Braiding Indigenous and Racialized Knowledges into an Educational Leadership for Justice

Abstract

The tenacious knowledges that undergird educational leadership as a field of study and practice were founded on and remain largely anchored in Eurocentric White philosophies, values, and epistemologies. This results in enduring commitments of many scholars of educational leadership to a presumptive colorblind knowledge base that has failed to decenter epistemologies and ontologies that deny Indigenous and racialized students, their families’ and communities’ racial justice, and an equality of educational outcomes. In many regards, the discourses of educational leadership continue to marginalize Indigenous and racialized knowledges, ways of knowing and of being. Critical race theory provides an opportunity to expose and analyze how the extant knowledge base continues to reify a field of study and practiced that is tethered to Eurocentric White discourses that act as tools of imperialism and neocolonization. This chapter describes how a critical race theory analytic approach when combined with a decolonizing framework can open up the space and create opportunities for practitioners and scholars to develop a more reflexive field. Furthermore, it offers the opportunity for the knowledge base to be rebuilt by braiding Indigenous and racialized knowledges with anti-oppressive Westernized knowledges that when tied together can reorient educational leadership toward racial justice.