Ethical relationality, TribalCrit, and autobiographical narrative inquiry: Imagining coming alongside Indigenous children

Cardinal, Trudy; Stavrou, Stavros; Murphy, M. Shaun; Huber, Janice

doi:10.3389/feduc.2022.1051339

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Educ., 20 January 2023

Sec. Teacher Education

Volume 7 - 2022 | https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2022.1051339

This article is part of the Research Topic The Role of Reflection in Teacher and Teacher Educator Development View all 18 articles

Ethical relationality, TribalCrit, and autobiographical narrative inquiry: Imagining coming alongside Indigenous children

$\nTrudy Cardinal$ Trudy Cardinal¹

Stavros Stavrou²

M. Shaun Murphy²

Janice Huber¹^*

¹Faculty of Education, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada
²College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada

Creating this chapter brought us together as a diverse group of scholars to think deeply about a process of reflection in teacher education that centers on ethical relationality. To show our coming alongside adult learners attentive to reflection that centers ethical relationality, we inquire into both the Assessment as Pimosayta courses that Murphy, Cardinal, and Huber teach and into Stavrou's experiences teaching and enacting assessment in his practice. The body of our chapter is structured by the five design elements foregrounded by Stavrou and Murphy's recent bringing of critical race theory and anti-racist education to narrative inquiry: beginning with experience; carrying theoretical frameworks into an inquiry; negotiating theoretical frameworks with participants; using narrative threads to show the complexity of experience; ending in experience. Centering ethical relationality as we come alongside pre- and in-service teachers as they imagine coming alongside Indigenous children, youth, families, and communities lifts the long-termness of our work, including that this long-termness entails interactions and responsibilities with other humans and more-than-human beings.

Introduction

Ethical relationality is an ecological understanding of human relationality that does not deny difference but rather seeks to more deeply understand how our different histories and experiences position us in relation to each other. This form of relationality is ethical because it does not overlook or render invisible the particular historical, cultural, and social contexts from which a standpoint arises. Rather, it puts these considerations at the forefront of engagements across frontiers of difference. (Donald, 2009, p. 6)

Creating this chapter brought us together as a diverse group of scholars¹ to think deeply about a process of reflection in teacher education that centers on ethical relationality. As taught to us by Donald (2009), living ethical relationality requires that we attend to how we honor this sensibility in our work as educators, and as important, how it is we live in our everyday interactions/lives. Throughout our careers, we each have worked with children, youth, families, communities, and adult learners of Indigenous heritage.² We are conscious that most of the adult learners we come alongside in post-secondary places, who are both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, will work with Indigenous children, youth, families, communities, or adult learners. We are also conscious that how we come alongside adult learners in undergraduate and graduate courses and programs arises from our responsibilities to the children, youth, adult learners, families, and communities they will come alongside (Clandinin and Connelly, 1998; Clandinin et al., 2006; Young et al., 2012). Reflection is an important aspect in these interconnected intergenerational webs of relationships; it is a key way we attempt to live out and nurture Donald's understanding of ethical relationality (Donald, 2009). Increasingly, we—as teacher educators and the adult learners we come alongside—recognize the need for reflection that “seeks to more deeply understand how our different histories and experiences position us in relation to each other” (p. 6).

To show our coming alongside adult learners attentive to reflection that centers ethical relationality, we inquire into both the Assessment as Pimosayta courses that Murphy, Cardinal, and Huber teach³ and into Stavrou's experiences teaching and enacting assessment in his practice. The Assessment as Pimosayta courses⁴ centers on the Anishinaabe concept of pimosayta, which offers knowledge and pedagogies for walking together in a good way.⁵ Cardinal, Murphy, and Huber center this concept in the Assessment as Pimosayta course because of their respect for, and relationships with Dr. Mary Young who taught them pimosayta to support them, as Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, to walk together in good ways. The concept of pimosayta reminds us that assessment in schools and universities needs to center on walking together in good ways as we come alongside children, youth, or adult learners, and the webs of relationships and inter-relationality that shape their and our identities. As Stavrou co-inquired with Cardinal, Murphy, and Huber, he reflected on his experience with assessment, sharing insights about his and Murphy's earlier bringing of Tribal Critical Race Theory (TribalCrit) to narrative inquiry (Stavrou, 2020; Stavrou and Murphy, 2021). Together we think about how ethical relationality (Donald, 2009) and TribalCrit are increasingly orienting the reflective practice that we and the adult learners engage in as we come alongside one another in teacher education.

