Indigenous Feminist Meditations

Contemplating the Next University Through Indigenous Relational Praxis

Kēhaulani Vaughn

Relations

My imagining of the “next university” (la paperson, 2017) is contextualized by my current home in Soonkahni (Salt Lake City/Valley), Utah, home to the Newe (Sosogoi/Shoshone; Kusiutta/Goshute) and Núuchi-u (Yuuta’/Ute), and Nuwuvi (Paiute) peoples. As a Kānaka Maoli residing outside of my homelands, I recognize the genealogical caretakers of this land and corresponding responsibilities. Utah is home to a diverse and vibrant Indigenous community, including Pacific Islanders who began arriving in the latter half of the 20^th century. As an Indigenous educator at the University of Utah, I am too familiar with the underrepresentation of Indigenous students, staff, faculty, and administrators, and our overall lack of inclusion within the general university curriculum. This current condition is rooted in colonial education, which alienated Indigenous peoples from their land, languages, and values (Sepulveda, 2024). These actions worked in conjunction with the settler accumulation of Native territory—committing a form of ideological genocide. This genocidal project forcibly alienates Indigenous peoples from their ways of life through settler education practices that normalize Western values and standards. Today, in Utah and elsewhere, despite a history of dispossession, Indigenous people are participating in language reclamation, the continuance of ceremonies, and implementing education programs centering Indigenous cultures. Despite these efforts, higher education continues to be a place that is foreign, alienating, and isolating for many Indigenous scholars. Those who do “make it” (meaning graduate and even arrive at tenure-track positions), including me, constantly mediate between different worlds, advocating for our communities.

Our current universities often translate their responsibilities to Indigenous communities on campus—faculty, staff, and students—as a practice of equity or parity through a multicultural paradigm. These practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion alone do not transform the institution. The “third university,” according to la paperson, demands a reckoning with the original and continual settler colonial violence and its corresponding Indigenous dispossession (2017). Thus, the “third university” requires land rematriation along with an uplifting of Indigenous organizing (la paperson, 2017). The organizers of this volume (and fellow contributors) are thus called to reflect on creating the “next university.” I refer to the people engaged in this meditation as “edgewalkers;” those who walk between worlds while doing the “edgework” (Beals et al. 2000).

My higher-educational journey as a first-generation Native Hawaiian woman learning and residing on Turtle Island (North America) informs my analysis of the “next university.” As an Assistant Professor of Education and Pacific Island Studies, I have attended and worked at both private liberal arts colleges and public institutions. Each higher educational institution that I have attended did not reflect my ethnic or cultural background in the general curriculum, faculty, or staff. To survive within these institutional spaces, I have directly worked to increase the number of Pacific Islander, Indigenous, and underrepresented students across higher education institutions. This was one way of growing the number of people who could support each other in and through edgewalking. To survive in the current university, I straddle different environments by being deeply community-engaged. Being involved in several communities tied to my positionality as an Indigenous scholar supports my personal and professional ethics, which seek to imagine and create systems of learning and living that are not driven by capitalist accumulation in the pursuit of “white life ” (Rodriguez, 2020). Rather than being a token success story within the current system, which seeks to maintain a system of white supremacy, I seek to meditate and dream of a “new university” that reimagines new ways of learning and being in this world.

Edgewalking and the “Next University”

For many of us in higher education who come from identities and cultural epistemes that challenge the very existence of the current university, we have no choice but to walk between worlds that are often incommensurable (Beals et al., 2020). As an Indigenous woman, I have a particular racialized and gendered experience in higher education and in settler society. This includes being simultaneously raced (and erased) and subjected to Western heteropatriarchal values. I edgewalk in the academy because I believe that learning alternatives to settler systems, including Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies, can contribute to world-making. Indigenous life systems strive to live in balance with land and resources, value human and more-than-human life, and create expansive kinship models that move beyond biology. These alternatives encompass my research and that of other scholars who edgewalk.

