Academic Raiding

Moving Throughout Institutional Machinery as Raiders

Philip J. Stevens, Vanessa E. Anthony-Stevens

Part I: Dreaming of Forward-facing Education

In the summer of 2021, our family realized a much-anticipated traditional Apache Na’í’ees ceremony for our eldest daughter, Carmen Aniela. A Na’í’ees (Sunrise Dance or Changing Woman ceremony) requires extensive familial collaboration, guidance from spiritual leaders, plant/animal resources, and financial investment (food, lots of food). Acknowledging and nurturing communal inter-relationships and practicing humility emplaces us humans as members inhabiting a small place among many living and powerful beings on our Earth and in our atmosphere. These salient understandings guide practice in the laborious and rejuvenating ceremony.

Most any Apache knows well the planning, sacrifice, mental, physical, social, and spiritual demands of a Na’í’ees—an embodied love between people and place. Delayed by a year due to COVID and recovering from the impacts of pandemic separation, illness, and extreme drought, we stood by our daughter with the support of extended family as she was molded by her new godparents into a strong woman. Every step of the multiday process was realized under the guidance and protection of spiritual teachers. Their songs (prayers) and verbal and physical instructions were companions to remind our daughter of her female strength, across her lifespan, as her physical and mental endurance was tested. Activating these constellations of relationships within the Apache world is powerful. Rain poured from the sky during the entire three-day ceremony. In the Arizona high country (a region enduring a 30-year extreme drought), plants, animals, and the animate atmosphere burst with new life. Plants literally sprouted before our eyes. The water tanks maintained for free range cattle filled across the vast flats. Too many words would be required to describe what the eyes, ears, and skin could sense, so it will suffice to say, the landscape was vividly painted anew as its abundance was strutted before us.

A Na’í’ees ceremony is both very personal and an embodiment of community stewardship, reciprocity, and forward-facing education with people and the environment. We are told to save no expense to invest in the next generation. It is a communal ritual with the expressed goal of building the best possible Apache futures, supporting Apache women – the mothers of the community - to understand the physical, spiritual, emotional, mental and social journey and stages for living well from girlhood to advanced age. Months preceding her Na’í’ees, Carmen created an image of her future self in a moment of the ceremony where earthly elements and beyond-earthly powers converge – a moment of change. Her image is derived from everyday simplicity: recycled cardboard, used wrapping paper, magazine pages, and white paint. Its temporality is its profundity, a cosmological glimpse not meant to perform for the colonial.

We share our experiences as a family to invite you, the reader, into the complexity of our world(s). We are only offering you fragments of what is actually whole. What we have described must be experienced in process, with others, in relationship with a specific environment. Our daughter’s Na’í’ees is not an object for your exploitation or overgeneralization; we offer our memories and an artifact of Carmen’s dreaming to tell you a Na’í’ees ceremony is a practice of Apache nation building.

Indigenous Knowledge Systems teach that we know the world through our situated places and histories, which exist in relationship with other places and histories, past, present, and future. Because institutions of formal schooling in the United States have had "far more to do with the project of coloniality than with learning, teaching or co-existence" (Patel, 2016, p.4), the gifts of knowledge that young women like Carmen become socialized to embody remain unrecognized in the academy. The communal practice of a Na’í’ees is felt on every level of being, yet it is impermanent. Carmen’s depiction of her then future-self, assembled her knowing, dreaming, and sense-making of an elsewhere not beholden to the colonial. There is so much that academia can learn from Indigenous Knowledge Systems to help its metamorphosis into a better partner for planetary wellbeing.

Dwelling in the breaks

Like border thinkers who recognize and disregard colonial boundaries of knowing (Mignolo 2012) and as people who desire “to theorize in an elsewhere that is beyond the dispossession of that [colonizing] oppressive theory” (la paperson, p. 19, citing Fred Morton, 2003), our family experiences knowing and dreaming in many worlds. We – Philip and Vanessa - exist as products and carriers of many histories and origins, including Apache and settler-colonial, as well as accumulations of multiple repertoires. We are multilinguals, brokers of multiple ontologies, dwellers at the intersections of diverse physical and cultural communities. With and through these assemblages, a collage of active and evolving practices that embrace a wide variety of seemingly incompatible components to make shared meaning (Deleuze and Guattari, 1990), we understand knowledge systems to be plural and simultaneous. Using the words of science, technology, and society scholars, Watson-Verran and Turnbull (2011), our collected assemblages “constitute connections and contrive equivalences between locales in knowledge systems,” facilitating a kind of “heterogeneous engineering” (paraphrased from p. 3).