In the Assessment as Pimosayta course, we encourage the pre- and in-service teachers we come alongside to be reflective. We build this process into our syllabi, and we give examples from our practices as teacher educators and from when we taught in grade school and our everyday lives. As the term unfolds, we engage in term-long reflective thinking as we co-inquire into assessment as an aspect of teaching, how assessment is related to identity making, and how assessment, as a result of colonial narratives that still dominate in schools and universities, privileges certain ways of knowing, being, and doing while silencing or attempting to change or exterminate other ways (Bouvier and Karlenzig, 2006; Rameka, 2007, 2021; Claypool and Preston, 2011; Huber et al., 2011, 2022; Young et al., 2012; Peltier, 2017, 2021; Ball, 2021; Preston and Claypool, 2021; Shultz and Englert, 2021; Stavrou, 2021; Brown, 2022; Steinhauer, 2022; Tulloch et al., 2022; White, 2022). Our process of reflection begins as we explore curriculum making (Clandinin and Connelly, 1992), and interrogate how curriculum making, assessment making, and identity making are connected (Murphy, 2010; Huber et al., 2011; Swanson, 2013, 2014, 2019; Houle, 2015; Lessard, 2015). In relation to schooling, as humans, we come to know who we are, in part, because of the shaping influence of assessment. Living as a reflective teacher or teacher educator supports us in considering how assessment is shaping not just our own identities but the identities of the children, youth, or adult learners whom we are alongside. Are we living the ethical relationality embedded in the concept of pimosayta as we engage in assessment making with children, youth, or adult learners? What can Indigenous knowledge and TribalCrit offer?

Engaging in reflection through term-long autobiographical narrative inquiry (ANI)

As we come alongside students in the Assessment as Pimosayta course, we center their experiences. We are, in part, guided by Clandinin and Connelly (2000) grounding of narrative inquiry (NI) as a relational research methodology in the understanding that “Narrative inquiry is the study of experience, and experience, as John Dewey taught, is a matter of people in relation contextually and temporally” (p. 189). We consider the intersecting knowledge of experience and story embedded in discourses of race, class, gender, gender expression, culture, language, social, and economic positioning (and more), as inspired by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, such as hooks (1984, 1996), Anzaldúa (1987, 1995), Lugones (1987), Heilbrun (1988), Trinh Minh-ha (1989), Sarris (1993), Gunn Allen (1994), Delpit (1995), Greene (1995), Lindemann Nelson (1995), Marmon Silko (1996), Battiste and Henderson (2000), King (2003), and Adichie (2009).

Attending to these intersections and dominant colonial narratives that shape social, cultural, and institutional narratives increasingly drew Clandinin and Connelly's attention to the need for simultaneous inquiry into multiple dimensions of experience, including the “personal and social (interaction); past, present, and future (continuity); combined with the notion of place (situation)” (emphasis in original, Clandinin and Connelly, 2000, p. 50). Narrative inquirers have also drawn attention to how experience is continuously shaped and reshaped in complex, contradictory, and intergenerational ways (Young, 2005), as well as in violent ways (Saleh, 2020).

Understandings of the place of ANI within this growing tradition of NI continue to develop (Cardinal, 2010, 2020; Saleh, 2020), as do understandings of NI as pedagogy. In part, the growth of NI as pedagogy through ANI began through Connelly and Clandinin (1988) drawing on their understandings of NI and teacher knowledge to describe how teachers can “revolutionize their practices through reflection on their own experiences” (p. xv). Over time, they added further emphasis on connections among teachers', children's, and teacher educator's lives and education through inquiry into the meeting of their lived, told, retold, and relived stories of experience:

Narrative and storytelling allow us to link teachers' and children's lives with the concept of education. It is education that is at the core of our enterprise. … We see living an educated life as an ongoing process. People's lives are composed over time: … life stories are lived and told, retold and relived. For us, education is interwoven with living and with the possibility of retelling our life stories. As we learn to tell, listen, and respond to teachers' and children's stories, we imagine significant educational consequences for children and teachers and for faculty members in universities through more mutual relations between schools and universities (emphasis in original, Clandinin and Connelly, 1998, p. 246).

