Keywords

When we, the editors, were approached to consider editing the Handbook of Indigenous Education, we were excited at the opportunity. We thought it was timely to produce the first large handbook by Indigenous people themselves, partly because for a long time, we have watched others write our story and as a result actively suppress Indigenous knowledges. As the number of Indigenous education academics and researchers increased over the years, largely due to the work of Indigenous academic “pioneers,” their allies, and programs established in tertiary institutions, we thought there were enough people who could provide an account of the Indigenous education research journey to date. We also thought it timely to highlight Indigenous education scholarship that is often hidden away in the non-mainstream journals being read only by others who know where to seek it out.

Indigenous education was not always marginalized. Indigenous communities have always maintained and developed complex education systems. For example, traditionally in Māori society in Aotearoa New Zealand, there were institutions of higher learning, students were especially chosen to fulfill special roles in their communities, children were developed, and their particular interests were noted. Learning was elevated above the ordinary pursuits of a community, had spiritual elements to it, and there were rituals and protocols to observe. Colonial invasion and exploitation have shattered Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing, and as a result the pieces have become scattered – destroyed, hidden, and other parts just waiting to be reconstructed. This Handbook explores the ways in which this has happened to Indigenous communities throughout the world and how the traditions of Indigenous systems of knowledge are now being recovered and remade within the context of their critical engagement with western traditions. However, the Handbook is not only concerned with “recovering” the broken pieces. As educators and researchers, we seek to put the recovered pieces into new places, embrace new technologies, gather new information, and try to make sense of a rapidly changing world with the same confidence as our ancestors had as thinkers and knowledge creators. Indigenous knowledges are not, as Mead (2003) reminds us, “an archive of information” but tools for thinking, organizing information, considering the ethics of knowledge, and informing us about our world and our place in it. These attempts are now “coming of age” in this work.

No matter what the context, Indigenous Peoples have articulated a deep relationship to mother earth, to her lands and waterways, and with that interconnection diverse and relational paradigms of knowing and being. Being of the land gives each of us a unique understanding of the lands in which our ancestors made our homes, enabling us to share a deep sense of place brought about when we live and breathe the land – a land that gives life, shapes our stories, and defines who we are. The relationship to land has also defined the Indigenous experiences of being forcibly removed from land and of being displaced and denied the rights and responsibilities that hold worldviews, meanings, and identities together. It defines the work and the journeys that have gone into putting down ancestral stories and bones into new lands, reservations, and margins where Indigenous Peoples have had to survive. As editors of the Handbook, we wanted to tap into this rich vein of culture, knowledge, and understandings that inform Indigenous approaches to knowledge and education. We have sought to do this by embracing the rich diversity of Indigenous research and by keeping the scope of the sections wide and open and reducing any sense that there is either a homogenous or unitary approach to Indigenous education or indeed a singular definition of education or research.

The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), adopted by the General Assembly in 2007 by the majority of 144 members, sets out the internationally agreed-upon rights of Indigenous Peoples to education. While the UNDRIP expresses Indigenous Peoples’ historical grievances, contemporary challenges, and socioeconomic, political, and cultural aspirations, Article 14 expresses the keys to the realization of these through education, stating:

  1. 1.

    Indigenous Peoples have the right to establish and control their educational systems and institutions providing education in their own languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching and learning.

  2. 2.

    Indigenous individuals, particularly children, have the right to all levels and forms of education of the State without discrimination.

  3. 3.

    States shall, in conjunction with Indigenous Peoples, take effective measures, in order for Indigenous individuals, particularly children, including those living outside their communities, to have access, when possible, to an education in their own culture and provided in their own language.