Meditating the “next university” while working in the current one requires edgewalking. Robyn Maynard reminds us that world-making has always occurred simultaneously with world ending (2022). Maynard details that Indigenous and Black communities who are the most vulnerable and who are positioned as the first to die within our current white supremacist system are the best poised for world-making. She states, “Our communities, quite literally the post-apocalyptic survivors of world-endings already, are best positioned to imagine what this may be (pp. 26).” Therefore, I ask questions like, what can be learned from an Indigenous feminist meditative practice that can inform and shape the “next university?” What insights are gained from being an edgewalker who mediates between different worlds? Through this recitation, I contemplate the possibilities for the “next university,” that will reconnect relationships to lands, bodies, and people. To propose what comes next, the current university needs to be examined, along with a look toward the past, to inform a future beyond time. The goal is not to recuperate the past but to integrate the values and pedagogical practices that emphasize connection, kinship, and wholeness into this meditative practice (Beals et al., 2020).

Moving Away from Inclusion and Reform

The neoliberalization of higher education institutions is intertwined with the project of settler colonialism (Grande, 2018), necessitating Native erasure and a continued logic of elimination. Although diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at institutions have increased, scholars have noted that the institutionalization of DEI does not abolish white supremacy as a regime of knowledge institutionalized through the apparatus of education (Grande, 2018). Rather, diversity programming and their hiring initiatives selectively incorporate diversity through the logics of recognition or inclusion (Grande, 2018; Kelley, 2016). The current university, an institution of settler colonialism, reproduces the ideology and knowledge production necessary to uphold the existing system. Since its inception, the present university has created the ideology necessary to institute racial and gendered hierarchies that justify the theft of Native lands and the genocide and enslavement of people. Writ large, it rewards toxic individualism and conspires with capitalism to destroy the planet (e.g., think of the relationship between science and industry).

To contemplate the “next university,” it is essential to analyze the current university through a Native feminist lens to reveal the racial and gendered effects. This is a necessary part of the meditation that reveals the regenerative possibilities for the “next university.” In this chapter, I will discuss three Indigenous praxes through an Indigenous feminist analytic: Indigenous cultural kīpuka, genealogy of mentorship, and trans-Indigenous education. Each resituates education as kinship and centers Indigenous epistemologies, including Indigenous feminisms, as essential to reconfiguring the “next university.”

Indigenous Worldviews and Education

Indigenous education existed prior to colonialism and informed value systems that strived to live in a balanced relationship with humans, more-than-human, and the earth. Long before colonizers set foot on the lands and waters of the Pacific and Turtle Island, Indigenous people had complex and diverse structures of community, government, and family/kinship. Native creation stories detail the umbilical bonds that inherently tie Indigenous people to place (Delisle, 2015). Through inherited responsibilities, Indigenous peoples center non-anthropocentric worldviews that focus on interconnectivity and balance. Therefore, education within Indigenous societies strives to teach good relations between people, land/place, and more-than-human life forms. Being in “good relations” in many Indigenous communities often means valuing life-giving relationships by living reciprocally with the environment. These principles of living respectfully are often taught through oral traditions of storytelling—songs, chants, proverbs, and poetry—that are grounded in place. Indigenous storytelling traditions are the first teachings that guide relationships between the human and the more-than-human. (Lilimaiava-Doktor, 2020; Kanahele, 2011). These principles are also taught through shared genealogies with the natural world (Meyer, 2008).

For members of Indigenous communities, education prepared them to understand their role and function within society. Indigenous education was essential for passing down ancestral knowledge of a distinct understanding of the world that uniquely situated people and place. Despite dominant discourses of Indigenous people as not sophisticated, civilized, or intellectual, there are numerous examples of Indigenous communities around the globe being technologically advanced with engineering, number systems, calculations, agriculture, and medicine. These systems were often in tune with the moon, sun, and the surrounding environment, predating Western interference. Through systems of Western knowledge production, Indigenous peoples were alienated from their worldviews through settler education (Sepulveda, 2024). This forced process stripped Indigenous peoples of their knowledge and value systems, which continues to have negative effects both on the people and the environment. Therefore, the “next university” must be place-based and steeped in Indigenous relationalities to create the goals of harmony, kinship, and connection amongst peoples, lands, and bodies. Understanding settler colonialism is necessary to create the “next university,” not in its reflection. The next few sections expand on settler colonialism in relation to the present and the “next university.”

