Language-Culture-Education: Problem and Potential: An Introduction

Abstract

Education plays an enormous role in the regeneration and reconstruction of Indigenous language, culture, and knowledge. Examples span the globe of Indigenous peoples recreating “traditional” Indigenous education institutions of teaching and learning to support the continuation of their respective languages, cultures, and knowledges. Similarly, there are many and varied examples of Indigenous individuals and groups coopting colonial education institutions to establish education initiatives in support of language and culture regeneration. While originally aimed at dismantling and destroying Indigenous language and culture, colonially imposed education systems at early childhood, compulsory schooling, and tertiary levels have become significant sites for their regeneration and reconstruction. It is on the problem and potential of these systems that many writers in this section focus to develop rich and layered examinations of what we refer to in this introduction as the triad of language, culture, and education.

As section editors, along with section authors, we are ourselves very much implicated in the problem and potential across many dimensions of our respective identities. Along with all the authors, we find ourselves continuously engaging with conceptual shifts that are necessary for language and culture, which have been impacted negatively by colonization, to survive within educational spaces and systems that have invariably been set up with a primary goal of their destruction. We are both on a personal journey of language and culture regeneration – for Margie, this now includes three generations to her children and children’s children; for Carl, it is the subjective endeavor of theorizing a Maori philosophy of language. We are Indigenous educators who have taught in Indigenous education initiatives that span schooling (Margie) and higher education (Carl). We are now both Indigenous scholars in the “Western academy.” As Indigenous writers we are, in all respects, formed and spurred on by the limits and potential of both colonization and counter-colonial approaches to language and culture. The concern that the Indigenous writer has for these issues overrides any pretense at objectivity that the Western academic convention strives for.