Meeting Them Where They Are: A Case Study in Land Education and Indigenous Resurgence

Abstract:Land education has emerged as an important and promising area of development within the field of Native education, in that it connects students with Indigenous knowledges while simultaneously attending to structural problems that settler colonialism has imposed on Indigenous Peoples. Existing models for this kind of programming, however, tend to focus on urban areas with high-density Native populations or on reservation communities. Native students growing up in suburban/exurban or nonreservation rural areas may not have access to these kinds of programs, yet mainstream “equity and diversity” initiatives do not fully meet the unique needs of these students either. The case study presented here offers a model for a community-driven program in a suburban/exurban area of Colorado’s Front Range that not only works to meet the specific needs of these students but can also contest settler narratives of Indigenous erasure and removal and contribute to the project of Indigenous resurgence.