Indigenous Education: New Directions in Theory and Practice ed. by Huia Tomlins-Jahnke, Sandra Styres and Spencer Lilley (review)

indigenous education, by editors Huia Tomlins-Jahnke, Sandra Styres, Spencer Lilley, and Dawn Zinga, is a timely and comprehensive text that allows the reader to explore the expanses of education through Native academic voices. Against a national backdrop of upheaval, chaos, and existential threat, Indigenous peoples simply living their values have contributed a point of light. The global pandemic has forcefully exposed the many disparate intersectional circumstances discussed in the book around settler colonialism, health and well-being, and access.

The text resonates by demonstrating the resilience of Indigenous knowledge—it reinscribes our stories of survivance that intersect and overlap with wider movements for antiracist, decolonial/deoccupational, and us-centric teaching. Not an easy task, as Styres reminds us that the colonial relationship is complicated in that it "(re)frames the conquered by drawing the colonized into complex, exploitative, and tangled social, economic, and political relationships with the colonizers" (46). These chapter contributions are fresh but also familiar in their understanding of academic voice and content and allow us a glimpse into the possibilities as we recenter our ways of knowing and being. While the text is arranged into four major themes—"Vision: Theoretical Approaches to Indigenous Education," "Relationships: Negotiating Contested Space," "Knowledge: Practice and Pedagogy," and "Action: New Directions in Indigenous Education"—the editors and contributors speak to topics that often affirm and constellate around these thematic boundaries.

This unique envisioning of Indigenous education in modernity, I ka wā ma mua ka wā ma hope, in our past lies the answers to our future, is extended to nonlinear patterns of our collective educational journeys. The ways that Indigenous people are able to learn from our past through stories, place-names, and collective histories explicate our understandings of educational progress through futurist lenses, or, as Dr. Kamanamaikalani Beamer suggests, "ōiwi optics" (2014, 12). The book utilizes makawalu, the ability to see something from multiple perspectives, to tell the stories that have historically been marginalized, that are now being told and retold for us by us.

Margaret J. Maaka begins by exploring education through paideia, "the educational act of moulding an 'ideal' citizen who has a mature broad outlook on life" (8). For Native children, however, many generations have suffered through educational systems that intentionally if not violently worked at "stripping away of the fundamental markers of native identity" (9). Wally Penetito expands on that point: "The problem is that the authority and control over every facet of mainstream schooling remains firmly in the minds, hands, and hearts of those who believe that reproduction of the dominant culture is the paramount goal of the educational system" (131). It is not surprising, then, that for many Native peoples movement forward may require primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling spaces, that center, as Leonie Pihama states, "their experiences and understandings" (73). In fact, Patricia Maringi G. Johnston, much to the chagrin of the dominant (often Caucasian) groups, suggests that "the best space for Indigenous educators to build and develop Indigenous education programs was a space where members of the colonizing groups were not present" (483). A bitter pill, perhaps, but as the kids say, "She's not wrong."

When we are intentional about the spaces and places that we move in, we return to creativity, which unveils itself through our 'ōlelo and mo'olelo. Katrina-Ann R. Kapā'anaokeola Nākoa Oliveira refers to this aesthetic intelligence as "wisdom maps," understandings that "require a depth of social, cultural, and linguistic knowledge that must be mastered over time" (173). Wisdom mapping may be a similar homage to the Māori concept of ahika, explicated by Wiremu Doherty, where elders have set their intention to "maintaining a claim to the ancestral lands that required continued presence by the people" (410). To keep these fires of constancy, vigilance, and stewardship burning we must continue to resist hegemonic educational systems of colonial education and invest in...