The boundary between the taxidermy of naming and the unboundedness of dreaming is an opportunity, a break – maybe the break. For us, this space holds the possibility of understanding outside of the settler colonial practice; a practice, as L. T. Smith (1999) describes in her analysis of imperialism, of reaching into our heads with classification systems that impose themselves far beyond their origins to shape relations between people and place. To recognize how and where imperialism is embedded in the contemporary academia, descriptions of truth and knowledge remain foundational to reshaping inequitable relations between settler colonial states and Indigenous societies. We do not need imperial classification systems to know what power is or that it exists with the land; yet, examining the fine grains of colonial hegemony and its ability to travel so unexamined into homes, to be ingested by our children, is necessarily a practice of agentive future-making.

As professors at a land grant university, we work to understand, imagine, and negotiate institutional conditions that assemble technologies of higher education to further the goals and desires of Native Nations in self-government and community well-being. This can appear to be a pointless endeavor, as academia can be an endless feedback loop propagating a master US narrative “of discovery, conquest, and settlement that wipe out any references to the original relations between Indigenous peoples and Europeans” (Alfred, 2006, p. 34). Yet, as assemblages are practices in meaning making, reframing the relationships between power and knowledge to assemble forms of investment in the material, social, and literary practices of Indigenous Peoples, Nations and communities, are efforts to build in the break, and to practice new forms of forward-facing education.

In our short tenures in higher education, we have worked at two land grants - one in the State of Arizona and one in the State of Idaho (both in the Western part of the USA). The origins of these institutions, two of 52 land-grant institutions in the United States, are part of a colonial tradition of violence in claiming and reshaping Indigenous lands and relationships among beings. Recent movements to acknowledge the Indigenous history of an institutions place, such as land acknowledgement statements, do little to transform the coloniality guiding these institutions of higher education (Stewart-Ambo & Yang, 2021). The need of institutions to fragment and flatten relationships with words – containable simplicity – undermines, intentionally or not, active engagement and relationship making with complex histories beyond the colonial.

We have elsewhere critiqued the absence of relational acknowledgement between land removal and land appropriation and pushed ourselves and our colleagues (and administrators) to examine the complex ways land-grant institutions of higher education so effectively manage to forget, erase, ignore, dishonor, and disrespect the truth that they reap the resources from stolen Morrill Act land transfers with no reciprocation (Stevens, Anthony-Stevens, Hedden-Nicely & Hamilton, 2021). Land acknowledgements seen as assemblages which bring together disparate worldviews, propose superficial engagement with complex histories, and perpetuate what we believe Alfred (2006) referred to when describing the master US narrative. Take for example the University of Arizona, as an exemplifier of this dynamic: The university land acknowledgement statement communicates there are 22 federally recognized tribes in the State and Tucson is home to the O’odham and Pascua Yaqui people. What the University of Arizona (UA) does not acknowledge is that the largest land grab conversion to capital to fuel their massive university complex was stolen from the Western Apache: 91,371 acres, which raised $286,162 for the university, about 8.6 million in today’s economy. This land base, also in the Sonoran Desert, and its profits are larger than the total combined grab of O’odham lands. The UA’s land acknowledgement statement fails to acknowledge the institution’s material connection to Apache lands and Apache displacement, also inhabitants of the desert lands, as part of the frame. That would be too complicated, again leaving mostly intact the underpinnings of the master narrative that past-tenses Indigenous worlds and textured relations.

Yet, we keep dreaming, and we carefully scan our surroundings from the break(s). A few years ago, we became deeply interested in the concept of Tribal Nation building as an orientation to higher education (Brayboy et al., 2012; Coffey & Tsosie, 2001; Cornell & Kalt, 1998; Deloria & Lytle, 1983; Native Nations Institute, n.d.). Described by scholars of economics and business development, nation-building, their concept, indicates an approach to community development that is future oriented, and committed to comprehensive solutions to invest in societies where businesses and humans flourish (Cornell & Kalt, 1998). Future oriented and comprehensive solutions in this context were directly speaking to the history of oppression and deprivation imposed on Tribal Nations by the US Federal government up to point of US federal policy changes in the mid-1970s. More recently, taken up by scholars of social, cultural, and educational studies, nation building has been conceptualized as a framework for systems change, involving many facets of familial, institutional, and community cohesion in a society. Tribal Nation building in higher education is discussed as involving a conscious and focused application of Indigenous people’s collective resources, energies, and knowledges toward liberating and developing the physical and intellectual space for Indigenous communities to drive conversations of legal, political, cultural, economic, health and nutritional, spiritual, and educational needs of Native nations (Brayboy et al., pp. 12–13). Previous scholars apply nation building to an institution of higher education as an orientation, here we propose nation building be considered importantly a verb: the action occurring as Tribal citizens access and develop the skills and knowledge they deem necessary for strengthening Tribal sovereignty and self-determination. This action can occur within the current capitalist frameworks, or outside of it, or both simultaneously.