These understandings of experience and lives as a story, and inquiry into the living, telling, retelling, and reliving of stories as (teacher) education are well documented.⁶ So, too is our and other NIs earlier (Huber et al., 2013) drawing on Elder Angela Sidney's Trinh Minh-ha (1989), Cruikshank (1990), Marmon Silko (1996), Battiste and Henderson (2000), Young (2005), and Archibald (2008) deep cultural knowledge of the intergenerational and pedagogical nature of stories, alongside Apache Knowledge Keeper Nick Thompson's Basso (1996), Okri (1997), Morris (2002), and King (2003) knowledge of how stories work on us as we engage in NI as pedagogy. Earlier, Huber et al. (2013) noted how non-western understandings of stories show “how much difference, openness, and place matter [and that in our attentiveness to] possibilities for storying and restorying ourselves and one another into being…new kinds of, or maybe forgotten or written over, obligations and ways of interacting and responding to and with one another” (p. 216) become visible. In time, Cardinal and Fenichel (2017) made some of these “forgotten or written over” obligations more visible by drawing attention to the potential opened through co-creating with adult learners in teacher education courses, a curriculum simultaneously attentive to Indigenous education, relational pedagogy, and ANI.

More recently, Saleh (2020) has contributed to the development of NI as pedagogy through ANI through her exploration of how thinking with stories can offer openings for inquiry into difficult knowledge that has long held silent the oppression and displacement of diverse peoples and their ways of knowing, being, doing, feeling, seeing, and relating.

Bringing TribalCrit to reflection through term-long ANI

This above-noted flourishing of NI, as both a relational research methodology and as relational pedagogy, has continued to grow through the knowledge of many people, including successive generations of scholars. This methodological and pedagogical growth is also influencing the growth of ANI. For example, Stavrou and Murphy (2021) recently brought TribalCrit to NI. In doing so, they drew on Mapping a landscape of narrative inquiry: Borderland spaces and tensions, in which Clandinin and Rosiek (2006) described the methodological interplay between NI, post-positivism, post-structuralism, and Marxism's critical theory. As Stavrou and Murphy expanded these metaphorical borderlands to the methodological topography of critical race theory (CRT) (see Gillies, 2017 and references therein) and anti-racist education (ARE) (see Kumashiro, 2000, 2001, 2004; St. Denis, 2007, and references therein), they suggested five design elements for narrative inquirers who want to attend to societal issues (such as racism) by intersecting the inquiry with other forms of scholarship. These five design elements are: beginning with experience; carrying theoretical frameworks into an inquiry; negotiating theoretical frameworks with participants; using narrative threads to show the complexity of experience; and ending in experience.

In the upcoming sections we show our bringing these design elements to the reflection through the ANI process we invite teachers in the Assessment as Pimosayta course to engage in. We also show some of Stavrou's experiences with assessment, and some of his reflections as he brings TribalCrit and these design elements to his teaching. Our goal in these upcoming sections is to show how these design elements are influencing our pedagogy. We then draw on the insights we show through our inquiry into the influence of these design elements on our pedagogy to reflect on our continuing growth in attending to the centrality of ethical relationality for teacher education for coming alongside Indigenous children, youth, families, and communities.

Beginning with experience

The first design element foregrounded by Stavrou and Murphy (2021) bringing of TribalCrit to NI, which we now bring to NI as pedagogy through the process of ANI we invite adult learners to engage in, was to begin with experience. Stavrou and Murphy show that as they attend to this element as narrative inquirers, their inquiries start with an autobiographical introspection into the experiences they bring to the particular inquiry focus. These narrative beginnings help to make visible the personal, practical, and social justifications of their research. The larger societal issues that might be addressed are an instance in which inquirers engage with other theoretical frameworks (such as CRT and ARE). As they noted, theories “do not supersede experience, but rather shape an understanding of the context in which experiences occur” (p. 15).

