Structured controversy exercise

23

RETHINKING COLLABORATION

Working the Indigene-Colonizer Hyphen

Alison Jones, with Kuni Jenkins

To rethink collaboration between indigene and colonizer is both to desire it and to ask troubling questions about it. This chapter critiques desire for collaborative inquiry understood as face-to-face, ongoing dialogue between indigenous and settler colleagues or students. Interrogating the logic of (my own) White/settler enthusiasm for dialogic collaboration, I consider how this desire might be an unwitting imperialist demand—and thereby in danger of strengthening the very impulses it seeks to combat. I do not argue for a rejection of collaboration. Rather, I unpack its difficulties to suggest a less dialogical and more uneasy, unsettled relationship, based on learning (about difference) from the Other, rather than learning about the Other.

E WORKING

In Aotearoa/New Zealand, Kuni Jenkins and I sit down together to write. She is Maori, from the iwi (tribal group) Ngati Porou; I am Pakeha, White,

bom locally. Her Maori ancestors are the indigenous people of Aotearoa/New Zealand; my English ancestors are among those who colonized this country about 150 years ago. She is older than me. I was her teacher at university and supervised her doctoral research on Maori education. We now teach together. We have become friends and research collaborators and have decided to extend for publication a section of Kuni’s doctoral research about the origins of schooling in New Zealand. No one has yet done this work, and we are both convinced there is a fascinating story to be told.

• read books by the popular historians. “Hah!” saysKuni. “That didn’t happen.” “What didn’t?” I ask. She talks about a well-known event: the delivery of the first sermon in New Zealand, by Samuel Marsden of the Church Missionary Society, on Christmas Day 1814 (Cloher, 2003, p. 86; King, 2003, p. 141; Nicholas, 1817, p. 205; Salmond, 1997, p. 465). “How could he have ‘given a sermon’?” she asks.
• hesitate. Here is the first Western formal mass pedagogical event in New Zealand. About four

• 471

Rethinking Collaboration • 473

472 n POWER, TRUTH, ETHICS, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE hundred Maori men, women, and children are gathered on the slopes above the beach to hear a chiefly visitor, Marsden, a few days after his arrival in New Zealand, from Australia. But he cannot speak the Maori language, and they certainly cannot understand English. Ruatara, a young chief who has invited both Marsden and a teacher to Aotearoa/New Zealand to start a school, is the interpreter of Marsdens sermon.

There is no record of what Ruatara said. Kuni is unconvinced that Ruatara would have attempted any direct translation. Instead, she says, he would have spoken with passionate eloquence about the benefits and status of the new settlers; he would have enjoined the people to be good to the visitors and to protect them, in anticipation of the technological, agricultural, and knowledge advantages they would bring to the iwi.

The people heard Ruatara; Marsden’s words were indistinct to them—merely foreign sounds. So it was Maori desires, words, and authority to which the people responded. In an important sense, it was Ruatara who gave that first “sermon,” which might more properly be called Ruatara’s political meeting.

Kuni and I talk about the arrival of Marsdens ship, with its small cargo of the first settlers, a few days before the sermon. The historians refer to a sham fight on the beach, staged for the entertainment of the new arrivals (Cloher, 2003, p. 85; Nicholas, 1817,p. 193; Salmond, 1997, p. 462).“That was no sham fight,” says Kuni, “that looks like a massive pôwhiri or waka taki.”1 Suddenly, a bit of thrilling but trivial entertainment on the beach becomes a very significant mass ritual of encounter, ! by which the local people indicate their willingness to engage and negotiate with the new arrivals, as 1

well as signal to them that they now have some :

obligatory connections to the tribes of the area.

Almost at once, two historical events are i turned upside down. ]

Focusing on how the stories might be framed, i I take notes as Kuni speaks. In each retelling of < these familiar scenes from our shared past, their < power relations shift and become dramatically < more complex. The standard account implies that j power lies largely with the settlers: It is Marsden (

who talks to the people and thereby introduces Christianity to a new land; his important arrival is marked by a vigorous bit of entertainment by excited natives. But Kuni reads these stories • through a different lens: Ruatara decided on and gave a major address to the people about Pakeha settlement, which he sought to control; the Maori leaders choreographed a major welcome so that the local people would understand the significance of the settlers and their proper place within the protection of the tribe. The play of power, knowledge, and reality—there is our potential article, right there, and a direction for more research and consultation. I write, weaving Kuni’s interpretations and my analysis into a joint account (Jones & Jenkins, 2001,2004).

Several things happen through this collaboration. The stories of the relationships leading to the establishment of the first Western school in New Zealand become layered, richer, more complex. We know the different historical experiences cannot be homogenized into one single account (even though our joint academic publication is genuinely shared work, and neither could do it without the other). At the same time, our new, rich account is not produced through mutual dialogue; neither of us attempts fully to understand the other. What we do understand is that the careful, tense interplay of our histories provides an interesting account of the complexity of contemporary as well as past indigenous-colonizer relations.

Another dynamic is played out in the micropractice of this collaboration: the negotiation of voice. Who speaks? Does joint authorship denote harmonized voices? Is it possible to hear my Maori colleague if I am the one who writes the text, using her insights? There is never anything simple or settled about indigenous-colonizer writing collaboration. All collaborative arrangements differ depending on the personalities, the partnership, the relative power, and academic desires of the participants. Kuni and I sometimes coauthor our collaborative work; sometimes we do not. This negotiated flexibility reflects a selfconsciously conditional and open approach to our joint work on Mãori-Pakeha relationships in education. We agree that coauthorship, when it

implies speaking with one voice, is impossible. We know that we cannot and do not have a homogeneous viewpoint; I speak out of my social position as a critical Pakeha academic, and she takes a Mãori/Ngati Porou cultural and political perspective shaped by her academic training. Though this means we often find enough shared ground to speak together as coauthors, it also means that sometimes we speak separately—depending on the audience, the standpoint, or the politics of the writing.