While the UNDRIP enshrines Indigenous education in a rights framework, much of the work in Indigenous education predates the signing of the Declaration and represents decades of education development across different contexts working within the constitutional arrangements of different nation states. The rights to education, schooling, and access to a free primary school education for citizens are recognized in most national constitutions although the recognition of citizenship and entitlements of citizenship for Indigenous Peoples as Indigenous Peoples rather than as an ethnic minority is not always a given. The variable and often marginalized status of Indigenous Peoples and their relationships to the nation-state within which they reside is one of the reasons that the UNDRIP is an important part of the human rights framework as it sets out basic rights and freedoms for Indigenous Peoples. It is also important to recognize that many Indigenous communities are struggling to survive; many Indigenous activists have been assassinated or disappeared, Indigenous LGBTIQ communities are harassed and marginalized, Indigenous women and girls are often the victims of abuse and sexual violence, and Indigenous boys and men are more likely to end up in criminal justice systems. In many situations, identifying as an Indigenous person is still life-threatening. Constitutions and declarations may recognize the rights of Indigenous Peoples, but states and governments must implement policies and infrastructure that protect those rights. Education plays a fundamental role in the survival, security, safety, and well-being of Indigenous communities and ways of knowing and being.

Indigenous educators have advanced Indigenous agendas under all political conditions. While the educational landscape is forever changing, policies for the education of Indigenous Peoples have often remained stuck in old assimilationist frameworks informed by paternalistic ideologies or stymied by a lack of imagination and political will to address the rights of Indigenous Peoples to an education that supports their language, culture, and knowledge. It is often at the local level or with the support of a single forward-thinking official that Indigenous educational initiatives are implemented. These kinds of initiatives can sometimes develop into systemic change (e.g., the Language Nest Kohanga Reo from Aotearoa New Zealand which gave flight to a Māori language education pathway in the Aotearoa New Zealand school system). Too frequently, however, they remain contingent on support and fly under the radar with little official recognition and minimal resourcing. It is still rare to have Indigenous knowledge included in curriculum, to have Indigenous experiences of colonization fully recognized in history, or to have Indigenous perspectives included across curriculum. It is rare to have the full engagement of Indigenous communities in public or private schools, to have governance roles, or to be principals and educational leaders. It is rare to have a critical mass of Indigenous educationalists and researchers, policymakers, and thought leaders operating in one context or jurisdiction. The Handbook brings together an international network of Indigenous researchers who, for the most part, work in quite isolated contexts in their own settings.

Indigenous educators and researchers walk along the interface of multiple knowledge systems, including official and conventional systems, institutions, histories and discourses, communities and knowledge systems, expectations, and accountabilities. For many of the first generation of Indigenous individuals who were well educated, the public or civil service was an immediate career option, while others may have trained for teaching, health-related professions, or the military. Indigenous people “making it” in the system was seen as a successful strategy for assimilation policies – a measure of the system’s worth. Following generations have moved beyond public administration of education to leadership roles such as school principals and into specialist areas including teacher education and research. Other successful individuals have become community activists leading educational programs that exist outside official structures and advancing Indigenous knowledge within communities and developing community advocacy for Indigenous focused education. The diverse trajectories for Indigenous educators and researchers are reflected in the varying approaches to Indigenous language revitalization, alternative schooling models, research approaches, and leadership.

There are genuine tensions in this diversity; these are theoretical, political, cultural, disciplinary, and intergenerational. Some of the tensions can be understood best as the politics of decolonization and internal colonization and of differences between those who work for and in communities and those who may be seen as working for and in state structures. Internal colonization acts as an internal control for maintaining the hegemony of colonialism and serves to constantly reinforce the mythologies of Indigenous Peoples being “not good enough,” “not intelligent,” and “not able to govern themselves.” These tensions include the real challenges of choosing priorities, for example, language revitalization priorities, in contexts where there are hundreds of Indigenous languages at risk of extinction. In some contexts, failing to choose is resulting in all the languages disappearing. Other tensions can be understood as cultural-structural approaches that position people along different points of a continuum of change, which engages with how that change can best be effected and how explicit theories of transformation and Indigenous self-determination can be practiced/utilized/executed/employed. For example, some might argue that the only way to attain real transformation is to overturn economic and power structures, and everything else is a waste of effort. Others argue that people have agency to make changes themselves and that culture is a context in which Indigenous Peoples can exercise agency and create transformation. Many tensions are not about opposing political positions but are disciplinary worries about the focus and approach to research, the ontological dimensions of research, the methodologies and theories being used, and the frame and scope of research. Unlike the simplistic binary of qualitative and quantitative methodologies, Indigenous research methodologies tend to grapple with undoing dominant language and definitions, finding ways to use the colonizer’s language for decolonial analyses and drawing insights from Indigenous knowledge and values. All these tensions are represented in some way by the work in the Handbook. What holds it together is a basic commitment of authors to the very idea of Indigenous Peoples, to the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and to research by Indigenous people that affirms Indigenous identities and aspirations for self-determination.

