Villegas, Malia; Neugebauer, Sabina Rak & Venegas, Kerry R. (Eds.). (2008) Indigenous Knowledge and Education: Sites of Struggle, Strength, and Survivance. Reviewed by Lesley Graybeal, University of Georgia

Villegas, Malia; Neugebauer, Sabina Rak & Venegas, Kerry R. (Eds.). (2008) Indigenous Knowledge and Education: Sites of Struggle, Strength, and Survivance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press Pp. 351         ISBN 978-0-916690-48-9 Reviewed by Lesley Graybeal University of Georgia April 20, 2009 Villegas, Neugebauer, and Venegas have compiled in Indigenous Knowledge and Education a volume that reflects a broad yet critical understanding of Indigenous Knowledge and its evolution in educational research. The book is part of a reprint series that draws from fifty years of Harvard Educational Review archives to incorporates the perspectives of authors from as early as 1958 to as recently as 2006, and the several decades in between. Indigenous Knowledge and Education is divided into three parts, each corresponding to one of the three areas of struggle, strength, and "survivance." Villegas, Neugebauer, and Venegas define what each term means as it is used to categorize the pieces included in the volume. “Struggle” addresses those aspects of education that are debated when knowledge is defined (p. 3), while “strength” is used to illuminate ways in which communities have taken action to create education and learning opportunities that reflect their ways of knowing (p. 4). “Survivance” is perhaps the most unfamiliar term to most readers, and is used as a descriptor for examples that illustrate the fundamental human drive for education (p. 4). The editors introduce each section briefly and include several questions for readers to consider spanning all of the included articles. New essays by Marrie Battiste, Gregory A. Cajete, and Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy are used to synthesize each section at its conclusion, providing contemporary insights into Indigenous Knowledge scholarship. Beginning with the assumption that “education reflects what society values,” (p. 1) Villegas, Neugebauer, and Venegas assemble a body of scholarly work that speaks to the values held across a wide range of cultures and their importance as evidenced by Indigenous communities’ ongoing efforts to see them validated and maintained. The intended audience is as broad as the choice of content. The editors suggest that the volume may serve as a useful entry point for scholars and readers who are not familiar with Indigenous Knowledge scholarship, as well as a tool for engaging a broader audience. They emphasize both in their introduction and the structure of the volume that the issues discussed pertain not just to Indigenous Knowledge, but also raise questions about the epistemological bases of education that may be engaged by any community. The expressed purpose of Indigenous Knowledge and Education is to show that Indigenous Knowledge brings issues of power, place, and relationships into focus, and in this way, within education, has the potential to offer support to children and improvement to communities, regardless of their Native or non-Native status. They emphasize the importance of selecting examples that illustrated the humanness of education in both specific and universal ways. They select examples across time and disciplines to illustrate that Indigenous Knowledge has been acknowledged in a variety of instances and to highlight a wide range of issues. Villegas, Neugebauer, and Venegas meticulously broaden the definition of Indigenous Knowledge, with “Indigenous” capitalized and used to mean any group that has found itself in a struggle for sovereignty, regardless of its recognition by any other entity (p. 5). While the editors capitalize Indigenous to emphasize a particular understanding of what knowledges are encompasses under the umbrella of Indigenous, they also preserve the use of upper- or lower-casing as well as italics or quotation marks in the original articles, illustrating a diversity of scholarly representations of terminology about Indigenous Knowledge. Part One of the volume depicts sites of struggle, particularly the colonization of knowledge. This section include four reprinted pieces, and Adams’s 1988 article, “Fundamental Considerations: The Deep Meaning of Native American Schooling, 1880-1900,” begins the section with a look at various European American and government perspectives on Native Americans as they pertain to schooling policies. Ruiz’s 1958 article on Mexican rural schooling follows, examining the competing concepts of indianismo and indigenismo in Mexican education. Altbach’s “Literary Colonialism: Books in the New World,” originally published in 1975, examines how industrialized nations have continued to exert a form of colonial control over knowledge and scholarship. Hudicourt-Barnes offers a more recent piece from 2003, which examines the use of Haitian Creole Indigenous Knowledge in science classes and questions prevailing notions of the need to compensate for rather than incorporate Indigenous students’ cultural differences in the classroom. Battiste concludes the section with an essay that explores the various types of struggle that have been encompassed by the paradigmatic differences between Indigenous Knowledges and the knowledges that are often dominant. Part Two offers cases of strength, in which the role of the local community is recognizable in directing education and educational research. This section includes five reprinted articles, beginning with MacLure’s 2006 article on endogenous educational research in Sub-Saharan Africa, which critiques the concentration of scholarship about African education in Northern institutions and reveals a large body of previously overlooked or unpublished Indigenous scholarship. Bartolomé’s 1994 article, “Beyond the Methods Fetish: Toward a Humanizing Pedagogy” questions her students’ assumptions as pre-service teachers that there are universal methods that can be used to teach minority children successfully, instead suggesting that problematizing the notion of a one-size-fits-all method for teaching is the first step in developing an approach to students that does not