As Murphy has subsequently brought this design element to the ANI he invites teachers to engage with, in the Assessment as Pimosayta course he orients the teachers to this aspect through his course outline, which includes the following description:

Mary Young (an Anishinabe scholar) always said, “Indigenous and non-Indigenous people might learn to walk together in good ways.” Pimosayta, the Anishinabe concept for “walking together in good ways” shapes an understanding of assessment. Experiential learning can be understood as shaping culturally responsive, inquiry-focused, and interactive learning environments and activities; it can also be understood as the lived experiences continuously shaping and reshaping children's unfolding lives. In this understanding, attention turns toward children's life curriculum making, and in particular, connections among curriculum making, identity making, and assessment making as children compose their lives in and outside of school (Murphy, 2020, Class syllabus: Assessment as Pimosayta: Attending to Experience in Relational Ways).

With this clearly stated in the syllabus, Murphy and the teachers he alongside begins the course. The teachers knew what the intent of the course was before they started, as they had self-selected to register. In the first few classes, Murphy invited the teachers to reflect on the assessment they have conducted and the assessment that has been done to them. This tends to be a written activity but often has an oral component if the class is face-to-face. The teachers completed this reflective writing before Murphy supported them to begin to consider other ways of knowing and assessment. Some teachers were able to write about assessment with Indigenous learners, others had little to no experience. As Murphy initiated this term-long process he was conscious that, “…reflection as a process of thinking alone does not account for the beliefs and biases that guide the thinking in the first place” (Webb, 2001, p. 246). Webb (2001) goes on to say that “student teachers' own familiarity with the classroom restricts their ability to conceptualize alternate visions of teaching and learning” (p. 248). While Murphy noted with the teachers that Webb was writing about beginning teachers, he posited this was also a consideration he held for in-service teachers, and himself as a teacher educator, in relation to practice in school or university classrooms; it is an understanding that teachers and students are engaged in learning and that inquiry into experience is key in their learning.

Carrying theoretical frameworks into an inquiry

The second design element explored by Stavrou and Murphy (2021) was carrying theoretical frameworks into an inquiry. They explained that while theory expands an understanding of experience, we need to be ever mindful that experience is more nuanced than what could be shared if stories were restricted to theoretical domains. As Stavrou and the adult learners reflect on stories around school assessments, they are bringing forward TribalCrit, a theory developed by Lumbee scholar Brayboy (2006).⁷

Brayboy (2006) explained that, in education, TribalCrit theorizes and reveals the colonial and racist nature of schooling institutions; is a “theoretical lens through which to describe the lived experiences of tribal peoples” (p. 441); is praxis for social justice that values narrative and stories as legitimate forms of data and ways of being. It centers on the educational experiences of Indigenous students, teachers, and practitioners in the areas of classroom interactions, cultural and linguistic revitalization, and problematic representations of pedagogy.

While assessment in education is a broad and dynamic concept, one of its purposes is to give a monolithic explanation of student achievement and capability. As such, assessments are a colonial endeavor when they are used to assimilate Indigenous students by sidelining cultural knowledge with Eurocentric knowledge for the purpose of being “successful” (as a Eurocentric conception) in educational institutions. Indigenous students are qualified as having cognitive and cultural deficits through quantitative data in the form of administered standardized testing. Practitioners reporting racialized data often ignore: root causes of oppression; differential access to equitable education through chronic underfunding of rural, reserve, and urban schools; effects of historical and ongoing colonization from continued land theft and various forms of forced poverty; classroom discourses that relegate Indigenous cultures and knowledge's to the multicultural melting pot; the ways whiteness operates in legal and educational institutions to construct mixed-race identities; the enduring aspects of cultural knowledge; and the ways schooling contexts are complicit in maintaining inequity through classroom interactions and curricula that touts ideologies of meritocracy, modernity, and colorblindness (Battiste, 1986, 2011, 2013; King, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1998, 2005; Kumashiro, 2000, 2001, 2004; Dei, 2001; St. Denis, 2004, 2007, 2011; Brayboy, 2006; Wilson and Macdonald, 2010; Leonardo, 2013; Goulet and Goulet, 2014; Battey and Leyva, 2016; Gillies, 2017, 2021; Stavrou and Miller, 2017).