There have been too many examples of education policies for Indigenous Peoples by states and governments that have acted in regressive, culturally and socially destructive ways, for example, Residential Schools in Canada, the forced removal of Indigenous children under various welfare provisions, policies that suppress or deny Indigenous knowledge, and language and culture and policies that focus on the presumed deficits of communities and parents. The politics and agenda of dominant non-Indigenous interests which hold sway over education systems where Indigenous Peoples are minorities are always contestable, especially when purported to be “in our best interests.” The multidisciplinary, long view of Indigenous education research is concerned with the intergenerational impact of past, current, and future education policies and practices for Indigenous Peoples. The work in this volume builds upon generations of documented Indigenous experiences across multiple education jurisdictions that give testimony to the systematic efforts made by governments to assimilate Indigenous Peoples and by definition destroy their languages, cultures, values, social systems, and practices. More fundamentally, however, the work in this volume provides evidence for the powerful resistance and motivation of Indigenous Peoples to harness the promise and potential of education to advance our aspirations for self-determination and revitalize and strengthen our cultures and languages and our families and communities.

The chapters in the Handbook provide numerous examples of Indigenous educational research being undertaken across the world. Collectively they address system-wide issues, challenges, and opportunities of education, and they span the following diverse themes: from the relationship between societal issues to schooling, from the impact of colonialism to an Indigenous teacher education program, from governance issues to mathematics and the arts curriculum, and from research methodologies to understanding pipelines from school to prison and from prison back to an Indigenous identity. The scope of Indigenous education research is expansive and deep. It is concerned with what happens in formal and informal settings. It is concerned with outcomes and the strategies, policies, pedagogies, and curricula that produce educational outcomes. It questions the taken-for-granted western-centric assumptions, philosophies, discourses, and principles of education and schooling; it challenges what counts, what matters, and how each dimension is defined. For example, Indigenous worldviews value the interconnected relationships of humans within the environment, and so, how does that worldview imagine an education, pedagogically, in curricula, assessment, and teacher education? Indigenous education research is interested in the impact of education on Indigenous well-being and on the survival of Indigenous languages, cultures, and knowledges. Indigenous education research involves building narratives and bodies of knowledge and new terminology about Indigenous education that address the experiences of Indigenous Peoples while simultaneously rewriting the narratives of the nation-state about its identity, history, and relationship to Indigenous Peoples. It is about establishing evidence frameworks that incorporate Indigenous knowledge and paradigms and speak to the practices and challenges of educators working in schools and communities. Indigenous education research maintains a critical gaze on the wider context of education and seeks to identify and address barriers to achieving Indigenous aspirations as well as innovative ways to educate the wider society. Indigenous education research is interested in what works best, how to save a language from extinction, how to nurture an Indigenous child for the future, how to transform higher education institutions, and how to strengthen Indigenous families and young people. And while all these concerns are at play, there is a constant questioning of the role of western knowledge and its tools, of Indigenous knowledge and practices, and of the ethical dimensions and relational principles of being Indigenous while doing Indigenous work. In time this expansive scope may narrow, but at present the energy of Indigenous education research is on rewriting and re-righting the historic archives of Indigenous education that were erased by colonization and on incorporating learnings from the hard-won lessons of Indigenous resistance and survivance. The Handbook represents a state-of-the-art text on Indigenous education seen through the research lens of Indigenous researchers, but by no means does it represent the entire field of Indigenous educational research.