Similar to our family’s continuance of Apache cosmologies of womanhood, the experiences of many Indigenous families to support and prepare their youth to be strong adults and leaders are grounded in centuries of knowledge. Lumbee anthropologist of education Bryan McKinley Jones Brayboy states, “Tribal nation building, and activism happens across and through generations. It takes many forms. It is not new,” (2021, pg. 97). Yet, we know that academia, which we see as colonial machines made up of technologies in the image of affirming capitalist alchemy and negating Indigenous sovereign practice (la paperson, 2017), does not understand the vibrancy of Indigenous Knowledge, spiritual life, and its relationship to being-in-place. We recognize that the regeneration of Indigenous people/place relationships is undermined again and again by colonial institutions (schooling) equipped to serve European modernity as the arms and legs of domination and enslavement over land and being. Persisting to assemble tools and resources for building, and rebuilding, the Tribal Nations our children deserve relays on the intelligence and vibrancy of Indigenous Knowledge Systems, which have been seen to survive great toxins and violence.

Complex, nuanced, philosophical, and dynamic lessons embedded in a Na’í’ees are often misidentified as static, superstitious, primitive, and even foolish (e.g., “devil dancing” that was banned by the US government). However, encouraged by the words of la paperson (avatar of critical pedagogy scholar K. Wayne Yang), we too approach the university as a settler colonial technology and believe/dream that within the space and time of “the colonizing university also exists a decolonizing education” (2017, p. xiii). Just as we are witness to land acknowledgement statements with their potentials and limitations, we have also been witness to adjustments within Eurocentric educational facilities, spearheaded by Indigenous educators and scholars, that have begun to recognize Tribal epistemologies and theories in and around academic spaces. It is the philosophical and material changes Tribal Nation buildingputs in motion which interests us.

Doing the Work

Let us first say that we have been professors for just a decade. That means, with humility, our work is not yet mature. Even so, we understand that doing the work, sustaining, persisting, and negotiating the world as it is, with the desire to build better worlds, is our core investment. Our collective efforts in academia to design and lead programs centers on space-making for Indigenous sovereign work in colonial institutions. Among these efforts are the University of Idaho’s American Indian Studies program (AIST), the Indigenous Knowledge for Effective Education Program (IKEEP) and Cultivating Relationships (CR): Partnering with Teachers and Tribes to Integrate Indigenous and STEM School Knowledge. This work moves in multiple scales and operates from multiple worldviews. In one strand, we work to make more visible conditions of inequality formed over decades of racial and social class hierarchies, conditions of coloniality mediating possibilities of being among people, communities, and society (Maldonado-Torres, 2013). Another strand grapples with the entanglements of multiple cosmologies, ways of seeing the world, and their implications on our relationships with land, landscapes, and each other to assemble tools that might help leverage school classrooms to learn and teach in more conscious relationship with Indigeneity. As coloniality has played a central role in regulating whose knowledge and whose practices were included in the modern creation of schools, the on-going practice of honoring Indigenous needs and desires in the colonial apparatus of the university is really about action.