This particular chapter, authored by Alison, addresses colonizer interests in cross-cultural engagement. It reflects my experience as a White settler/colonizer researcher and addresses similarly positioned others about desires for collaboration with indigenous colleagues. Many of my insights have developed over years of engagement with Kuni, as well as with other Maori colleagues and students, including Linda Tuhiwai Smith. Those voices echo strongly here.

• WORKING THE HYPHEN

In our collaboration about our respective people’s shared histories, Kuni and I work the hyphen. Using this phrase as a qualitative researcher working across cultures, Michelle Fine (1994) calls attention to the complex gap at the Self-Other border. For those of us engaged in postcolonial cross-cultural collaborative inquiry, this hyphen, mapped onto the indigenecolonizer relationship, straddles a space of intense interest.

The colonizer-indigene hyphen always reaches back into a shared past. Each of our names— indigene and colonizer—discursively produces the other. In New Zealand, the local names Maori and Pakeha form identities created in response to the other. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) notes, “Maori is an indigenous term ... a label which defines a colonial relationship between ‘Maori’ and ‘Pakeha,’ the non-indigenous settler population” (p. 6). Each term forced the other into being, to distinguish “us,” the ordinary (the word maori means ordinary in Maori language) people, from

the others, the white-skinned strangers. The shared indigene-colonizer/Mãori-Pakeha hyphen not only holds ethnic and historical difference and interchange; it also marks a relationship of power and inequality that continues to shape differential patterns of cultural dominance and social privilege. Therefore, in a research setting, the politics of the indigene-colonizer hyphen becomes a struggle, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith puts it, between “the interests and ways of knowing of the West and the interests and ways of resisting of the Other” (p. 2). As collaborators across these interests, Kuni and I attempt to create a research and writing relationship based on the tension of difference, not on its erasure. In that the indigenecolonizer hyphen marks the indelible relationship that has shaped both sides in different ways, the hyphen as a character in the research relationship becomes an object of necessary attention.

The indigene-colonizer hyphen has attracted a range of discursive postures in collaborative inquiry. A marker of the relationship between two generalized groups, the hyphen has been erased, softened, denied, consumed, expanded, homogenized, and romanticized. The discursive hyphen has stood in for an unbridgeable chasm between the civilized and the uncivilized; it has marked a romantic difference between the innocent noble savage and corrupt Western man; it has held the gap between the indigenous subjects of study and their objective White observers.

Modern anxieties about this gap, as well as the paradoxical desire both for difference and for its dissolution via communicative relationships, have led to calls for dialogue and mutual engagement across difference. The current (colonizer) researcher ideal of the mutuality of the indigene-colonizer hyphen was perhaps first asserted by anthropologist Margaret Mead (1969): “Anthropological research does not have subjects,” she said. “We work with [indigenous] informants in an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect” (p. 361). This fantasy/model of respectful sharing often shapes the hyphen in contemporary liberal cross- cultural research and teaching. Especially in education research which reaches across cultural boundaries, calls for—or assertions of—dialogue,

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understanding, and empathy between cultures are common.

When mutual understanding is fundamental to cross-cultural engagement, the hyphen becomes a barrier to close empathetic collaboration. Therefore, the hyphen is softened, or reduced, in the interests of mutuality. Shared understandings reduce distance and enable progress toward the social ideal of equality. Structural power differences, as well as other differences in perspective and history, are downplayed as collaborators attempt to come to some shared perspective. In education, research that focuses on such shared social goods as teacher effectiveness, childrens learning needs, and multiculturalism requires a softened hyphen to allow the foregrounding of mutually shared values and outcomes. The hyphen becomes submerged in researchers’ enthusiastic, all-encompassing visions of humanity, quality, and diversity.2 Social theorists such as Brian Barry (2001 ), Martha Nussbaum (1997), and Todd Gitlin (1995) express eloquently the powerful desires for universal moral norms that reduce any ruptures suggested by the hyphen.

An extreme form of this approach to cultural difference is articulated by those who seek actively to erase the hyphen as they look “toward the ultimate unity of human experience” (Hansen, 2002, p. 2; Hollinger, 1995). On this sort of view, diversities are “not something to be celebrated, but a problem to be solved ... as avenues to unified understanding” (Hansen, 2002, p. 338; see also Harrison & Huntington, 2000). To ensure unity, the hyphen, as a marker of difference, is best dissolved altogether.

The denial/erasure of the hyphen is also expressed in the language of hybridity, a codeword for sameness. We are all hybrid mixes of one shared sort or another—we are all settlers (we all came to this land at some point); we are all indigenous (most of us were born here); we are all “mixed breeds” (intermarriage is widespread, and most indigenous peoples are assimilated into Western lifestyles). Or, we are all citizens; we are all students; we are all equal under the law, in the eyes of God, or in terms of needs and opportunities.

On this logic, the hyphen becomes a marker of social division and a barrier to communication and democracy, something to be (dis)solved. Disavowing the hyphen in the name of sameness becomes literally a productive political act for “us all.”

The almost universal indigenous and Other response to the ideal of what I am calling the erased, denied, dissolved, or softened hyphen has been a firm reinstatement of the gap. Critics refer to the “ethnocentric universality” (Mohanty, 1997, p. 272), which enables Western researchers to ignore the indigenous-colonizer hyphen as they write across it, recolonizing as they go. Taking this critique seriously, some colonizer researchers who work with indigenous peoples emphasize the gap of difference. They position themselves as outsiders, coming “to the Native culture as a privileged guest” (Haig-Brown, 1988, p. 155), seeking to “present Native perspectives” (p. 25; see also, e.g., Martin, 1999). Such collaboration often elicits a posture of self-effacement in White researchers who feel that the powerful and moving colonization stories of indigenous people must speak for themselves. The hyphen becomes a bridge, a moment of translation (and sometimes romanticization) for the colonizer researcher who gives voice to the oppressed indigenous person enabling a direct and sympathetic hearing from others.