Being and Becoming a Community of Indigenous Researchers in Education

The Handbook is a reflection of a growing community of Indigenous researchers in education from different places and contexts, trained in diverse disciplines, working with different theories and methodologies, in different languages, and all focusing their attention on the broad field of Indigenous education. This is not an accidental convergence of individual scholars working in isolation but a reflection of the political resurgence of Indigenous Peoples more broadly and of the shared vision for education as a fundamental means, as well as a fundamental right, for self-determination. Indigenous Peoples are critically interested in education and have visions of education as a way to achieve their social, cultural, linguistic, economic, and political well-being as Indigenous nations. Colonial and nation-state education systems, however, were designed, quite deliberately, as a mode for completely assimilating Indigenous Peoples so that they no longer existed. The work of Indigenous researchers in and about education grapples with that tension between transforming education systems designed to destroy and innovating systems that will make things right.

What does it mean to be an Indigenous education researcher? This may seem a self-evident question which naively gestures at Indigenous research in education as if it is just one more approach within the vast multidisciplinary traditions of education research that can be submerged, for example, within quantitative or qualitative research, or from different disciplinary outlooks or from a focus on the big questions being asked about the state of schools in society. It is this sort of simplistic/reductive thinking that casts the identity of the Indigenous researcher in the same category as that of the feminist or that attempts to corral the Indigenous researcher’s identity as an ethnic one. Indigenous researchers draw upon a completely different “worldedness” (Mika, 2017) and understandings that situate education in a relational, intergenerational, colonial, and decolonial context. Indigenous concepts and priorities about education may not necessarily be generated from the concerns of our colleagues. The Big Questions about education that often vex researchers often appeal to apparently universal ideas of the dominant group that may not be the big questions from an Indigenous perspective. In fact, even the defining terminology that appeals to ideas of universal application – for example, the term “public education” and the oppositional categories of public/private – has been experienced by Indigenous Peoples as one of the main agencies of colonization. Furthermore, legislative practices reinforced that Indigenous students did not belong in such “public” places. They were not considered full citizens, they were not tax payers, and they still had to undergo prior assimilation by the state before they were deemed ready for school. Indigenous research, not confined to those hegemonies, draws within it understandings about humanness, relationships, ancestors, and metaphysical dynamics; different understandings of the roles of teachers and learners, curriculum, and pedagogy; and a different sense of urgency around language and culture, expectations for governance and leadership, values and ethics, and theories for transforming the way education is conceptualized and organized.

The idea of being and becoming a community of Indigenous researchers in education is deeply entwined with ideas about being Indigenous, being both self-defined and recognized by relations as an Indigenous human being who is part of a collective whose histories and philosophies are connected to place. In one sense being is a constant act of becoming, of constant interaction with the world; at the same time, being is also about just sitting, being still and immersed in a world without trying to act upon it. Being Indigenous is a process and a concept of living in relation to other human and nonhuman beings. It turns on having intimate connections to the earth and the metaphysical elements of the world. But being Indigenous also engages with experiencing the sustained efforts of imperial and colonial powers to deny and redefine the humanness of our being. Being Indigenous in the twenty-first century is political. It is living, it is acting, it is claiming, it is honoring, it is remembering, and it draws upon the genealogies, dreams, lives, histories, creations, and ideas of ancient legacies and ways of being that existed long before European modernity. Being is not only relational but past, present, and future. It is a way to be, a way of being, that crosses time.