In our imperfect ways, we grapple with the intangibles of invoking words and ideas such as “decolonial possibility” in the pinnacle of coloniality (the academy). We take stock of la paperson’s (2017) words, colonial technologies do not always produce the intended outcomes; there are always inventive pathways through and amidst colonialism. We think about this as ways of being in-relationship-with, hard alternatives to the dominant frame of assimilation. Dreaming about Tribal Nation building in schooling and higher education can be dangerous, and doing the work is dirty—a multiscale battle through classrooms and curriculum committees, winding colonial hallways and archives, and sensitive human relationships to form coalitions that warp the patterning of oppressive power. Doing the work, in our privileged roles as university professors, is always in-relationship-with our roles as son/daughter, parents, community members, and neighbors (to humans and other-than-humans). To imagine and act in a multiplicity of ways that engage space-making for Indigenous well-being through education is not to isolate; it is to compliment and to seek out new purposes for old parts and old purposes imbedded in new parts. As seen in Carmen’s artwork and our description of her Na’í’ees, the materials for such work are around us daily, and they are futuristic. As we struggle to persist in this work, we ask ourselves: How might we imagine and take up materials as “reassemblages [that] bear into existence” an Apache future for our daughters? In answering that question, we remember: assemblages and reassembling are not new. Apaches are masters of assembling. In settler colonial times, this sophisticated practice was depicted through the eyes of colonialists as raiding. We see raiding as the work, and a way to embody beingness in the break.

Part II: Academic Raiding

Nłt’éégo bénáłdiih: An Apache intervention to European universality

In the late 1990s, while away from my home community, I, Philip, sat in an undergraduate class engaged in discussing the philosophy of Europeans and “eternal human truths.” I remember thinking that this was a really interesting point. Immediately, I started to think about what I was taught as being good and true in Apache culture and wondering if that would carry over into European scenarios. When I asked the professor for further clarification, I was given an example of an eternal human truth—that stealing is bad no matter your culture. This is when I became even more interested because of my understanding of the Apache wars. As an Apache, I was aware of the cultural aspect of raiding within the southwest; limited access to supplies meant acquisition through raiding of the supply depots. Raiding meant maintaining and growing Apache communities. I asked the professor if this was bad because it was stealing. Even though the exact words are not remembered, the outcome of the discussion deviated from a resolution of my inquiry regarding the applicability of universal values, to one that reinforced a traditional teacher student relationship. I was made aware that I should not make trouble and instead listen to what was being taught. In other words, I was told to quit arguing and just learn what I was taught.

For me to appreciate and understand Plato’s allegory of the cave and his theory on forms was interesting; yet my own understandings of my cultural beliefs did not have the same power as those of the school’s culture. Perhaps an easier route in this college classroom scenario would have been simply to accept that my question was invalid and to see that stealing or raiding by Apaches was a bad thing. However, this was not my choice of action because I could not forget what I was taught as a boy growing up on the Apache reservation. For me, not forgetting and being witness to the deep entanglement of coloniality and pedagogy practiced in and projected from institutional classrooms, has given rise to theorizing educational raiding—a subversive action designed to acquire “goods” from the school culture for the benefit of the home culture (Anthony-Stevens, Stevens, & Nicholas, 2017).

Raiding: An analysis

The choice of raiding to define what many Indigenous students engage in with schools is rooted in the use of language and words within Philip’s home community of San Carlos. Euro-Historically, Apache raiding was thought of as the scourge of the American Southwest; a severe reaction to the “settling” of the land (Thrapp, 1967). Culturally, raiding was understood to be an intelligent and necessary reaction to invasion of indaa (Europeans) on Apache land. Raiding was the response to the continued insistence of indaa that their way of living trumped the way of life for Apaches. The freedom to live as an Apache was seen as detrimental to the freedom to live as indaa. Raiding allowed Apaches to procure the necessities of life through the appropriation of goods to sustain the community’s culture and way of life. Raiding was also understood to be a covert action undertaken within a contested space. For Apaches, “a good raid” shed no blood but yielded goods that would strengthen the community.

The current conditions of institutional knowledge production perpetuate a lack of emphasis on place and de-historicize knowledge. The idea that cultural understandings are applicable to anywhere divorces place from knowledge. Instead, we see knowledges as developed in specific contexts and in a place. The European thought world engages in a supplantation of place: parts of the knowledges that were embedded in place now get embedded with the individual and the individual becomes the carrier of the knowledge. The white anthropologist Keith Basso (1996) described Western Apache relationships with the world as wisdom “sits in places” (also the title of his book). Whereas in the [European] academy, wisdom sits in certain people and in the academy itself. Thus, in comparison with Indigenous knowledges that are place based, there is hyperbolic emphasis on the human side of knowing. From an Apache worldview, ways of doing divorced from place plainly facilitate individualism. Even well-intentioned ideas that promote the plasticity of place can create universal ideas of place, which ultimately become no-place. The construction of “nowhere” or “nothing” facilitates dominion over and subjugation of place while perhaps encouraging learn about place but not from it—all consequences that promote coloniality.