While I have focused here on research relationships between indigenous and colonizer collaborators, struggles at the hyphen also characterize some collaborations between indigenous researchers and their own people. These collaborations become a rather different exercise in translation as indigenous researchers find themselves outsiders in their own communities. Their educational status and colonizer knowledge (and sometimes their lack of indigenous language) may create what Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins (1986, 1998) called the outsider- within, as indigenous researchers attempt to write from both sides of the hyphen. Such an uncomfortable, though insightful, position requires a constant struggle with tensions and

contradictions (Islam, 2000, and Twine, 2000, provide good examples of these).

0 PRAGMATIC COLLABORATION

ACROSS THE HYPHEN

• those colonizer researchers who would dissolve/ consume/soften/erase the indigene-colonizer hyphen into a sharing collaborative engagement between “us,” there is one, harshly pragmatic, response: It does not work. Indigenous peoples and others who resist their disappearance into Western stories about us either remain focused elsewhere ( i.e., silent, outside the hearing of their colonizer colleagues) or echo the words ofTonto, the Lone Ranger’s “faithful Indian companion”: “What do you mean,‘we,’ white man?” However hurtful, perplexing, frustrating, and disappointing this response might be, colonizers interested in joint work with indigenous subjects as indigenous subjects have little choice but to work with that sharp, shocking difference named by Tonto, and many others such as Mohanty, rather than deny, ignore, or condemn it or wish it away.
• other words, however much the Lone Ranger and other colonizer peoples assert the us in a shared modern life, indigenous peoples—as a matter of political, practical, and identity survival as indigenous peoples—insist on a profound difference at the Self-Other border. The hyphen is nonnegotiable. Indeed, in indigene-colonizer research and teaching work, the hyphen is to be protected and asserted and is a positive site of productive methodological work. Settler/colonizer researcher Michelle Fine (1994) puts it this way: ‘“Working the hyphen’ in cross-cultural inquiry means creating occasions for researchers and informants to discuss what is, and is not,‘happening between,’ within the negotiated relations of whose story is being told ... and whose story is being shadowed” (p. 72). Fine addresses the Self- Other hyphen as a moment of methodological self-consciousness about the “between”; in other words, she understands the hyphen as marking a difficult but always necessary relationship. This is

not only a relationship between collaborating people but also their respective relationship to difference. The relationship is also—from the indigenous side of difference—significantly one of struggle, resistance, and caution, as Smith (1999) reminds us.

Before I go on to discuss the inevitable difficulties with working the hyphen, I need to address some of the drawbacks of my apparent criticism of “us” in collaborative inquiry. Mine is not a rejection of possibilities for joint work. In fact, I believe that collaborative research relationships are essential to insight, and there are far too few good colonizer-indigene collaborations; the hyphen, after all, joins as well as separates. In addition, a united front in indigenous-colonizer research collaborations is at times pragmatically important, and “us” may name that collaboration. My point is that “us” cannot stand in place of the hyphen; it can only name an always conditional relationship-between.

Another obvious problem with the discussion so far is the apparently uncritical use of an indigenous-colonizer binary, marking two fixed, radically different, apparently homogeneous groups. After all, significant divisions and differences exist within both groups named by these terms. Differences among indigenous peoples are significant on the basis of language and education, tribal histories, and cultures. In fact, while it may be a basis for internal collaboration and a politics of strength, the term indigenous may itself be a homogenizing term, produced within colonization and continuing its colonizing work by brushing over national or tribal differences. Another problem with the assertion of a clear indigenous- colonizer binary is that few indigenous peoples have avoided substantial assimilation into Western cultures and languages (Semali & Kincheloe, 1999). It is the case (especially in New Zealand) that intermarriage has always been very common and also that indigenous values and language have affected colonizer peoples, as well as vice versa. In addition, colonizer and indigenous peoples often do not understand themselves in these terms. The boundaries between “us” and

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“them” on the street, in workplaces, and in classrooms have diminished substantially since our first encounters. Such mutual assimilation, in that it marks pockets of equality, has been and should be a cause for celebration. My argument is not about such interrelationships in the social and personal world. It is important to recognize that arguments about collaborative inquiry across the indigene-colonizer hyphen entail the assertion, at some crucial points, of an indigenous political and social id/entity distinct from that of a colonizer subject. For indigenous subjects, this is a necessary distinction and disjuncture; for collaborators, a necessary “between.”

• ANGER AND LEARNING

ABOUT THE OTHER

Collaboration between indigenous and colonizer researchers, where invitations and relationships are established over time, differs from the more shortlived cross-cultural relationships in classrooms, although desires for democratic communication tend to underlie both. As educators, Kuni and I struggle to assist our students toward a productive relationship with difference; our joint teaching experiences in classrooms where indigenous and colonizer students sit alongside each other formed the basis for some of our collaborative research work. Teaching together, Kuni and I have attempted to model the difficulties and rewards of collaborative inquiry, emphasizing that mutual understanding or “learning about the Other” is not the aim—or even possible—for dominant group students. Learning from the Other, that is,from difference, from the hyphen, becomes the possibility we seek—as I explain below.