Becoming a community of Indigenous researchers of education illuminates the purposeful act of bringing Indigenous researchers from diverse places together to create what Toni Morrison has said is “a shareable language” (Morrison, 1992) for conceptualizing, organizing, practicing, researching, and evaluating the education of Indigenous Peoples. One important vehicle for becoming an Indigenous research community has been the formation of Special Interest Groups and caucuses that have emerged in Education Research Associations. Professor Margie Maaka and Dr. Sharon Nelson Barber played an important role in bringing the two Special Interest Groups of Indigenous Peoples (of the Americas and of the Pacific) together in a preconference to the Annual Meeting of the American Education Research Association. This regular event has facilitated shared conversations about research. Professor Maaka also instigated the Special Interest Group for Indigenous Peoples of the Pacific. These fora have connected researchers, introduced emerging researchers, and fostered collaborations and networks. Other scholars, such as Professor Graham Hingangaroa Smith from Aotearoa New Zealand, Professor Verna Kirkness from Canada, Professor Ray Barnhart and the late Dr. Oscar Kawagley from Alaska, as well as scholars from Sami countries or the Pacific, have traveled afar and introduced young scholars and research to different Indigenous contexts. The World Indigenous Peoples Conferences on Education (“WIPCE”) has provided for community and institutional researchers to gather every 2 or 3 years to share knowledge. These are large community hosted conferences that attract Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers from across the globe. Networks have formed that support collaborations, and educational and research ideas have circulated internationally. New specialist journals have been established or reinvigorated with a consciousness about broadening research to wider Indigenous audience. This in turn has helped create Indigenous Studies as a broad umbrella for studies that focus on Indigenous knowledge and knowledge for Indigenous Peoples that is committed to the sovereignty and self-determination of Indigenous Peoples.

Overview of the Book

In this Handbook, we are trying to address Indigenous approaches to education rather than being directed by the standard disciplinary “gaze” and responding to non-Indigenous Peoples’ agendas about what is important in Indigenous education. While many of us as academics are “squeezed” into disciplines, such as anthropology, Indigenous studies, educational psychology, and so on, we decided the book needed to be constructed in a way that reflected Indigenous education issues. Of course, it is nigh impossible to separate our lives in the academy from our lives outside it. All the chapters show our everyday lives are inextricably entwined with our past colonial masters. One of the criteria for the authors was that all chapters needed to be written in English (or at least translated into English). The book is dominated by writers from former colonies of the British Empire (particularly Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the USA) as well as other countries which have a legacy of English, particularly African countries and the Pacific Islands. One of the chapters was translated from Spanish, and some other authors (not from British colonial countries) had help with their English grammar. There remain a number of challenges for books of this nature. For example, the book only includes Indigenous people who have access to the academy – yet there are many Indigenous Peoples who still remain outside it. Furthermore, another challenge is to become more inclusive of a wider range of Indigenous Peoples from other language groups.

We made the decision to model our Indigenous capacity building ethos by encouraging co-editors for every section – a senior editor with a junior colleague. We tried to make the Editorial teams international, but for very pragmatic reasons, our Section Editors needed to have a close working relationship, and so some of our Section Editors worked in the same institution, and all worked with an editor from their own country. We also encouraged multi-authored chapters led by an Indigenous principal author. It was very important to us that the Handbook became a vehicle for telling our research stories from our Indigenous perspectives and frameworks. There is a vast tract of literature about Indigenous education, authored mostly by non-Indigenous researchers, that is already available, and we wanted to demonstrate the capacity that now exists for Indigenous researchers to be authorities and take leadership of the agenda for Indigenous education research. Many of the teams of collaborating authors, however, are a mix of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers.

