Indigenous Pedagogy in the Classroom: A Service Learning Model for Discussion

Scholars of Indigenous religious traditions are keenly aware of how difficult it is to lead our students into the fluid dynamics of oral religions within the conventional structures of text-based academic inquiry and classroom learning. This pedagogical struggle is surely related to the search for words nimble enough to interpret Indigenous traditions in a scholarly interpretive idiom that more properly belongs to the study of "religions" and/or "cultures." As Inés Talamantez has put it in various public contexts, "Native communities have their own theories of culture," their own sovereign ways of knowing, teaching, and learning traditions, and scholars have seen it increasingly as our task to indigenize the language that religious studies brings to Native lifeways.

Still, this is not a problem of vocabulary alone; more elementally, I submit, it is a structural one, a presenting problem to pedagogy and scholarship alike. What makes Indigenous theories of culture distinctive is in part that they are less a matter of theory than of process, and thus we cannot just enumerate the content of the theories more effectively; we must engage their dynamism in creative ways.

In my reflections here I wish to wrestle with the challenges and possibilities for the classroom of recognizing and seeking to close the gap between conventional academic discourse about Native peoples and Indigenous modes of cultural teaching and learning. First, I will identify some distinctive contours of Anishinaabe Ojibwe approaches to cultural transmission. Second, I will reflect on my experience incorporating service-learning in classes on Native traditions. This pedagogical approach, I want to suggest, can modestly incorporate some Indigenous pedagogy into classroom learning that becomes, as a result, more solid because it is more in tune with the structure as well as content of Native tradition, more memorable because human encounters work against the grain of deeply rooted stereotypes concerning Indigenous peoples, and more transforming because students emerge with a sense of both the beauty of Indigenous traditions and of what's at stake with Indigenous cultural survival. But before I take up the specifics of my experience with service-learning, I will turn to several distinctive marks of configuring knowledge, cultural authority, teaching, and learning as they happen on Indigenous terms among Anishinaabe Ojibwe communities, with whom I have fieldwork experiences spanning a decade.¹

Distinctive Contours of Ojibwe Pedagogy

Ojibwe pedagogy is distinctive in at least four relevant respects. First, Ojibwe pedagogy privileges knowledge rooted in oral traditions flowing through the complex authority of Elders over book knowledge. Today this is emphatically the case concerning knowledge about the sacred, especially in light of cultural dispossession and appropriation. Perhaps it is not surprising that one finds broadly in Ojibwe communities a hermeneutic of suspicion (if not dismissal) applied to many formulations of tradition in texts, even those of Ojibwe authorship.

There are a number of implications here. One is the relational, situational nature of cultural transmission. Cultural knowledge is transmitted in concrete situations of utterance between Elder and student, tailored to the moment and filtered by means of the particularities of their relationship. Indeed, the relational and situational nature of such exchanges, together with the artfulness practiced by Ojibwe Elders in such moments, cannot be effectively imagined in such mechanistic terms as "cultural transmission"—that refers to the predictable well-oiled rotations of a drive train with all its finely machined cogs, joints, and fittings. Here we have an embodied art.

But more than the distinctive configuration of cultural "transmission," this aspect of Ojibwe pedagogy illustrates the relational and situational construction of—or better, improvisation on—cultural knowledge. Cultural authority does not rest simply on those with an authoritative command of some thing called "culture" but the authority of people invested by the community with the authority to articulate culture. And here is where Elders come in as more than folk who have lived many moons...