Learning about the Other is the most popular form of teaching about difference for colonizer or dominant groups.“Walking in other’s shoes”allows the dominant group to empathize with, and therefore supposedly to understand, the point of view of the Other. Ideally, this results in shared aspirations, democratic tolerance, and social harmony. But it is rarely recognized that learning about the Other may not be required for indigenous groups in

classrooms. They have achieved this learning simply as members of a colonized society. They are already deeply familiar with the language, experiences, and views of the dominant group—indeed, some indigenous activists call for unlearning about the dominant Other, through what they call decolonizing the mind (see Smith, 1999, p. 23). The difference between the needs and knowledges of each side means that collaborative inquiry becomes problematic.

This major skew in learning needs at the indigene-colonizer hyphen has meant that, in some cases, the indigene has refused face-to-face collaboration. It was at one of these moments of refusal that Kuni’s and my sense of collaborative inquiry was forced to become explicit. Some of our Maori students stated that they preferred to study their histories, knowledges, and experiences separately from their Pakeha (White) peers. They found the development of their own cultural memories was disrupted by Pakeha classmates who, although positively keen to engage with them on the subject of education, generally had a very different view of it. Maori students, often disheartened and weary, had become unwilling constantly to explain themselves, to listen to cultural ignorance, even hostility, and to encounter again and again what they experienced as a disappointing lack of knowledge in many of their Pakeha classmates.

So, in a spirit of pedagogical experimentation and guided by the ideal of social justice, Kuni and I divided the class on the basis of ethnicity for a large portion of the following year’s program. Maori—along with Pacific Islands3—students were invited to form one group; Pakeha and others formed another.

Although some teachers in the United States would like to try such an experiment, they believe it is dangerous even to attempt because it transgresses too deeply the mainstream cultural abhorrence of separatism (Srivastava, 1997). In New Zealand, protected perhaps by our good relationships with our students and each other, Kuni and I took turns to teach both groups. The Maori students enjoyed the program and did well in their assessments. They reported that the separation

from White peers enabled them to engage more freely and deeply in the debates about Maori education as well as colonization. They enjoyed the opportunity to talk directly with each other, and teach each other, about their experiences (Pihama & Jenkins, 2001).

Many of the White students, on the other hand, were furious. They saw the segregation from their Maori peers as denying them something they very much wanted. They wanted to learn, they said, and to share. They asked, How can we learn about each other if we are separated? Surely it is better to be together so we can share our experiences? Isn’t separation reinforcing difference, rather than reducing it (see Jones, 1999)?

While their White peers sought to reduce difference, this was not a priority for the indigenous students. Indeed, for the indigenous students, difference was both a fact (as their White peers did not share their knowledges and experiences as Maori) and something actively desired as significant to their identity and political location as indigenous people (rather than as, say, brownskinned diverse citizens). In addition, the indigenous students did not feel the need to be the recipients of sharing—their Pakeha peers as Pakeha had no information about themselves Maori needed or wanted. To the indigenous students, the White students seemed to be the sole beneficiaries of sharing.

Interestingly, many of the White students were no happier in the joint classes, which formed parts of the course. These classes were taught by Maori, Pakeha, and a guest Tongan teacher. Some White students were uneasy when teachers used brief phrases in languages they did not understand; they reported these teachers expected them to know “cultural things” that they did not know. These White/settler students were “marginalized,” feeling they “did not belong.” In their journals, they recorded the following:

1. felt marginalised in this class ... it made me feel personally that I wasn’t part of the lecture... it served to emphasise rather than diminish my status as an “outsider.” ... I had been told in a subtle way I did not belong, (see Jones, 2001, pp. 281-282)
2. both sorts of classes—the separated lessons and those taught by non-Pakeha teachers—many of the White students experienced a keen sense of exclusion.

The feelings of these White students are not unique. There are many anecdotal and published examples of White anxiety at other ethnic groups’ attempts to caucus separately or to debate issues that they believe White people do not readily share or understand. We heard of White people who felt left out when their non-White peers formed groups. Some schools were wary of organizing meetings for particular ethnic groups, fearing the angry response of the White mainstream. For instance, when Virginia Chalmers (1997) organized a highly successful and lively evening at her New York school for parents of color (a group that normally did not come to school meetings), angry White parents expressed their disappointment in terms of exclusion and loss.

How, then, is indigene-colonizer collaboration possible when learning about the Other seems so problematic for both groups? As teachers and researchers interested in forms of collaborative inquiry, how might we think through the colonizer/dominant group request for sharing and possible indigenous resistance to it? To consider possibilities for cross-cultural collaborative work, I return to the logic of colonizer desire for collaboration.

0 WHO IS OUTSIDE?

... I had been told in a subtle way I did not belong.

When the indigenous person fails to address the needs or wishes of the well-meaning, would- be collaborator-colonizer, the latter experiences a shock. Any withdrawal of the indigene from accessible engagement is felt as an unbearable exclusion. But the resulting anxiety for the new outsider is not from loss of social power so much as loss of ability to define the conditions or the social-political space within which, they believe, getting to know each other becomes possible. The terms of engagement are no longer controlled by the dominant group.

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The progressive terms of engagement have been spelled out by educators seeking collaboration in the name of justice. They argue that Western social history, including its institutions such as education, has operated as a series of exclusions—of people of color, indigenous people, women— where “the voice of the other is consigned to the margins” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 115). A logically progressive response to exclusion is for marginalized groups to be included. Inclusion means they—the Others—must be brought in to the center by us—the powerful. According to this logic, the decolonizing researcher or teacher seeks to “make room for those groups generally defined as the excluded others” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 122). Making room entails “redrawing the map of modernism so as to effect a shift of power from the privileged ... to those groups struggling” through “establishing new boundaries with respect to knowledge most often associated with the margins” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, pp. 115,120). Or, as Sandra Harding (1998) puts it, we must develop “borderlands epistemologies” that value various knowledges from diverse cultures (see also Semali & Kincheloe, 1999).