Negotiating theoretical frameworks with participants

Stavrou and Murphy (2021) third design element focused on negotiating theoretical frameworks with participants. They explained that the grand narratives surrounding larger societal and institutional racism and colonization create openings for bringing TribalCrit to make sense of macro-social experiences. In doing so, however, they noted that we need to simultaneously hold in the foreground experiences across a life by returning to the people participating in the inquiry. A feature of a NI is the relational ethics that surround inquirer–participant relationships. As such, participants co-compose interim and final research texts and therefore have a say in the role theory plays in the telling (and retelling) of their lives.

As Cardinal and Huber brought this design element to the most recent ANI they invited teachers to engage in, in an Assessment as Pimosayta course, they drew on the wisdom and theories shared with them by Anishinaabe Elder Stanley Peltier, particularly his emphasis on the significance of the land in Indigenous ideologies, languages, and pedagogies. By sharing with the teachers their stories of learning these theories alongside Elder Stan, Cardinal and Huber hoped to encourage the teachers to consider connecting with the teachings of the land where they were situated, and to then inquire into these experiences in their term-long ANIs. As he taught Cardinal and Huber to trust the teaching/knowledge they received from the lands where they were situated, Elder Stan emphasized how these theories have been nurtured since time immemorial to strengthen children's trust in their inner knowing, and their intuitions. Following their sharing stories of their learning alongside Elder Stan, Cardinal and Huber invited the teachers to listen to the wisdom shared by numerous Elders and Knowledge Keepers about the significance of this process of land-connected knowledge making.⁸ In their subsequent reflections in their ANIs, numerous teachers foregrounded, for example, Blackfoot Elder Narcisse Blood's⁹ teachings about how visiting some of the sites that are sacred to the Blood Nation is a repatriation of knowledge that has and continues to sustain the Nation since time immemorial. As these teachers thought with Elder Narcisse's knowledge alongside their stories of experiences with assessment, similar to knowledge shared by Brayboy and Maughan (2009, drawing on Battiste, 2002), they simultaneously attended to ancient, orally shared, and inter-relational theoretical frameworks:

Battiste (2002) is…clear on this point when she notes that “Indigenous Knowledge is also inherently tied to land, not to land in general but to particular landscapes, landforms, and biomes where ceremonies are properly held, stories properly recited, medicines properly gathered, and transfers of knowledge properly authenticated (p. 13)”. (p. 10)

While some teachers chose to not engage in this process and with these oral theoretical frameworks this “different way of learning” (Elder Narcisse Blood, 3.29 on counter) offered, the majority who did, noted how their land visits slowed them to experience (re)connection with the land where they were situated. In their ANIs they noted how these experiences with the land were supporting their growth in ways they believed would not have otherwise happened. Some teachers reflected on their (re)awakening to more of who they were and were becoming as teachers, people, and human beings; other teachers reflected on the commitments that initially drew them toward wanting to become teachers; and still, other teachers reflected on ways of knowing, being, doing, feeling, seeing, and relating that they had experienced with family and community people, as well as alongside more-than-human beings, but now realized they had gradually silenced as a result of their years-long experiences in school and university places.

Using narrative threads to show the complexity of experience

Stavrou and Murphy (2021) fourth design element focused on using narrative threads to show the complexity of experience. They noted that intersecting other forms of scholarship might lead researchers to think about themes and categories. Since these notions of organizing research can be constricting and reductionist, this fourth design element reminded narrative inquirers to attend to the “wholeness of a life that is still in the making” (p. 16).

As Huber and Cardinal brought this design element to the ANI process they invited teachers to engage in during the winter 2022 Assessment as Pimosayta course, they shared feedback expressed by two teachers¹⁰ who participated in the fall 2021 Assessment as Pimosayta course:

Our term-long project showed that Huber was interested in who we were as individuals, and it really meant a lot to get positive feedback…[this] made learning exciting and personal… (Assessment as Pimosayta: Honouring Children: Indigenous and Relational Approaches, Student Course Evaluation, Fall 2021).

