Background
In Look to the Mountain, Cajete introduces how to lead a fulfilled life. This involves actions in “discovering one’s true face (character, potential, identity), one’s heart (soul, creative self, true passion), and one’s foundation (true work, vocation).” In our presentation we will present our stories in searching for a fulfilled life. That search starts with understanding ‘being’ through preparing, asking, seeking, making, understanding, sharing, and, finally, celebrating.
Objectives
Audience members will leave our session with:
• a greater understanding of the role of family history in understanding personal learning styles and worldview;
• an awareness of an adoption process;
• an understanding of the history of American Indian boarding schools;
• a view of the impact of family history on information seeking and, thus, information literacy.
Methodology
We employed several of the Indigenous research methods that Smith identified in Decolonizing Methodologies. These include testimony and story telling through locating data and sharing family stories. Sharing is conducted while still protecting family biography and negotiating privacy and writing. Smith mentions remembering as an Indigenous research method, even if such remembering includes not forgetting a painful past.
Outcomes
In this presentation we will introduce finding information about family history including a process of locating details including a presenter's first official records related to her birth in South Korea and subsequent adoption by an American couple. Her return to the country of her birth aided in her understanding of her personal history. The other presenter’s family history includes her grandfathers’ attendance at the Carlisle and Pipestone boarding schools in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Such attendance was enforced and shortened due to the 1915 influenza and the return of the United States soldiers from WWI. Details about the Carlisle Industrial School are available through a searchable database developed and maintained by library staff at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania while national efforts are underway to document the Indian boarding school experience through local initiatives and the Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (NABS).
References
Cajete, G. (1997). Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education. Skyland, North Carolina: Kivaki Press.
Denzin, N. K., Lincoln, Y. S., & Smith, L. T. (Eds.) (2008). Handbook of Critical and Indigenous Methodologies. Los Angeles: Sage.
Fear-Segal, J., & Rose, S. D. (Eds.). (2016). Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, & Reclamations. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Krupat, A. (2021). Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian Students Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Nelson, K.P. Hübinette, T., Kim, E. Kwonn Dobbs, J., Langrehr, K, Myong, L. (Eds.) (2010). Proceedings of the Second International
Symposium on Korean Adoption Studies.
Roy, L. (2014). “Leading a Fulfilled Life as an Indigenous Academic,” AlterNative 10 (3): 303-310.
Smith, L. T. (1999). Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books Ltd.