devalue and dehumanize them. Liberman’s 1981 article on Aboriginal education in Strelley, Western Australia explores the history of Aboriginal people’s efforts to secure varying degrees of control over their education and the particular success of one group in obtaining autonomy. “Nicaragua 1980: The Battle of the ABCs,” a 1980 article by Cardenal and Miller, describes the use of literacy education to unite the population in the wake of the widespread violence of war. Lomowaima’s 2000 article on sovereignty and research in American Indian education characterizes Indigenous Education in the United States as a battle for power, and portraying recent moves by tribal groups toward increased regulation of researchers as useful and productive exercises of sovereignty. Cajete summarizes the section by reflecting on the creative possibilities for contemporary research paradigm based on an Indigenized framework for knowledge. In the final section of the volume, the Villegas, Neugebauer, and Venegas select pieces that illustrate Indigenous groups preserving their knowledges, emphasizing that the term "survivance" is used to speak to the need among both Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities for uplift and renewal. This section includes five reprinted pieces, beginning with Anglás Grande’s 2000 article, “American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power: At the Crossroads of Indígena and Mestizaje,” which critiques the adequacy of critical theory and postcolonial notions of hybridity in addressing the real possibility of cultural loss present among Indigenous communities. Katz contributes a 1981 article that identifies the persistent importance of education as part of the healing role in two Indigenous communities, the !Kung and the Fijians, and Okakok’s 1989 article expresses the continued significance of culturally relevant education among Inupiaq Eskimos in Alaska. Kardos’s 2002 article, “‘Not Bread Alone’: Clandestine Schooling and Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust,” which explores the role of schooling socially, politically, and culturally in the Warsaw Ghetto, is juxtaposed with Faseh’s 1990 articles, “Community Education: To Reclaim and Transform What Has Been Made Invisible,” which depicts Palestinian education as persisting despite school closures and violence. Brayboy concludes the section by asserting that, despite continued efforts to colonize and subjugate Indigenous people and knowledges, in many places in the world Indigenous inhabitants’ human rights have been acknowledged and celebrated. Villegas, Neugebauer, and Venegas succeed it presenting a varied and comprehensive, while admittedly not exhaustive, overview of work that has been done in the field of Indigenous Knowledge pertaining to education. They stress the importance of humanizing the field of Indigenous Knowledge research and select contributors who will add to a delimited understanding of Indigenous Knowledge and its significance. Furthermore, the organization of Indigenous Knowledge and Education itself portrays a variety of knowledges as worthwhile scholarly topics with vital, living, and evolving importance. Articles such as Adams’s and Anglás Grande’s use Indigenous Knowledge as an opportunity to execute an effective social critique, problematizing the accepted ideas of democracy and social justice and examining how democracy has been interpreted across history as consumerism, patriotism, and assimilation. Such contributions help to foster interdisciplinary appeal of Indigenous Knowledge and Education that will ensure that the issues emerging in the study of Indigenous Knowledge are not reserved for Indigenous scholars alone. Several contributors also speak directly to practitioners and academics in Indigenous Knowledge. Anglás Grande and Lomowaima boldly call for an entirely new approach to studying Indigenous Knowledge, making a strong case collectively for the failure of Western paradigms to approach Indigenous Knowledge in a respectful and humanistic way. Finally, Kardos contributes the highly relevant assertion that the central questions asked about education during times of attempted genocide and possible extinction are in fact the same questions asked of all schools today—all knowledge, like Indigenous Knowledge, is scrutinized for its purpose, utility, and social function. Thus, throughout the volume, the contributors assert the importance of Indigenous Knowledges being considered in the past, present, and future, formulating a cohesive argument for both the inherent and applied value of Indigenous Knowledge scholarship. Villegas, Neugebauer, and Venegas include contributors throughout the volume to point out the successes of Indigenous people and provide hope for Indigenous Knowledge, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 (although Brayboy reminds readers in his essay that the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were the only four member nations to oppose the document). Additionally, the contributors move past a narrow understanding of what constitutes Indigenous Knowledge and its use, questioning assumed boundaries and definitions, and as a result delimiting the study of Indigenous Knowledge and expanding its relevance to all students, schools, and communities. Indigenous Knowledge and Education is indeed a useful resource for readers new to the concept of Indigenous Knowledge and provides them with a solid foundation of the history and directions of Indigenous scholarship, yet at the same time will be recognizable to experienced scholars for its contribution of a cohesive, humanizing, and hopeful overview of the field that provides a basis for productive action grounded in a heritage of struggle, strength, and "survivance." About the Reviewer Lesley Graybeal is a doctoral student in Social Foundations of Education with a concentration in International and Comparative Education at the University of Georgia and an assistant for the UGA-Tunisia Educational Partnership for collaboration in higher education reform. Her research interests include knowledge and identity politics in non-formal educational settings, museum representation and rhetoric, and the use of new museology by Indigenous peoples.