces, minds, and geographies. To achieve our hopes and dreams of tribal sovereignty, there is a tremendous need to include a continuous dialogue with community members, those both in decision making authority and non-decision-making authority. To understand its significance, I’ve place this into concrete meaning through a co-edited manuscript with Associate Professor Glenabah Martinez and Professor Lloyd Lee. This manuscript examines the contentious lawsuit, “The Yazzie Case: Building a Public Education System for Our Indigenous Future”. In this work, I developed three chapters, served as producer of the 15 photo essays, and served as the lead author, I’ve placed tribal sovereignty as the pivotal core for the future of the State of New Mexico’s Indian Education Act (IEA). As the Navajo Representative for the state’s educational advisory body, the Indian Education Advisory Council (IEAC), this work has shaped the scholarship within the co-edited book to critically analyze the New Mexico Public Education Departments (NMPED)’s Action Plan to Respond to the Yazzie Case (Chapter 10), re-indigenizing the New Mexico IEA (Chapter 5 – co-authored with Navajo President Jonathan Nez), and to tackle the Anti-critical race theory movement to build the future of Indian Education (Introduction). These three chapters apply the meanings of tribal sovereignty within the framework of state and federal policy impacting the tribal nations.
Finally, my last scholarship area of Indigenous Education describes the most valuable resource of tribal nations, our Indigenous children. Indigenous education is the control over what children are taught. Therefore, making Indigenous Education the greatest resource necessary to help rebuild Native Nations. As tribal nations develop their standards and curriculum that embraces tribal history, culture, government, language, and k’e (character). This involves my current work to assist in establishing a Diné State Education Agency. The Navajo Nation intends to transfer the authorities of state education agencies to the Department of Diné Education. This move will help the nation to unify the competing interests of states educational systems into a highly effective independent agency that will target the educational needs of the Navajo Nation. The scholarship question guiding this work is Does the Navajo Tribal government have the capacity to manage the responsibilities of a State Education Agency (SEA)? If not, how can they increase their capacity? This SEA movement requires the attention to the authority and oversight of the many school systems operating within the jurisdiction on the Navajo Nation. This is a heavy policy research plan that is transformative for the Navajo Nation especially for students that will be directly impacted by the plan. This part of my scholarship is deeply entrenched in community-based scholarship.
One journal article that has evolved from this work is understanding the conflicting values of local vs. central decision-making and its impact upon a specific tribal grant program in the article, “The Paradox of Tribal Community Building: The Roots of Local Resistance to Tribal Statecraft” (2018). This article clarifies how federal grant programs that fund Indigenous Education programs at the tribal level can become failed policy if the local community values and input is overlooked. Therefore, this has sparked a second article that was submitted to Wicazo Sa Journal, which examines informal pathways that arise when both local and centralized systems fail. As I move through the differing domains of Indigenous education, from the federal, state, tribal, local, classroom, the project of disentangling our sovereign body requires a continued deconstruction of our systems that have become rooted into our tribal geographies, minds, and bodies.
Future Scholarship
With the request of University of Arizona Press to expand on the work developed in my first book, I will apply a Native Policy and Nation Building framework that I’ve developed and have taught in my courses. Native American policy making continually viewed at the federal level but I believe, there is still a gap in understanding policy-making at the tribal and community level. I’ve created a step-by-step process that is both theoretically and methodologically grounded. It begins with examining the policy problem, the tribal authority, community perspective and alignment, the policy makers’ positionality, current research, counter arguments from all stakeholders, data engaged responses to counter arguments, and community engagement from inception. This framework is based on my own community-engaged scholarship which shows both successful and failed moves made through my community policy experience to teach students how to construct transformative policy.
Finally, my future scholarship is a continued effort to complete this important project that I’ve titled, The GeoInstitutional Constraints on Navajo Knowledge: The Production of Navajo Educational Knowledge of 40 years of Dissertations. I’ve collected dissertations written about Navajo education and completed the coding of these dissertations. My next step is to submit the article to the Journal of American Indian Education (JAIE).