Academic raiding for Indigenous students is comprised of the very act of going into this foreign system, constructed by European and Western thought worlds, and housed in the buildings that it has invented, including school. School is not only no-place, it is also a weird place, perhaps in the Shakespearean sense—meaning supernatural, where there are demons and dangers, where things do not make sense, and where the incredible and the impossible may happen. Historically, in these places, Indigenous peoples have been relegated to remediation, punitive measures, and less allowed to join in to the impossible and the incredible. For Indigenous students, academic raiding in such school systems requires not getting caught, which can mean not being noticed, not calling attention to oneself. The objective of academic raiding is to get tools, ideas, concepts, “the goods” of schooling so that they can be refashioned and appropriated to fit within students’ home communities and their peoples’ way of doing things, which signals a return to place-based knowledge systems that do not depend solely on the individual. In this way, academic raiding disrupts the idea of schools as the only creators of universal knowledge and knowers.

Academic raiding, as an Indigenous act, also transforms. We observe three general transformations - two defined by the school, one defined by the student. However, we also note that academic raiding is maintaining agency despite assimilative and oppressive powers. In the first transformation through raiding, the student is spotted and assimilated, and they follow the school’s expectations for using its tools towards the outcomes it wants. In the second transformation, the student is recognized and caught because the student has made it known that this process is not useful. Maybe the student calls school boring, and as a result, is kicked out or labeled as defunct. In the third possible transformation, the student does not allow themselves to be recognized as too good and are seen as minimally or marginally proficient and a threat to no one. This is the camouflage the student wears—she/he/they are not out of the ordinary. If the student is able to raid successfully, the hope is layered: to access the impossible and the incredible while being situated within their strengths and knowledge systems.

Centering Apache Knowledge Systems

Apache Knowledge Systems pre- and post-contact have been heavily influenced by the places and cultures around Apache people, and they continue to be shaped by those relationships. Apache Knowledge Systems were flexible and pliable, just like they are today. Other than the constraints of their environment, Apache people were able to develop knowledge systems on their own accord: Apaches could choose where they wanted to learn and what they wanted to do, which is distinct from contemporary institutional life. Some knowledge systems pre-contact engaged what we today refer to in English as botany, the environment, family planning, and astronomy because there was understanding of how to live with the environment. Those knowledges are still shared within Apache stories of how to be and act, knowing that there are places that belong to other things, other beings (e.g., Beaver Springs is actually “the Beavers’ spring,” which means that the place does not just belonging to the people). There is much to be learned from other knowledge holders in the natural world.

If students are to participate in academic raiding in the university, they will also grow and develop Apache Knowledge Systems. To students reading this chapter: academic raiding facilitates that you are able to see and grow your own concepts and objectives in a new environment, including seeing how Apache Knowledge Systems can effectively engage and interact with European Knowledge Systems. Being a raider does not hinge on mutually exclusive binaries. There is space for the incredible and the impossible. Perhaps think of a sound board and the switches for making music. The switches are not placed in just any order. The order is dependent upon the music - what kind of music are you trying to make? The knowledge systems are the music, and certain parts of the “one pedagogical system” are not going to be the best for everyone, especially when dealing with different knowledge systems because certain things are going to be more emphasized than others. In an Apache Knowledge System place is valued because places are sources of knowledge; land is renewable knowledge energy where stories are always there—even as time changes, and the people come and go. To understand this allows a raider to disrupt the academia’s notion of itself as the “knowledge holder” and to engage in the assembling knowledge that lives in relationship with place, natural cycles, and the abundance that is other-than-human.

Part III: Academic Raiding as Tribal Nation Building

Nation-building convenings

The transformation of educational systems to affirm situated knowledge is brought to life for us through complex partnerships that deal in assemblages and engage the thoughts, desires, and dreams to be enacted with our own communities. Through the lens of academic raiding, we turn to a few examples of raids with others, e.g., to co-imagine higher education and tribal-university partnerships as grounded in Tribal Nation building. As many Apache raids were carried out not just by individuals but by groups. Individual academic raids, as described above, have their effects; however, assembling critical masses to engage in collective academic raids generates opportunity for resources to be imagined and gathered in different parts of the academy.

