Internal and Environmental Safety Zones: Navigating Expansions and Contractions of Identity between Indigenous and Colonial Paradigms, Pedagogies, and Classrooms

This article re-stories how Native American high school students navigate two conflicting academic classroom spaces: Native American literature (rooted in critical reflection) and "American" history (rooted in settler colonial discourses). This navigation reveals how the re-centering of Indigenous paradigms can lead to transformative praxis. It also shows how the maintenance of settler colonial paradigms can lead to painful silencing experiences. To better understand how students process this drastic shift in paradigms, the article adapts Lomawaima and McCarty's (2006) Safety Zone Theory (SZT) to the micro level by introducing the terms internal safety zone and environmental safety zone. The internal/environmental safety zones explore how students' internal identities, motivations, and engagements interact with and are impacted by thentwo very different academic classroom environments. By focusing on how students internally process their cultural identities and knowledges in relation to these classroom environments, their navigation reveals how schooling spaces can work to validate — as well as invalidate — students' identities, knowledges, and lived experiences. It also speaks to the significances that moments of in/validation can have upon students.