The vehicle for this movement over the terrain of power, out from the margins and into the centers—the mechanism for shifting the boundary pegs and redrawing the maps of power—is voice. Speaking, the colonized subject is able to name the world and thus rename it in the interests of social change. This speaking is not simply to enable verbal sparring with the colonizers, nor is it än expression of a simple liberal pluralism (Shor & Freire, 1987, p. 13). And nor is it necessarily authentic; critical theorists recognize that notions of authentic voice are utopian and misunderstand the complexities of power and identity (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 117; McLaren, 1995). Such complexities notwithstanding, researchers and educators interested in liberation wish to “hear the voices” of the colonized/oppressed/other (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 129), as these Others “become the mediators of their own narratives” (McLaren, 1995, p. 115) and therefore actors in their own emancipation. What we might “become together” in such renegotiation, suggests McLaren

1. p. 109) takes precedence over “who we are”—in other words, whether we are indigene or colonizer, our shared talk is most important.
2. is these terms of engagement that are problematic.

• HEARING VOICES?

Here is the problem with the call for shared speaking. The desire for shared talk is, at its core, a desire for the dominant/colonizer group to engage in some benevolent action—for them/us to grant a hearing to the usually suppressed voice and “realms of meaning” of the indigene. After all, as already mentioned, indigenous access into the realms of meaning of the dominant Other is hardly required; members of marginalized/colonized groups are immersed in it daily. It is the colonizer, wishing to hear, who calls for dialogue.4

If we take seriously Barthes’s (1994) arguments about the power of the reader to make the text and that understanding “lies not in [a text’s] origin but in its destination” (p. 148), it is obvious that the indigene’s audience in the site of inquiry becomes the key player in meaning. Therefore, when dominant group members are unable to understand the speaker, the indigene’s ability to speak is reduced dramatically. Even good intentions by the dominant group are not always sufficient to enable their ears to hear and therefore for the other to speak. Uma Narayan (1988) has argued that members of disadvantaged groups “cannot fail to be aware of the fact that presence of goodwill on the part of members of advantaged groups is not enough to overcome assumptions and attitudes born out of centuries of power and privilege” (p. 35)—assumptions and attitudes that produce at least a partly and necessarily nonshared language and meaning system for naming the world. Deafness of the colonizers to indigenous speakers is one of the necessary conditions of a colonized society. While usually unintentional, such dis-ability enables imposition on others in the name of development and engagement.

Even progressive settler educators who seek collaboration with indigenous others necessarily remain only partially able to hear and see. What determines this ability is not merely indigeneity. It is not simply that Kuni is Maori that gives her the privileged ability to see what I cannot as we work together; it is an issue of access to knowledge. One’s experience, knowledge, and recognition by one’s own people provide an indigenous person with the authority and insight to contribute as Maori to research on Maori things. With enough immersion in Maori language and culture, it may be logically possible for me as a Pakeha/settler to interpret past and current events “from a Maori point of view.” But in practical terms, outside such complete immersion, it is unlikely as a Pakeha that I will see, hear, and feel from that viewpoint or get emphatically inside, say, the story of Ruatara.

The reasons are as simple as they are powerful. Compared with Kuni, I have been less exposed to the speeches of rangatira (leaders) and other knowledgeable Maori people, and I am less famil- iar with their forms of address; my aunties and grandpas have not taught me subtle forms of engagement that mark me as polite, knowledgeable, and relaxed in Maori company; I have less chance of getting my interpretations checked and validated by expert indigenous people, or access to formal and informal indigenous knowledges through conversations and meetings conducted in te reo Maori (Maori language) or in English. I am unlikely to have had forms of Maori spiritual experience. And I am unlikely to be accepted (politically or personally) as providing a Maori perspective when I am not of Maori descent and cannot trace my ancestral links to Maori leaders of the past. As a Pakeha subject engaging in cross-cultural work, then, I am limited—in both senses (see also McConaghy, 2000, p. xiii). It becomes necessary for me to abandon the hope that collaborative inquiry—and progressive education—can be a product of my enabling the indigenous voice and promoting shared engagement.

Even as an accepted collaborator, I know that, from a Maori perspective, if the settler collaborator is not of some use, she or he is politely

abandoned. Kuni is often called on by indigenous colleagues to justify her working with me. She is asked to consider the extent of nonindigenous influence. We both value these sometimes bitter critiques because they remind us—-as if we could forget—that this is always already contested and risky territory on which we work.

0 THE LOGIC OF LEARNING

FROM THE OTHER

The limits to understanding between indigene and colonizer are not only rooted in our different histories, experiences, and cultures—and therefore what we can hear and what we are told. Limited understanding can also be seen as epistemologically inevitable. Working with a view of the Other as absolute difference, Sharon Todd (2003), following Levinas, argues that in order to know the Other, I am forced to make the Other in my own image: “When I think I know, when I think I understand the Other, I am exercising my knowledge over the Other, shrouding the Other in my own totality. The Other becomes an object of my comprehension, my world, my narrative, reducing the Other to me” (p. 15). This means that the alterity of the Other is “reabsorbed into my own identity, as a ... possessor” (Levinas, 1969/2000, p. 33). For Todd, as well as Levinas, the “it does not work” pragmatics of knowing the Other is a matter of the logic of knowing.

Todd (2003) points out that, as one who is absolutely different from me, the Other cannot be totally learned about, known, or understood by me. The relationship is necessarily much more oblique. Todd explains, “If I am exposed to the Other, I can listen, attend and be surprised; the Other can affect me, she ‘brings me more than I contain’” (p. 15). What she brings me is the experience of difference. This experience confronts me with limits to my knowledge and learning, when I had no idea of their limits before.

