Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought.

By Sandy Grande. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004.

In Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought, Sandy Marie Anglas Grande has delivered a powerful response to eurocentric critical theory and its cousin, revolutionary critical pedagogy, that for too long have taken little unessentiallzed notice of indigenous intellectual disciplines and epistemologies. What Grande offers to critical theory is the potential--long-term--for a re-centering, a re-valuing, and a re-claiming of knowing about relationships with the land and the original peoples of the Americas. Indigenous intellectual disciplines, many of them no doubt tens of thousands of years old, are integrated into and constitutive of our cultures--our sacred ways of variously being and becoming and knowing in relationship to all things. They are as responsible as anything for the resilience of indigenous communities and nations through the most brutal moments of colonization and into unforeseeable futures.

Red Pedagogy also labors to engage practitioners of American Indian education who mostly, Grande claims, have not reached out beyond our communities to forge intellectual and political links to progressive educators. What Grande theorizes in the form of a Red pedagogy, borrowing and blending from the idea of a "decolonial imaginary" and the notion of a "nation-people," is what she terms a fourth space of indigenism. Among the latent possibilities of a Red pedagogy located in this fourth space, perhaps most crucial is her attempt to identify discursive threads that eventually might constitute new human relationships, even political coalitions or united fronts in resistance to the belligerence of global capital, and, maybe, real understanding and appreciation for the obligations of American Indian peoples to the staying power and continued existence of our communities.

Although enchanted by the possibilities offered to a Red pedagogy by the critical pedagogue Peter McLaren because she sees in McLaren the greatest understanding and the most potential, Grande's fundamental concern is with theorizing an anti-oppression, liberation pedagogy that works in the various interests of American Indian peoples. Following the lead offered by Taiaiake Alfred in Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifest (1999), in chapter two, "Competing Moral Visions: At the Crossroads of Democracy and Sovereignty," she asks us--Natives and our allies--to interrogate the suitability of the concept and aim of sovereignty. The fundamental task, she suggests, "is to detach and dethink the notion of sovereignty from its connection to Western understandings of power and relationships and base it on indigenous notions of power." In whatever variety of ways Native peoples resolve the political dimensions of sovereignty, Grande reminds us, there will be accompanying intellectual and spiritual implications--what she terms "a politics of ensoulment"--guided by "the tribe, the people, the community" and "the perseverance of these entities and their connection to indigenous lands and sacred places."

Threats to maintaining connections to lands and sacred places are ongoing, and even revolutionary pedagogies currently are implicated in the corporate-instigated and state-sponsored bullying and intimidation. In "Red Land, White Power," Grande argues for understanding that while the explanatory frameworks of critical pedagogy "provides the tools for constructing a more potent and overtly challenging critique of the colonialist project," she also insists "that it remains deeply informed by Western theory." She identifies the failure of contemporary environmentalist discourse as it is represented by C.A. Bowers, for instance, to defend her friend McLaren but also, more notably, to ask the practitioners of critical pedagogy to acknowledge both the intricacies of ongoing indigenous struggles and the deep structures of colonialist consciousness within which they do their critical work. One matter that is at stake for us all, she suggests, is the ability to produce pedagogies for ecological sustainability, something that can not happen absent the meaningful involvement of culturally connected indigenous peoples. Another crucial matter is the suitability of what might be a too unreflexive critical theory, something Grande leaves as an open question rather than a solved problem. If critical pedagogy, in Grande's words, "is able to sustain the same kind of penetrating analysis it unleashes on capitalism, it may evolve into an invaluable tool for indigenous peoples and their allies, fighting to protect and extend Indian sovereignty over tribal land and resources."

Grande's longest chapter, "American Indian Geographies of Identity and Power," is perhaps her most problematic from a perspective emergent from within the nation-centric discourses of indigenous studies. In chapter four, Grande takes what could be conceived of as an excessively racialized or overly ethnic stand on the identity question emerging in a discursive space we might agree to name "Indian" or "Indigenous," or whatever. What we might agree to call anti-essentialist theories of identity that are concerned with the debilitating dynamics of border patrolling and the conditions of possibility imparted through border crossing may be totalizing in their effects and therefore seriously damning and damaging to--(fill in the blank). Not all border patrolling is incapacitating. Not all border crossing is progressive. Through the sacred ways of being and becoming deeply embedded in--(again, fill in the blank), there indeed are essential qualities to various indigenous identities that border crosses may knowingly undermine or inadvertently destroy.

Grande's most salient contribution comes in chapter five, "Whitestream Feminism and the Colonialist Project: Toward a Theory of Indigenista." Grande sees promise in revolutionary, anti-racist feminisms, a view troubled somewhat by Reyna Ramirez in her effort to theorize a "Native feminist approach to belong" as well as embraced in varying degrees by Andrea Smith, Luana Ross, Lee Maracle, and others. For her contribution to this conversation well underway among Indigenous women writers and thinkers, Grande finds a common ground among several tensions at which revolutionary feminisms intersect with the indigenous project and from which she proposes a theory of indigenista. Some readers will recall her articulation of indigenista from a 2003 publication in Educational Theory. She reminds us again in Red Pedagogy that, in her words, "many indigenous women share historical memories and contemporary experiences of women as warriors, healers, spiritual leaders, clan mothers, tribal leaders, council members, political activists, and cultural proprietors, and thus, already live with a sense of their own traditional 'feminist' agency." She marks the condemnation of whitestream feminism as "warranted" and denotes revolutionary feminisms as having "relevance for indigenous women" because "in this moment of late capitalism and advanced colonialism, it is critically important for indigenous scholars to examine, articulate, and disrupt the global capitalistic forces that work to imperil tribal existence." As differently positioned indigenous peoples obligated to fight for our communities, we need non-Indian allies, she suggests, even as we need autonomously to fashion our own decolonial theories relevant to our own struggles and unique conditions.

Alongside its undeniable contribution to decolonial thinking and its unquestionable potential for radical teachers to think more seriously about forging relationships with Indian people in a context of ongoing colonization, Red Pedagogy is not free of shortcomings, as my reading of the author's treatment of identity suggests. However, Grande is correct. There is a need for indigenous theories of subjectivity that address the ongoing political duty to protect and expand sovereignty, the socioeconomic urgency to build transnational coalitions, and the intellectual necessity to create space for effective social change. Sensible or even satisfying answers may or may not be found in eurocentric critical theory, as Grande repeatedly suggests even as she endeavors to theorize a common ground from where together we might forge coalitions to fight back against our mutual enemies, the shared threats to our varying existences, ways of being and becoming, conditions, and struggles.

Because these not insignificant matters are yet unsettled, Red Pedagogy ought to be required reading along with Linda Tuhiwai Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies (1999) and Devon Abbott Mihesuah and Waziyatawin Angela Wilson's Indigenizing the Academy (2004) in mandatory undergraduate and graduate courses offered by schools of education as well as in American studies, American Indian and Indigenous studies (which may not share the same purpose), ethnic studies generally, criticism and interpretive theory, and women's studies. Red Pedagogy promises to be a conversation starter for radical teachers dedicated not simply to their individual and shared professional development but who also feel and act upon an obligation to human beings beyond themselves and outside of their classrooms. It should not be used as a handbook for understanding the behavior of Indian children in public schools or as a guidebook for grasping how Natives think.