I enjoyed all aspects of the course, especially the guest speakers and the individual inquiry. (Assessment as Pimosayta: Honouring Children: Indigenous and Relational Approaches, Student Course Evaluation, Fall 2021).

These two teachers' comments validated their decision to continue to utilize ANI as pedagogy. When Cardinal and Huber designed their first offering of the course,¹¹ they drew from their experiences as teachers in courses alongside Jean Clandinin, in which they were each inspired by Clandinin's invitation to engage in term-long ANI. They recognized from the two teacher's comments that they had had an experience similar to their own alongside Clandinin. One teacher in her comment noted experiencing Huber's interest in her as an individual and how this made her “learning exciting and personal”. Reflection on these teachers' comments contributed to Huber's ongoing growth in understanding the significance of staying attentive to being in the midst during inquiry into our lived, told, retold, and relived stories (Clandinin and Connelly, 2000; Clandinin, 2013), an understanding she shared with the teachers in the winter 2022 course: “In narrative inquiry, we try to understand the stories under or on the edges of stories lived and told, as no story stands on its own but rather in relation to many others” (Downey and Clandinin, 2010, p. 387).

Pedagogically, Huber practiced this understanding alongside the teachers in the fall 2021 course through a process of bi-weekly responses to their ANI, i.e., on a Google Doc each teacher created and shared with Huber. Huber's response to each teacher showed her thinking with their stories attentive to personal, as well as social, cultural, political, place, institutional, familial, linguistic, racial, land (and more) stories living “under or on the edges” of their “lived and told” stories of assessment.

As the teachers engaged in this process, they gradually began to name narrative threads they were becoming more awake to that showed the complexity of their experience. Significant were the extensions they made to the complex, layered experiences and lives of children and families. This thinking (by the teachers and Huber) raised important questions about how dominant forms of assessment in schools and universities ignore attentiveness to the narrative threads that show the complexities and ongoingness of a child's, youth's, or adult learner's life. As Saleh et al. (2022) recently showed, staying attentive to the narrative threads that show the complexity of our experience (including intergenerationally and inter-relationally) across time, place, situations, and relationships can open us to important possibilities:

I am trying to purposely create spaces “to live better” (Basso, 1996, p. 59) and “walk in a good way” (Young, 2005, p. 179) alongside co-inquirers and all those whose lives and stories touch, shape, and/or overlap with mine. To both work with and toward this niyyah (an Arabic word and Islamic concept of engaging with good spirit and intentions), I have been engaging in an ongoing autobiographical narrative inquiry (Clandinin, 2013; Saleh et al., 2014) into the stories I live by, with, and in. For, how can I know what stories are guiding my (embodied) spirit, intentions, and responses without wakefulness to the stories that are alive within and around me? (p. 172).

Ending in experience

The fifth design element foregrounded by Stavrou and Murphy (2021) bringing of TribalCrit to NI focused on using narrative threads to show the complexity of experience. They noted that as NIs attend to macro-social, institutional, and cultural grand narratives that theoretical orientations might invoke, they must end in the participants' experiences.

In the NI as pedagogy process that Murphy invited teachers to engage in, ending in experience did not neglect a more nuanced understanding of experience. In this ANI pedagogical process, this return to experience and its reflection was akin to retelling (the analysis aspect of an inquiry). Therefore, the teachers in Murphy's course reflected on their teaching practice by thinking about their continued and past experiences alongside new experiences. The new experiences now included thinking alongside theory and how to engage theory in their reflections. The theory is ultimately based on experience, and in order to be practical and supportive, we must return to experience. In Murphy's ANI as pedagogy design, he considers that the teachers he is alongside have had experience with theory, therefore in subsequent reflection, theory, such as we have discussed throughout this article, remains anchored in their work as in-service and pre-service teachers enabling them to query and reinterpret their experience.

The final articles or visual syntheses the teachers submitted to Murphy reflected this movement. These creations remained largely reflective in that they were based on work they had done (or in the case of some, assessment work they will do, and even these tend to be based on experiences they have had). What differed from the teacher's initial experiential reflections was that now they brought the theoretical work of others and class discussions to bear on their pedagogy/work. Hence, the teachers and Murphy ended in a reflective experience, but with the insight of theory.