Like many other ( White) writers who address difference, Todd (2003) seems to assume that the Self-Other hyphen always maps onto colonizerindigene in that order; that is, the Self refers to the positive subject colonizer, the Other to the abject

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indigene. In philosophical terms, this may be a necessary hierarchy. But what about the inversion, which has to be a characteristic of reciprocal collaborative inquiry (see Oliver, 2001, p. 6)? When the indigene-Self speaks, what does it mean to say, “If I attend to the Other I can be surprised”? Why would the indigene be surprised when attending to the colonizer who is so familiar as to be part of ones Self? Isn’t surprise the prerogative only of the attentive dominant subject who, having been deaf to the Other, finds her or him suddenly speaking?

Nevertheless, Todd (2003) makes very useful observations about ethical principles of collaborative inquiry. Social justice education and collaborative research work, in which the Self-Other relationship makes a central appearance, she suggests, often get routed down a particular pedagogical path. Participants have to learn and apply certain ethical principles about how to get along (such as respect, fairness, equity, empathy). This runs the risk that social justice education and collaborative inquiry become a form of moral training rather than a quest for knowledge and engagement. Furthermore, as a mode of relating across difference, she says, respect and empathy can miss the target completely in terms of recognizing that difference.5 Empathy’s impulse, as I mentioned above, is to overcome difference, to break down the hyphen between Self and Other. Engaging across differences through empathy may provide us with useful raw material for self- reflection, Todd insists, but “it cannot offer the ethical attentiveness to difference qua difference so necessary to projects of social justice” (p. 63).

Todd (2003) brings us to the nub of the argument: The indigene-colonizer collaboration—if we are open and susceptible—is a site of learning from difference rather than learning about the Other. The Self-Other hyphen as a positive marker of irreducible difference is a pedagogical site. The hyphen ideally demands a posture of alert vulnerability to or recognition of difference, rather than a pose of empathetic understanding that tends to reduce difference to the same. This is not a moral injunction, but one in the interests of knowledge. It is openness to difference that can provoke meanings beyond our own culture’s

prescriptions—and lead to new thought (Garrison, 2004, p. 94).

A desire to learn from otherness is in tension with the more common desire to make room for the voices of the Other. The Uberai injunction to listen to the Other can turn out to be access for dominant groups to the thoughts, cultures, and lives of others (see also Boler, 1997; Roman, 1997,1993). So while marginalized groups may be invited— with the help of the teacher or researcher—to make their own social conditions visible to themselves, the crucial aspect of this liberating process is making themselves visible to the powerful. To extend the metaphor: In attempting, in the name of justice and dialogue, to move the boundary pegs of power into the terrain of the margin-dwellers, the powerful require those on the margins not to be silent, or to talk alone, but to open up their territory and share what they know. The imperialist resonances are uncomfortably apt.

Some White researchers have been careful to reject the notion that their demands for dialogical engagement might simply become a form of surveillance and neocolonization. Radical educators emphasize that they seek merely to respect and uphold difference, as well as have it influence the world, through having it spoken and politically shared, where once it was suppressed. Homi Bhabha (1994) suggests that such pure motives may be more problematic than they seem. Using Derridas phrase, he talks of the colonizers demand for narrative, “the narcissistic, colonialist demand it should be addressed directly, that the Other should authorise the Self, recognise its priority, fulfil its outlines” (p. 98). Addressing the Other involves answering the colonizer’s benign, maybe even apologetic, request: “Tell us exactly what happened. I care,” “What is it like for you? I want to leam about you.” Bhabha suggests that such demands are a significant “strategy of surveillance and exploitation” (p. 99) and reensure the authority of the colonizer. Other postcolonial writers such as Spivak (1988) also argue that desire for accessibility to the Other can be simply another colonizing gesture. Both Spivak and Bhabha make calls to Western intellectuals and researchers to abandon the myths of representational clarity and total accessibility to the Other.

After Bhabha and Spivak (let alone some of their own disappointing experiences!), it is unsurprising that indigenous scholars or researchers might be cautious about collaboration and dialogue with members of colonizer groups. If shared talk becomes an exercise only in making themselves more understandable or accessible to colonizer groups, with no commensurate shifts in real political power, then it becomes better to engage in strengthening the internal communication and knowledge, as well as self-reliance, of the people.

S OUT OF GRASP

Nor should it be surprising that the colonizer/ settler feels anxious about any refusal of indigenous collaboration. Sharon Todd (2003) reminds us that learning is a psychical rather than merely an epistemological event. Learning from the Other—including learning about difference from the Other’s otherness—leads to all kinds of “connections, disjunctions, and ruptures” (Todd, 2003, p. 10). There is thus a kind of trauma in encountering what is outside the subject, she argues, because “that outside threatens the stability of the ego.... Precisely because the Other is seen to be that which disrupts its coherency, the subject tumbles into uncertainty, its past strategies for living challenged by the very strangeness of difference itself” (Todd, 2003, p. 11). It is the strangeness of difference—the unfamiliar space of not knowing—that is so hard to tolerate for the colonizer whose benevolent imperialism assumes both herself or himself as the center of knowing and that everything can be known.

For the colonizer/settler engaged in critical inquiry, there is an inevitable and disturbing moment when the indigenous teacher or informant speaks. It is a moment of recognition—perhaps unconscious—that some things maybe out of one’s grasp. It is a fleeting, slippery glimpse of (the possibility of) something inaccessible and unknowable. In the Western academy, the unknowable holds a paradoxical position (Readings, 1996). Critical traditions in Western thought would concur that, as

the ultimate expression of intellectual curiosity, Western science and scholarship is a major source of uncertainty; what is not known is the product of, and the machine driving, intellectual work. Nevertheless, it remains the case that the traditional Hegelian basis of education and pedagogy is not radical uncertainty but the ultimate accessibility and knowability of things. Indeed, the not-known is understood in terms of the still-to-be-known, or the potentially-knowable—a notion that has radically underpinned the impetus for exploration and colonization. Western knowledge and colonization are both premised on the ideal of discovering, making visible, and understanding the entire natural and social world (Haraway, 1997).