This book presents a body of research knowledge written by Indigenous scholars about Indigenous education. We have attempted to set a different frame of reference in terms of what has mattered around Indigenous Peoples. The six sections we decided on are the platforms that have enabled us to make sense of our experiences and, simultaneously, to realize the potential to be transformed and meet Indigenous aspirations. However, not all sections were obvious. We debated whether we should have a section on colonialism. The challenge of this section is that the inclusion of colonial histories can come to define Indigenous Peoples, but we realized from the feedback we gathered that we needed to include something. We chose to craft a section that framed colonialism differently by having some commentary by respected elders included to set the section apart from other books. Our sections include:

Section 1: Colonialism

Section editors Leonie Pihama and Jenny Lee-Morgan (both Waikato University, Aotearoa New Zealand) set the scene for Indigenous education in relation to colonialism. This section shows the diversity and similarities in the colonial experiences of Indigenous Peoples as colonizers imported systems of schooling. As the Section Editors say in their Introduction, “While our shared experiences of colonialism have left many of our societies scattered and impoverished, the colonial experience has also been a point of connection for our collective solidarity in survival.” While the mechanisms through which schooling contributed to the colonial agendas differed across Indigenous nations, it is evident schooling expedited them – from civilizing the natives through residential schools to supporting the dispossession of lands. In addition to showcasing the multiplicity and complexity of colonial processes and practices, this section also features three respected and well-known decolonizing scholars and activists in their own countries as guest authors to broaden the discussion and provide some insightful analysis.

Section 2: Indigenous Governance

In this section George Dei (University of Toronto, Canada) and Jean-Paul Restoule (University of Victoria, Canada) assert that Indigenous groups had their own systems of governance prior to colonialism. With Indigenous governance, a major topic for Indigenous Peoples from the multi-levels of societal institutions – legal-jurisdictional, political, and economics – to educational institutions, this section explores the conceptualization of Indigenous governance and how such governance is manifested in Indigenous and alternative educational sites. Contributions in the section also examine how such Indigenous Governance offers lessons for re-visioning schooling and education in multiple global and transnational contexts. In their introductory remarks the Section Editors that “Global governance of Indigenous rights is an urgent matter.” They have approached the challenge conceptually by “drawing a link between Indigenous Governance and global governance.”

Section 3: Language and Culture

Education plays a pivotal role in the regeneration and reconstruction of Indigenous language, culture, and knowledges. This section explores the intricacy of the relationship between language, culture, and education. They argue that neither language nor culture is being “revived/revitalized” as items but is deeply implicated through each other and constitutes Indigenous selves. The Section Editors Margie Hohepa and Carl Mika (both University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand) introduce the authors in this section as ones who “are from communities that are affected by a language-culture-education problem or potential. On their own, any of these separate elements of language, culture, and education complicate a theoretical description of life; in pairs, they produce even more inconsistencies and complexities.” Chapters in this section include themes engaging with Indigenous language and cultural knowledge in the curriculum, Indigenous pedagogy inside and outside of colonial-developed institutions, policy leverages for language learning opportunities, the place of Indigenous language and culture in teacher and higher education, and the politics and/or philosophies of language use, translation, and expansion.

Section 4: Societal Issues

Societal issues can impact significantly on the education of Indigenous Peoples. This section presents the reader with a wide range of current, and ongoing, challenges across a variety of Indigenous contexts, including school-prison-community trajectories, human rights violations, and the engagement and support of Indigenous families. The Section Editors, Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy (Arizona State University, USA) and Megan Bang (Northwestern University, USA), put forward a framework through which to view the narratives of this section that focuses on empowerment, enactment, engage, envision, and enhancement. The Section Editors posit the five Es framework as concepts that “do not place us as ‘victims’ regarding the impact of wider societal structures but provide a sense of agency (both individual and community) and hope about how to re-capture, re-establish, re-instantiate our nations of peoples.” Indigenous communities have dealt with and survived major events and changes in their circumstances and that experience is continuing. It is not accidental that societal issues impact powerfully on Indigenous communities and thereby on educational education. Schools may shield or shelter students from society but can also reproduce the injustices and unfairness of society. Indigenous education has responsibilities to provide safety through knowledge and resiliency through sustaining Indigenous values and agency.