Imagining our forward responsibilities

Relational ethics has since its beginning been a foundational aspect of NI (Clandinin and Connelly, 1988; Connelly and Clandinin, 1999). At its most easily understood, it implies that through our research, we seek to stay in a process of living an ethical relationship alongside participants. Due to the experiential nature of NI and our desire to understand experience, there is a vulnerability to our work that we need to continuously consider. Therefore, we need to always integrate investigations into how we are living in our reflection and pedagogical designs.

Early on, ethics in NI was based on the work of Noddings (1984) and an ethic of care that situates ethics in caring for a life, and that we are attentive to a whole life. Further, Margalit (2002) wrote about ethics and morality in that ethical obligations apply to the people with whom we interact, and moral obligations reside in relation to larger groups generically (as in the idea of a group) and systems. Hence, ethics must orient our relationships with people whom we are alongside (including pedagogically as we are alongside teachers). While we might contend that our ethics reside in an obligation to ourselves, ANI opens inquiry into the self in a relationship. We cannot think about/inquire into our pedagogy without referring to others. Practice is predicated on the other and by extension the other(s) of the other. We are always in a place of relational ethics as we engage in ANI as a relational pedagogy. This is an important element of our pedagogy—one we need to ensure is embedded in our course design and experiences in the course, and in our reflection on our experiences as teachers and teacher educators.

Over time, our coming alongside pre- and in-service teachers and inviting them to engage in reflection through ANI has grown increasingly guided by Cardinal (2011), who drew on Wilson (2001) knowledge of “All Our Relations” and “relational accountability” to highlight the significance of the inter-relational dimensions of experience. Cardinal's guidance has grown our understanding of Donald (2009) knowledge of ethical relationality, as well as our ethical responsibilities to the more-than-human, spiritual, and ancestral realms that ground and shape our interactions. These understandings now support us, and the teachers we are alongside, to attend to additional dimensions of experience (Cardinal et al., 2019, 2022; Huber et al., 2022). Increasingly, we have grown our earlier understandings of living in ethically relational ways by centering ethical relationality based on an Indigenous, particularly a Cree, worldview. As noted by Donald (2016), “As part of an ongoing effort to articulate new ways of living together that are not fully circumscribed by colonial frontier logics …[he has become] increasingly inspired by the wisdom teachings of Cree Elders” (p. 10). Donald noted further how he has learned that “In Cree teachings, ethical forms of relationality are emphasized as most important because doing so supports life and living for all perceptive beings in organically generative ways” (p. 10). As Donald described, central to this insight are the Cree wisdom concepts of wichi-towin and wahkohtowin:

The term wicihitowin refers to the life-giving energy that is generated when people face each other as relatives and build trusting relationships by connecting with others in respectful ways. [This way of being insists] that we recognize one another as fellow human beings and work hard to put respect and love at the forefront of our interactions.

....The term wahkohtowin refers to kinship relations and teaches us to extend our relational network so that it also includes the more-than-human beings that live amongst us. [In our work alongside teachers, the ANI we invite them to engage in, seeks to nurture an understanding] that we human beings are fully enmeshed in a series of relationships that enable us to live.... [W]e are called to repeatedly acknowledge and honor the fact that the sun, the land, the wind, the water, the animals, and the trees just to name a few) are quite literally our relatives; we carry parts of each of them inside our own bodies... and…[w]e are fully reliant on them for our survival. (Donald, 2016, p. 10).

Continuing to grow our attentiveness to always negotiating ethical relationality

Whether or not we acknowledge it, these teachings have guided us to always negotiate ethical relationality with the teachers we are alongside. By extension, we are also negotiating our ethical relationality with the people (typically children and youth) whom they (will) come alongside as teachers. Centering ethical relationality as we come alongside pre- and in-service teachers as they imagine coming alongside Indigenous children, youth, families, and communities lifts the long-termness of our work, including that this long-termness entails interactions with other humans and more-than-human beings. In this way, ethical relationality centers on relationships that also exist in our imaginations as relationships of possibility.