In contrast, for some indigenous cultures, as Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1991,1999) points out, free access to all knowledge is not a pedagogical or social ideal. Because knowledge contributes to a person’s power and status, it is not given out to just anyone: "Some knowledge can be gained only by its being given” (Smith, 1991, p. 50) and therefore is not made available to those who simply want to know. Therefore, indigenous researchers tend to look extremely carefully at potential collaborators. In working with Mãori-speaking Pakeha anthropologist Anne Salmond, in order to pass on his knowledge to future generations, Mäori elder Entera Stirling “looked to see if 1 had the ‘right spirit,’ and he wove a metaphor of kinship and apprenticeship between us that made our work together peaceful and unworried’’ (Salmond, 2005, p. 247). Right spirit, kinship, and apprenticeship are interesting choices of terms to describe this collaborative work. Lasting loyalty as well as humility and trust were the key elements in their shared inquiry; there is no suggestion of a liberal equality, sharing, or dialogue in working this hyphen.

Ignoring a right spirit, the Western university encourages researchers, students, and teachers to assume the happy position as potential knowers on an open epistemological territory awaiting anyone with the desire to explore. Pedagogy and research, especially at university, becomes predicated on the possibility of and entitlement to an accessible and shared terrain of knowledge. When this fantasy of entitlement is disrupted—for instance, when

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access to indigenous knowledge and experience is denied, such as when indigenous students remain separate or when indigenous concepts are not adequately explained—settler inquiry experiences a threat. The threat has particular emotional force for those who feel it, I think, because it threatens the dominant group at the very point of our/their power—our ability to know.

B NECESSARY FANTASY

The modernist project of mapping the world, rendering it visible and understood, that is, accessible, is an expression of a Western Enlightenment desire for coherence, authorization, and control. It can also be seen as central to liberal White desire for racial harmony, collaboration, and understanding. The assumption held by dominant cultures and our pedagogies and research programs—that everything is in principle knowable—forms not only the epistemological basis for our being and knowing but also our fantasies and desires for a better, less fragmented world. Such progressive desires are important, but they must also be seen as based in fantasy—a redemptive fantasy of unity that attempts to overcome history and ongoing effects of colonization. Such fantasy is a necessary but always troubled ingredient in cross-cultural work.

These troubles at the indigene-colonizer hyphen invite both sides to avoid the relationship as too difficult. Indeed, those whose teaching practice has led them, like me, to question progressive notions of dialogue (particularly Ellsworth, 1989) have been criticized as courting “a crippling form of political disengagement... [which] reduces one to paralysis in the face of... differences” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 132).6 But a critical position is not as negative, or impotent, as it might appear. Rather than paralysis, it suggests hard work—not the work of face-to-face conversation in the name of liberatory practice but the work of coming to know our own location in the Self-Other binary and accepting the difference marked by the hyphen. The desire for engagement must lead colonizer scholars to a deeper understanding of our

own settler culture, society, and history as deeply embedded in a relationship with the culture, society, and history of the indigenous people. Such an orientation to the hyphen invites colonizer peoples to seek to know ourselves in the relationship with Others, to locate ourselves in the “between”—to develop a stronger sense of how our Selves are and have been formed in the troubled engagement with indigenous peoples and their lands and spaces. Such cross-cultural work necessarily involves thinking about and engaging with the indigenous peoples and/or their texts. This orientation to a relationship—to the hyphen—rather than to the Other, is the most feasible posture for a colonizer collaborator.

Levinasian philosophers such as Sharon Todd (2003) make the point more emphatically. The Other is necessarily not knowable, being what “we” are not Rather than learning about the Other on our terms and therefore failing because we are obliterating the Other, what we can do, says Todd, is attempt to learn more obliquely from the Other as “one who is absolutely different from myself” (p. 15). What I leant is not about you, but I leant from you about difference. This, of course, returns us to the hyphen, that stroke that both enforces difference and makes the link between. The hyphens space does not demand destructive good understanding; indeed, it is a space that insists on ignorance and therefore a perpetual lack of clarity and certainty.7

Uncertainty is no longer a stranger to scholars; the ongoing crisis of representation in Western thought means many of us have abandoned already the unalloyed right to know (Lincoln & Denzin, 1994). As a result, addressing White/colonizer researchers, some assert that “disappointment— of certainty, clarity, illumination, generality—is both a choice and an inevitability; something to be both resigned and committed to,” not (or not just) as a state of resignation about the impossibility of fully coming to know the Other, but “as a strategic act of interruption of the methodological will to certainty and clarity of vision” and the colonizing impulses that attend it (Stronach & MacLure, 1997, pp. 4-5). Jim Garrison (2004) suggests that those of us interested in this sort of work adopt a “passionate

ambivalence” (p. 89). As well as taking on a politics of disappointment and ambivalence, we might also add a practical politics of hope and of sharp, unromantic pragmatic engagement.

B FAILURE AND THE TEACHER

The inevitable tangle of caution, passion, ignorance, ambivalence, desire, and power that attends the indigene-colonizer hyphen provides rich, though uncertain, pickings for research collaborators. It is within this interesting space, and with a determination to proceed, that Kuni and I continue to invite each other to work the hyphen. We experiment with genres for writing through and against the hyphen. We turn to Maori language. Kuni develops a notion of aitanga (turning toward the other to have sex) as a metaphor for the potential of the Mãori-Pakeha relationship. She collects data from elders on the term’s potential, and then she returns both to her Maori advisers and colleagues, and to me, with the data so we can discuss how it might be written. She writes it up for a Maori audience; I consider working the data into a joint piece for academic publication, writing carefully under Kuni’s guidance. We turn to the archives; we both read them, and Kuni again leads the analysis, with me as the writer. Through me, her voice (but not the bones of her analysis) must be compromised; we just have to live with that when we coauthor.

