CIES Perspectives May 2010

At the Intersection of Indigenous Knowledge and Underrepresentation:
Spotlight on the work of Lesley Graybeal

Dona Tonini
EdD Candidate - IED
Teachers College

The annual Comparative and International Educational Society (CIES) conference offers a collaborative space for scholars to share their work to cultivate cross-cultural understanding and highlight academic achievement from around the world. Although participating in a conference of this caliber affords members a valuable opportunity to explore different educational ideas and practices, fostering global diversity at the CIES has often proved challenging as many students and practitioners face various logistical and financial difficulties regarding attendance. Acknowledging these barriers, the Under-Represented Ethnic and Ability Groups (UREAG) Committee was made a permanent fixture in 2000 to increase the presence of minority groups in both CIES conferences and publications.

As a vital part of the CIES today, UREAG is active in creating opportunities for underrepresented scholars by making available a limited number of merit-based awards to UREAG-CIES members who are presenting papers at the CIES annual conference. A recent recipient of this esteemed award is Lesley Graybeal, who was also just elected Secretary to UREAG for 2010 – 2012. As a doctoral student in International and Comparative Education whose research focuses on the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and comparative education, her scholarship relates to the theme of this newsletter, offering UREAG a unique opportunity to highlight her work.

"... the Homeland Preservation Project has become an opportunity
to not only correct the inaccurate and incomplete
interpretations of local history
and the contributions of American Indians..."

Lesley Graybeal is currently completing her dissertation in Social Foundations of Education in the Department of Workforce Education, Leadership, and Social Foundations at the University of Georgia. Her work focuses on the experiences of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, a recently recognized tribe in North Carolina, the state with the largest American Indian population east of the Mississippi. Recently, the Occaneechi had the opportunity to purchase a 25-acre tract of land that was historically inhabited by members of the tribe, resulting in a “Homeland Preservation Project” which now includes historic reconstructions of a 1600-1700s village and a 1930s tobacco farm, showcasing the tribe’s history across time. Specifically, she is examining this venture as a heritage project and community educational space, documenting the significance of the project to tribal members’ individual and group identities, and exploring the recovery of suppressed cultural and historical knowledge and its contribution to the vitality of the rural community as a whole. She notes that the Homeland Preservation Project has become an opportunity to not only correct the inaccurate and incomplete interpretations of local history and the contributions of American Indians, but also to illustrate the many contemporary roles that American Indians inhabit, breaking down the preconceived stereotypes many visitors have of Indian people.

At the CIES conference in Chicago, Ms. Graybeal presented a paper titled “Representing the Local, Imagining the Global: An Indigenous Community Museum Case Study”, in which she provided the background and initial findings of her research, focusing on how museums and heritage projects use their education programs to reinvent and reformulate knowledges conveyed to visitors about cultures of the past and present. Ms. Graybeal argued that community museums and education programs in particular may often serve to re-imagine culture and identity at multiple levels, as well as how community is defined, through the representations of knowledge and self crafted by a particular group of people. She highlighted the connections that many Occaneechi tribal members and their educational programs make between their local community project and broader state, national, and international understandings of what it means to be an Indigenous person. Additionally, she also examined the ways in which the Homeland Preservation Project has reimagined tribal members’ culture and history on many levels, and redefined the different types of communities in which they participate.

The resulting panel discussion explored the fact that many of her participants have become active members of communities on the local, state, national, and international levels only after becoming active in their tribal community, highlighting the significance of grassroots projects in fundamentally changing individuals’ views of their own roles in many expanded cultural and educational contexts. The dialogue also underscored the importance of highlighting participant voices in studies conducted by outsiders, emphasizing the questions that inspire her research, including: What is it like to have one’s culture and history taken out of context, represented as an object in a display case to illustrate someone else’s history? What is it like to be seen as a relic, and to have one’s present-day existence forgotten by museum visitors? How do people respond to these realities when given the opportunity to create their own representations and educational spaces? This discussion reinforced her interest in the dynamics of research with and about Indigenous peoples, and will inform her future plans to conduct long-term collaborative research with the Occaneechi, pursing the longitudinal and comparative dimensions of the Occaneechi experience with educational programming. Her goal is to increase the visibility of small Indigenous communities and highlight the work that they are doing to recover their own stories, overcome economic and political challenges, break down stereotypes about Indigenous peoples, and improve the lives of their own and other people’s children through education.