In the winter of 2020, with colleagues Dylan Hedden-Nicely and Chris Hamilton, we organized a convening that brought together roughly 60 Indigenous and non-Indigenous faculty, higher education administrators, tribal directors of education, and Indigenous graduate students, all with expertise and interest in transforming university–tribal partnerships. Attendees represented 16 different public institutions spanning 10 states in the US. Faculty brought an array of disciplinary perspectives: life sciences, law, anthropology, linguistics, education, public health, ethnomusicology, among others. The multiday, conversational-style convening was guided by keynote speakers and the following interrelated questions based in the fields of education, life sciences, law, and anthropology: In what ways can or do institutions of higher education address administrative barriers that limit equitable opportunities for success with Indigenous students, faculty, and collaborative research in higher education? What innovations in higher education partnerships, policies, and programs have contributed to tribal nation building, and how might they be strengthened?

We recorded the rich discussions of engaged leaders in higher education during the convening. In the over 30 hours of group conversations, we hear Indigenous educational leaders consistently express the importance of centering Indigenous voices and leadership in higher education decision-making fulfills the promises articulated in policy, law, treaties to keep to the US honest and accountable. Our colleagues articulated struggles and successes in building collaborations that further the purposeful commitment of higher education, healthy families and communities, and sustainable economies that render “justice” to Indigenous communities. Relational sustainability and community centric thinking in higher education and research were offered again and again as imperatives of Tribal Nation building.

A first product from this convening was published in a special issue of the Journal of American Indian Education. The initial conversation offers an educational framework for Indigenous self-determination and Indigenous theories of knowledge as pillars of engagement in post-secondary education. Scholars and administrators from different fields offered tangible guidance on action: the need of community approaches to education policies, changes to faculty hiring practices, curriculum redesign, and outreach grounded in relational accountability with Native Nations. As Stewart-Ambo and Yang (2021) describe in their beyond land acknowledgement framework, thinking beyond rhetoric with others committed in sovereign-affirming education “ultimately leads in the direction of accountability to land, which from an Indigenous perspective means responsibility to decolonization, to all our relations” (34). Thinking together to intermingle the impossible alongside the practical, is a process of getting tools, ideas, concepts, “the goods” of higher education, so that we might work together to refashion and appropriate to fit within or further a community’s needs and desires for their children.

Indigenous methodologies

Indigenous methodologies for knowing are multidimensional, holistic, and relational (Cajete, 1994); never without obligation and accountability (Sumida Huaman & Mataira, 2019). There is no place for mere abstraction or false objectivism in Indigenous-centered research. For us, these assertions signal a return to place-based knowledge systems. Crafting academic courses that center research practices as deeply entwinned with the needs and experiences of our students, communities, and the land as an interactive exchange opens a potential to invite others into collectively elevate the philosophical underpinnings of Tribal epistemologies and consider how our situated relationships co-construct shared benefits in the research and dissemination process.

But that road can be bumpy, and too much talk about such transformations can derail the actual process of transforming. Because of this, we take Indigenous research to mean collaboration and praxis with diverse research teams: Indigenous, allied, practitioner, and cross-disciplinary. Bringing together and holding together diverse collectives forces us to be in relationship with complex and uncertain processes of reconstructing space for Indigenous needs and desires in higher education. This is the muscle and tendons of our work, like grafting relational materials in the colonial systems to generate new kinds of growth. We enjoy the incredible moments when thinking through/alongside Indigenous Knowledge Systems re-positions inquiry within land-based relationships. Situating knowledge in the subjectivities of place is central in the politics of addressing local peoples’ pressing social needs. Research in this direction can be designed and applied (ideally both), as tools, that are informed by local peoples’ understandings of social reality and are forwarded by what local people believe ought to be done to bring about change (Dei, 2020). Currently, we are navigating the oxygen-thin space of university bureaucracy to forward a university-wide initiative called the Center for Interdisciplinary Indigenous Research and Education. Being in relationship with college administrators and university leadership to access the needed material commitments for a physical and intellectual space dedicated to Indigenous research methodologies is a (not the) response to the continued insistence of indaa that their way of living trumped the way of life for Apaches. Or to state more broadly, fighting for space in the institutions is one of many inventive pathways through and amidst colonialism where dreaming of education in-relationship-with diverse local lands and diverse local peoples can occur as a process that invites possibilities collective tinkering toward the potential of relational research futures.

