Grounding Indigenous Teacher Education Through Red Praxis

Red Praxis centers Indigenous sovereignty rooted in epistemological and ontological orientations to place—to land. Applying Red Praxis requires teachers to understand, in greater detail, the ways in which settler and Indigenous ontologies represent not only different but also competing ways of being in the world. Red Praxis asks teachers to reconceptualize an intellectual space that reaffirms, reclaims, and (re)stories our relations to land as a decolonial practice and pedagogy of refusal. Red Praxis calls for Indigenous teachers and community educators to ground teaching in decolonial practices and aims to regenerate a sense of hope in rebuilding Indigenous communities. The exigencies of Red Praxis can be found within Indigenous teachers’ application of critical Indigenous theories and ongoing acknowledgement and protection of our relationship to land—the origin for our claim to exist as Indigenous peoples. In doing so, Red Praxis is about creating curriculum and enacting pedagogy that makes evident and mitigates the impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous communities’ knowledge systems and ways of being. Red Praxis is an extension of Sandy Grande’s theory and model of Red pedagogy. Grande proposed the pedagogical framework of Red pedagogy to rethink the ways in which teaching can confront the challenges Indigenous communities face in the 21st century. Red pedagogy is about critically analyzing the material realities resulting from the settler colonial project and creating decolonial spaces of resistance, hope, self-determination, and transformative possibility in Indigenous education. In addition to addressing structural issues, it is important for Indigenous teachers to address what is taught in schools—the curriculum—as well as how it is taught—pedagogy—as key factors in revitalizing and transforming Indigenous education.