We imagine these are the kinds of relationships that Cree Elder Jimmy O'Chiese (2017) was encouraging as he reflected on “the wampum belt—the first treaty that was negotiated” (p. 22) on these lands now known within dominant narratives as Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Canada. He described these relationships as follows:

It says it right there, “Side by side.” Not integration, side by side. Because we had our own education; we had our own laws; we had our own governance. We had our way of life, and we shared that with the Europeans that came here. … That's what that treaty was. Two laws, not only one side. Things will never work if only one side of the treaty is interpreted, if only one law is interpreted. (p. 22)

As Elder Jimmy noted, “We shouldn't be trying to ‘Indigenize education'. We should be recognizing our own Native education as it is, as it always has been, which is our own law—Creator's Law; some call it natural law” (p. 23). Elder Jimmy reminded us that:

Creator gave us one air, one water, one world, one life. We were supposed to be learning from each other, according to the treaties; we were supposed to be teaching each other our education as it is. That's what it means to truly co-exist. Respecting each other's own education. Treaties are about agreeing to co-exist (p. 23).

This teaching from Elder Jimmy keeps us deeply attentive to, and always in a place of, ongoing learning and growth. As Brayboy and Maughan (2009) reminded us, “teachers have historically been frontline actors in attempts to assimilate Indigenous peoples” (p. 4). We are hopeful that what we have tried to show here about our ongoing efforts to come alongside teachers inviting them (and us) to engage in an ongoing process of reflection through ANI that centers ethical relationality and TribalCrit will support them (and us), as we collectively come alongside Indigenous children, youth, families, communities, and adult learners. In our collective coming alongside, we hope that instead of perpetuating relationships of assimilation, our pedagogy will lift what we know and are growing to know about how “Indigenous Knowledges…extend and create space to think more broadly about what teaching and learning is and what it might look like” (Brayboy and Maughan, 2009, p. 18).

Data availability statement

The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.

Ethics statement

Ethical review and approval was not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

The reviewer RC declared a shared committee, AERA Narrative Research SIG, with the author SS, to the handling editor.

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Footnotes

1. ^Trudy is Cree/Métis and Janice is non-Indigenous, both from northern Alberta Treaty 8 working in Treaty 6. Stavros and Shaun, both non-Indigenous, are from Treaty 6 and working in Treaty 6 in Saskatchewan.

2. ^We use the word heritage to signify individuals of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit ancestry who identify in many ways.

3. ^For further information about this course, please see: Cardinal et al. (2019), Huber et al. (2022), and Cardinal et al. (2022).

4. ^Shaun's course title is Assessment as Pimosayta: Attending to Experience in Relational Ways (University of Saskatchewan). Trudy and Janice's course title is Assessment as Pimosayta: Honouring Children: Indigenous and Relational Approaches (University of Alberta).

5. ^Dr. Mary Young shared her understandings of pimosayta and pimatisiwin in the public lecture, Pimosayta (Learning to Walk Together), in the Faculty of Education, University of Regina, November 2012.

6. ^See for example: Clandinin and Connelly (1988, 1995), Clandinin et al. (1993, 2006, 2014), Connelly and Clandinin (1999), Olson and Craig (2001), Li et al. (2008), Barrett and Stauffer (2009), Conle (2010), Elbaz-Luwisch (2010), Craig (2011), Young et al. (2012), Huber et al. (2013, 2014), Iftody (2013), Schaefer et al. (2015), and Cardinal and Fenichel (2017).

7. ^In Stavros and Shaun's earlier paper, and here in Stavros's inquiry, their intentions are not to give a comprehensive explanation of TribalCrit, nor are they applying it in a thorough analysis of their work. Rather, they are drawing upon Brian's discourses which help them narrowly describe the ways school assessments perpetuate colonialism and racism in the educational settings of our reflections.

8. ^Please see: https://www.learnalberta.ca/content/aswt/connection_to_land/#respecting-intro.

9. ^Please see: https://www.learnalberta.ca/content/aswt/connection_to_land/#respecting-wisdom-blood.

10. ^Many of the teachers in the fall 2021 Assessment as Pimosayta course were of First Nation or Métis ancestry.

11. ^Their first offering of the Assessment as Pimosayta course was in winter 2019.

References

Adichie, C. N. (2009). The Danger of a Single Story. Available online at: http://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html (accessed October 10, 2022).