American Indian Studies revamp

An old Indian joke is that there are no friends in the world of the university, except for the anthropologists, but they prefer Indians dead. When living, Indigenous voices in the academy remain predominately welcomed in the form of a guest paradigm (McKinney, 2020) or as “living” objects of continued exploitation (Fredericks, 2009). Through direct conversations with tribal community members, it was determined that one of the best ways that the American Indian Studies (AIST) program at the University of Idaho could serve the community was to revamp the curriculum to address issues currently facing Indigenous communities. AIST developed the Tribal Elders Series, where tribal elders or knowledge holders could share knowledge with the university community as a semester long course. The premise of the course is built on a simple question: What do you want the university environment to know about you and your people? This strengthening of relationships between institutions of higher education, Tribal Nations, and tribal citizens is a way we engage in co-constructing new commitments to each other.

Our Cultivating Relationships (CR) Collaborative also underscores academic raiding as an active engagement in Tribal Nation building. This co-designed teacher professional certificate program, funded by the National Science Foundation’s now defunded Discovery Research K-12 program, partners university faculty from different disciplines (anthropology, education, life sciences, and natural resources) and four Tribal Nations (Coeur d’Alene Tribe, Nez Perce Tribe, Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and the San Carlos Apache Tribe) to ask teachers to be in sensitive relationship between people, place, land, and waters. CR invites teachers, both Indigenous and settler, into one year learning cycle with two years of continued classroom support to partner is seriously grappling with multiple epistemologies in STEM teaching and learning. Prioritizing Indigenous, place-based/land-based knowledge as the basis of curricula creation offers new models for K-12 classroom teachers creatively apply and adjust in relationship with their teaching setting. In this effort, we are beginning to see how Indigenous Knowledge Systems create a symbiotic relationship between teachers, students, and place, putting in motion a feedback loop that situates knowing as being in-relationship-with rather than reinforming standardized, place-neutral, and normative ways of determining knowledge in the world (see Cultivating Relationships Collaborative, 2025). Questions that guide the design of this locally run teacher professional development certificate include: What should STEM education look like if it were built around sustaining Tribal futures? How is STEM education transformed by Indigenous Knowledge Systems? The response to these questions consistently pushes us to see Indigenous Knowledge Systems as diverse, to be represented in dynamic ways that are useful for contemporary problems. The foundational premise we hear echoed across our work in partnership with Indigenous faculty and diverse tribal leaders in higher education emphasizes this truth: Tribal Nations are leading the intellectual and spiritual work that is needed to address the most complex issues of our time (e.g., climate change and people-land relations). We need to be listening and supporting this work, sometimes we do this with camouflage, and sometimes we take it underground to tinker with reassemblages/ing.

The End: Carry On, Raiders

Stories shared in relationships of accountability oblige us to speak textured truth to power in universities. Our calls to address inequities in university/tribal relationships are not new and fit within or alongside the many movements that seek to transform the terms upon which the university and schooling exists (see Bhambra, Gebrial, & Nisancioglu, 2018 as an example). Yet, there are too few examples of building sustained pathways for reciprocal relationships between Tribal Nations and institutions of higher education. But, as Philip describes, raiding is about furthering a community’s well-being, not the academies. The co-construction of local collectives that attend to cultural process and power, to learn from and with the efforts of Tribal Nations, are important breaks toward reassembling the conditions of higher education.

Reader, you may now be asking, what of the ephemeral unboundedness of dreaming relates to the pragmatic tinkering in the unglamourous innards of the university apparatus? (haha!) We admit, there can appear to be a disconnect between the unboundedness of dreaming and the materiality of academic raiding. Possibility and dreaming do not fade with the waking realities of raiding. Apache Knowledge Systems, like other Indigenous Knowledge Systems that thrive primarily outside of academia, are vibrant, living, and hold extraordinary potential for planetary wellbeing and sustainable social change (see Sumida Huaman & Martin, 2020). Our description of Carmen’s Na’í’ees ceremony that opened this chapter is a partial depiction of what is in reality an embodiment of a life cycle, community stewardship, reciprocity between people and place, and forward-facing education. Sharing stories such as Carmen’s Na’i’ees in an academic context presents something that the academy traditionally views as “not supposed to be here” as a sophisticated practice of Tribal values, principles and philosophies. This story is a form of education, a process of teaching and learning grounded in multidimensional, holistic, and relational knowledge. Maybe breathing Apache values in the academy is opening the gate for the raid. With the firmness of certainty and the fluidness of indeterminacy, it is dreaming, while in camouflage, that powers us to continue to tinker and reassemble the pieces. Acts of academic raiding are everyday and long-term. What comes next will be (continue to be) simultaneous, liminal, and relational.

References

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