(Re)storying Queer Land Education : pedagogical hub-making of Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans Indigenous educators

This collaborative project is a culmination of stories, memories, testimonios, dreams, life histories, and experiences of Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans Indigenous educators. I engage with what Opaskwayak Cree Nation Two-Spirit scholar Alex Wilson poses as Queer(ing) Land Education. Queer(ing) Land Education disrupts the gender-based essentialisms ubiquitous within environmental and nature educational discourses by attending to non-binary approaches of human and more-than-human worlds and Indigenous gender and sexual diversity within pedagogy, curriculum, and educational praxis. The project is both ethnographic and autoethnographic as Indigenous paradigms in education argue that Indigenous researchers cannot be disentangled from the community since that would be severing already formed relationships imperative to Indigenous knowledges and ways of being. I hosted individual story-sharing sessions, attended ceremonies, and engaged in inter-reflexive work throughout one year to focus on how Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans Indigenous educators in Central and South Texas create pedagogical and curricular hubs guided by their relationship to their Indigenous communities, ancestors, and Land. I deploy Land education as a theoretical guide and the “hub” as an organizational theory to make sense of the curriculum-building capacities of Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans Indigenous educators. The following questions guide this work to foreground a Queer Land Education: How are Two-Spirit and Queer Indigenous educators (re)storying their Land relations by creating queer Indigenous hubs that center Land-based pedagogies and curriculum? How does centering Two-Spirit and Queer Indigenous educator voices provide avenues to re-imagine curriculum building, gender fluidity, and community epistemologies? Ultimately, the knowledge embedded within the stories that my co-theorists shared suggests how Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans Indigenous educators move through moments of severance, of letting go or being let go of, to emplace worlds of Queer Indigenous freedom, a suggestion that is called severed Queer cartographies. Lastly, my co-theorists expressed how being in relation with Land encouraged them to gather as gender diverse Indigenous people, a process that is called (re)charging Queer Indigenous zones and create a pedagogical hub that centered the voices of Two-Spirit, Queer, and Trans Indigenous people while foregrounding the epistemological importance of honoring the Lands and waters, community, and ancestors.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Curriculum and Instruction

Grantor

The University of Texas at Austin

Year dc:date.issued

2022

Author dc:creator

• Montes, Pablo

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Urrieta, Luis

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• De Lissovoy, Noah
• Abril-Gonzalez, Patricia
• Garza, Mario
• Rocha, Maria
• Fikile Nxumalo
• Muñoz, Marissa

• Land Education
• Indigenous studies
• Decolonial Participatory Action Research
• Queer and Two-Spirit Studies
• (Re)storing

Identifier URI

https://doi.org/10.26153/tsw/62456

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/135135