And we keep on with our reading and writing about how the first school in New Zealand came to be. The historians called the school a failure because it stayed open for less than 2 years, and the children did not attend regularly (Binney, 1968). “That school was a success,” Kuni declares. Two years was enough time for the Pakeha teacher to become educated—to learn to speak the Maori language and to understand something about the beliefs of the people. As an educated man, the teacher became useful to the local Ngãpuhi chief and the iwi and worked within the local rules (much to the horror of the Church Missionary Society, as well as other tribes, because he enabled Ngãpuhi to get access to guns). The school had

thus served as an effective site of Maori teaching and Pakeha learning.

Kuni and I know that these two accounts and the earlier ones are not merely parallel stories about the past and its colonizer-indigene relationships. They undo each other at a deep level, providing radically different memories of power and “what went on” between Pakeha and Maori. If we remember Marsden as the speaker at the first big meeting between Maori and Pakeha, if we recall the sham fight on the beach and the failed school, whether we are Maori or Pakeha, the colonizer’s power, and the story of colonization, is normalized. Its normalization seeps into the present, into the accepted, commonsense status quo. To remember Ruatara as the speaking subject, to recall the pôwhiri, and to see the first Pakeha teacher as mere learner is to have quite a different memory, where Maori power is centered and normalized, and where struggle more than colonization is foregrounded. The juxtaposition of these stories does not simply enable multiple voices to speak; rather, it allows the indigene-colonizer relationship to be interrogated in uneasy ways that insist on examining power and common sense, as well as the place of histories in the present. In this tension is the fecundity of collaboration.

B NOTES

1. pôwhiri is usually a very large welcome ceremony put on by the host group to their visitors who come by land. In the ceremony, a taki (a challenge) might be made (where warrior lays down a dart that has to be picked up by the leader of the visitors). Once the challenge is received, it is followed by calls from the women. The calls can range from wailing cries to high-pitched chanting with actions beckoning the visitors to come. The men may also perform very vigorous haka in raised voices that reach screaming point accompanied by energetic actions and ritual movements of their bodies that, to the onlooker, could look very fearsome and violent as to be described as a “sham fight.” A waka taki (meaning a canoe challenge) is a pôwhiri that sees visitors arriving from the sea and on to the land to complete the welcoming ceremonial formalities.

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1. Martha Nussbaum’s (1997) book Cultivating Humanity is an interesting example of the disavowal of the hyphen. While Nussbaum purports to address all of us in her argument for multicultural engagement in a shared liberal education, she unwittingly tends to address only middle-class White students in such statements as, “This requires a great deal of knowledge that American college students rarely got... knowledge of non-Westem cultures, of minorities” (p. 10).
2. This grouping of Maori (Polynesian indigenous people of New Zealand) and Pacific Islands people (Polynesian immigrants) was an attempt to have a roughly evenly divided class. We recognize, however, that this combination is problematic, given the very different histories in the group. Similar remarks might be made about the eclectic ethnic-cultural mix in the other “Pakeha” group.
3. somewhat similar argument has been made by those critical of empowerment education as a form of critical pedagogy; as Gore (2003) puts it, such critics consider the problems in “the exercise of power ... to help others exercise power” (p. 346).
4. See also Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth's (2003) arguments about recognition and social justice that extend the arguments about recognition and their significance.
5. The passion of the opposition to critical arguments such as Ellsworths and my own, as well as the desire for “a vision of community” (Aronowitz & Giroux, 1991, p. 132), resonates with that of our White students dismayed by the withdrawal of their indigenous peers.
6. perhaps needs to be noted, to be taken up further elsewhere, that we might want to equivocate about the absolute difference of the Other when the Self is the indigenous self and the Other represents the colonizer. It might be argued that, as a result of colonization, the indigene is never absolutely different, and it is precisely this annihilation of difference that the indigene, necessarily, resists. The indigene as indigene is absolutely different; in speaking as Maori within collaborative inquiry, Maori assert an absolute and necessary difference from Pakeha partners.

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24

SEVEN ORIENTATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIGENOUS SCIENCE EDUCATION

Gregory Cajete

0 INTRODUCTION: CULTURALLY-BASED

SCIENCE CURRICULUM IN AMERICAN INDIAN EDUCATION

The idea of a culturally-based approach to science education for American Indians is a new development in a long and tenuous history of American Indian education and reflects an evolution of thought related to self-determination, community education, and a renaissance of American Indian identity.

Over the course of contact between European and American Indian cultures, the sustained effort to “educate” and assimilate American Indians as a way of dealing with the “Indian problem” inevitably played a key role in how American Indians have historically responded to American “schooling.” As is true with many “colonized” cultural groups throughout the world, the first attempts were met with resistance. This resistance to schooling continues today in more psychologically submerged forms.

Historically, the first attempts at introducing Euro-American schooling to American Indians were met with suspicion, apathy, and indignation. However, once education became viewed as an essential aspect of adapting to modern society, it rapidly evolved into an indispensable key to personal and tribal success in direct proportion to the assimilation or adaptation of “core” American cultural values. This general scenario was replayed for each American Indian tribal culture.

American Indian cultures first encountered Euro-American educational forms through contact with missionaries. Missionaries consistently focused on changing the religion of American Indians, which in most instances entailed a drastic change in the tribal culture as a whole. Such schooling directly conflicted with traditional forms of American Indian education. Early missionary and government teachers naively assumed that American Indians had no education at all and that their mission was to remedy this “great ignorance.” The notion that the learning process is adapted to the environment and

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