Section 5: Transforming Education

This section, co-edited by Graham Hingangaroa Smith (Te Whare Wānanga o Āwanuiārangi, Aotearoa New Zealand) and Melinda Webber (University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand), focuses on “transforming” both the processes and outcomes of education and schooling to more effectively meet the learning and sociocultural aspirations of Indigenous peoples. The section interrogates the dual concerns related to how education and schooling structures in colonized societies function to reproduce dominant social, cultural, and economic interests on the one hand and in turn maintain outcomes of persisting social, economic, cultural, and learning underdevelopment and marginalization on the other. The dual work covered in this section engages with the need to critically unpack the functioning of schooling in colonized settings and, secondly, with ways to improve schooling and educational outcomes for Indigenous students. The Section Editors view transforming education and schooling as “an important pre-condition to the broader struggle of transforming the social, economic, cultural, and political under-development that reflects the colonized positioning of many Indigenous populations.”

Section 6: Case Studies

This final section examines Indigenous experiences across formal and informal learning contexts through case studies. Sharon Nelson-Barber (WestEd, USA) and Zanette Johnson (Intrinsic Impact Consulting, USA) offer the reader a diversity of accounts that First Nations and Indigenous communities have faced – many of them parallel challenges, such as the effects of land loss, colonization, aggressive assimilation, and navigating collective and personal journeys through cultural trauma. The Section Editors ask, “Are our efforts getting results that matter? Are we doing things in ways that reflect our values deeply? Are we relating to one another in the ways our ancestors would have understood and respected? Are our children becoming a next generation who we can trust to carry our cultures forward?” In today’s historical moment, this section advances how Indigenous Peoples strategize to meet the challenges of modern local/global Indigenous life. These accounts provide ideas about how to adapt rapidly and survive as peoples and show how our collective efforts can inspire one another to creative solution-building that brings about positive changes.

Indigenous academics, who largely make up this work, are sometimes living and working far from their communities they are writing about. Every chapter is led by an Indigenous author. Again this openly political stand was not without controversy and debate from our writers. But in privileging Indigenous voices, we were not prepared to have one Indigenous person in a writing team named at the end of the line of non-Indigenous writers, nor were we willing to privilege young non-Indigenous academics as part of larger research teams even with an interest and commitment to Indigenous education. This was not what this book was about. Furthermore, we requested our Section Editors, who were involved with choosing authors for their section, to select senior Indigenous academics who would be willing to write alongside junior Indigenous academics, to build the capacity of our community, and many authors responded in kind. More than 40 chapters are written with 2 or more authors.

Cross Themes of the Handbook

It will be clear to readers that, while the Handbook is in sections, there are chapters that could fit in more than one section. There are interrelated and cross-cutting themes, blurred boundaries, and a layering of knowledge and insight across chapters and sections. We want to highlight some of those cross themes here.

Indigenous research in education addresses a range of contexts in highly nuanced ways. Attention to context is driven by the specificities of historical, geographical, and political experiences and by the stories that Indigenous communities want to retell and revitalize. Indigenous knowledge and relationships predate colonization, and Indigenous Peoples are more than the story of colonization and devastation. Critically describing contexts is important for reinstalling Indigenous ideas of context into the frame and positioning Indigenous ideas as offering solutions and hope. Indigenous Peoples do not seek to be the perpetual victims of their own stories.

Some of the chapters illustrate a deep knowledge base that has been developed over highly specialized Indigenous education areas, such as language revitalization and the inclusion of cultural ideas in curriculum and pedagogy. This expert knowledge is often subsumed in general educational literature as interesting case studies rather than as theory defining examples of the field of language revitalization. Indigenous educators and researchers of language revitalization have profound knowledge of what it means to re-embed Indigenous languages back into communities, families, and cultures.

The chapters examine subject matters in relation to a broader understanding of how these ideas resonate internationally. Indigenous education research is an international field with a distinctive literature and networks of knowledge that are shared across borders. In many contexts, Indigenous Peoples are still regarded as being deficient about their own context, let alone the context of others. However, Indigenous education has become a collaborative international project with ideas and methods, theories, and examples being drawn upon from diverse Indigenous situations. Some areas such as research ethics, working in institutions, and culturally informed pedagogies have a rich literature from diverse contexts. Other specific contexts are cited consistently as examples of deep practice informed by 30–40 years of work.

The Handbook provides a rich source for the diversity of Indigenous methodologies and analyses for educational research. The chapters demonstrate seamlessly the thoughtful framing of research, attention to what matters from an Indigenous perspective, the critical use of a broad range of education research methodologies, and the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge, languages, and cultural ideas. Indigenous writers have for the most part stopped explaining their cultural frameworks and paradigms for others and have developed diverse ways for generating and applying Indigenous ideas to educational questions.

And finally, the chapters and sections speak to the challenges of education for marginalized peoples and have much to contribute to wider educational directions and understandings. Education is seen by Indigenous Peoples as having a powerful potential for the healing and resurgence of Indigenous communities and families. Language is seen as healing, Indigenous knowledge is seen as healing, and Indigenous engagement is seen as healing. Schools and other educational settings should be healing places rather than places of trauma and exclusion. This is a fundamentally different view of education in the twenty-first century that Indigenous Peoples held hundreds of years ago and an equally fundamentally different philosophical understanding of the purpose of education from standard mainstream views of education.

What Is the Future of Indigenous Education Research?

In closing this introductory piece to the Handbook, we wish to ponder on the future. In a recent speech, one of our esteemed elders and author in this book, Dr. Moana Jackson, recounted a story about his granddaughter that sums up the aspirations of Indigenous Peoples:

I have an eight-year-old granddaughter who is the most beautiful granddaughter in the world, of course. Her first language was our language – the first language learned to speak to read in and to write was Māori and then she began to learn English because it’s all around her. We were sitting on the couch one day and she had a book that had a list of English words and she was reading out the words and sometimes she would ask me what they meant. Then at one point she paused for quite a while and then she said to me “[Granddad], what’s this word?” and she spelt it to me F - U - T - U - R – E. I said, “That’s future” and she said, “What’s a future?” Do you know how hard it is to explain to an eight-year-old what a future is? But I did my best and I told a story and then I said, “so the future is when we take all the times of our past, bring them into today, and then we carry them into all of our tomorrows, and the carrying into all of our tomorrows, this is future.” She seemed satisfied with that and carried on going through her wordlist.

The next morning I was sitting in the kitchen quite early and she came bustling in, got out the little lunch box that she takes to school and started putting some food in and filled up a water bottle, then bustled outside and stuffed them into the saddlebag on her little bike. While she was doing that, the little Pākehā boy, the little white boy from next door who’s two years younger than her - my family called him her shadow because he follows her everywhere - he came through the fence and he said, “What are you doing?” And with that wonderful non-response which children have and which politicians never lose, she said, “Nothing.”

Then she got on her bike and started to pedal up the drive and he said, “Where are you going?” She said, “to look for a future.” He said, “Can I come?” and she looked over her shoulder and said, “Can you keep up?”

The challenge that faces all countries that have been colonised is that Indigenous Peoples are forging a journey and asking the others in that country, “Will you come with us? Can you keep up?” (Jackson, 2018, pp. 2–3)

The Handbook is an example of some of the current research available in Indigenous education. What is presented here is a significant body of research produced by Indigenous researchers working across diverse contexts. Where does this research take us? Research provides knowledge and insights that help identify the limits and possibilities of education. The challenge for Indigenous research is to have impact at the level of system and structural change. Indigenous education is political and subject to relations of power and the dominant views of nation states. Influencing how education systems should be improved, how schools could be reformed, or how preservice teachers should be educated are challenges for Indigenous education research. Likewise being able to deliver well-being to our communities through the healing and educative powers of an Indigenous education system is a significant aspiration.

In this Handbook of Indigenous Education, we too ask the questions Dr. Jackson’s granddaughter asks: Will you come with us on this journey to frame our educational institutions in a way that relates to strong Indigenous communities? Can you keep up with us as we forge our paths toward strong and healthy Indigenous communities and families that will benefit everyone?