Settler Colonialism

Settler colonialism is a form of colonialism predicated on the removal of Native/Indigenous people from their land through logics of elimination (Wolfe, 2006). Settler colonialism is a system in which settlers come to new lands to stay, producing a governance and social system that expands settlement of land (Wolfe, 2006). Since settlers need continued access to land that does not belong to them, settler colonialism requires Native erasure. Settlers replace Indigenous peoples (and their worldviews) through various means, including ideological and physical genocide. Ideological measures are codified in law and policy and enforced through settler education and Western knowledge production. The replacement of Indigenous people functions through genocide, which also includes their physical removal from homelands that alienate their specific, place-based epistemologies (Sepulveda, 2024).

Settler colonialism is an ongoing structure anchored by heteropatriarchy. Heteropatriarchy alienates people from place/land by imposing logics of domination and extraction through practices of non-relationality (Sepulveda, 2024). By instituting a hierarchy based on a gender binary where one is inherently dominant (i.e., patriarchal), settler colonialism creates systemic power imbalances and institutional values to replicate and maintain that hierarchy. For example, males could own private property, vote, and were expected to make decisions concerning nuclear families. Heteropatriarchy stands in juxtaposition to most Indigenous societies, including Kānaka Maoli, where women and non-binary individuals held positions of power that functioned through expansive kinship formations beyond the nuclear family. Settler colonialism continues to wreak havoc on Indigenous communities.

Settler education upholds and naturalizes the violence of settler colonialism, including the ongoing theft of Indigenous lands, their communities, and bodily sovereignty. Therefore, settler education is directly complicit in its maintenance. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) details the history of Western knowledge production and disciplinary formations, with their standards of rigor, which emerged from an impulse to categorize and collect. These colonial and imperial encounters surveyed waters and lands and collected bones, hair, material objects, plants, animals, and rocks for study, preservation, and exhibition (Smith, 2012). The wealth of settler academic institutions is inextricably tied to Indigenous dispossession and non-consensual research (Smith, 2012 ). As Audra Simpson (2014) argues, the continued existence of Native people is a reminder of the unfinished nature of settler colonialism (pp. 7-8). Along with other Indigenous peoples within the university, I do the necessary edgework as part of a worldmaking process that recognizes that the current university must perish while imagining the next to exist.

Settler Education

For Indigenous peoples, settler education is an alienating project that disrupts Indigenous people from their languages, cultures, land, and relationships. While the consequences of enforced Western education on Indigenous communities are still being uncovered, it has had genocidal effects. For example, although social and economic gains are attributed to college completion, the normalization of Western life and values is in opposition to the healthy sustainability of Indigenous communities and peoples, which is anchored in relationships. The lack of matriculation and retention and the underrepresentation of Indigenous people are evident at every level (student, staff, faculty, and administration). For example, in 2017, the four-year college completion rate for American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) was 17.9 percent at public institutions (NCES 2018). Overall, there has been a decline in AIAN enrollment at colleges and universities (NCES 2018). Similarly, for Pacific Islanders, less than 20 percent of adults aged 25 or older hold a bachelor’s degree (EPIC & AAJC). This signals something deeper than disinterest. Settler education creates an illusion of rewards for “law-abiding” and “hardworking” individuals, thereby normalizing settler values through a project of nation-building and citizenship-making. Current university education focuses on creating a labor force that upholds capitalism. Students who attend university do so because they believe it will lead to better jobs and career paths within the current capitalist structure. Unfortunately, higher education, with its implicit and explicit ties to global capitalism, promotes and proliferates Western ideas, epistemologies, and structures that maintain a white supremacist capitalist society. Capitalism is inherent to colonialism. Therefore, an education system that normalizes its values is complicit in its maintenance.

The “next university” needs to center relationships rather than maintain hierarchies based on gender, race, or capitalist competition. Forecasting the demise of settler education institutions, Sandy Grande poignantly discusses a politics of refusal in reference to the death of the current university (Grande, 2018). Like Grande, I continue the work of edgewalking, aware of the impending death of colonialism, settler colonialism, and settler education, and recognize the need to plan for its afterlife.

Indigenous Feminisms

Indigenous feminist theories provide frameworks to explore the gendered contours of colonialism and settler colonialism as embedded within the forms of knowledge production that structure settler society. Imposed gendered hierarchies generate harmful interactions between people, land, and more-than-human life forms. Through the physical occupation of land, extraction of natural resources, and the severing of peoples’ relationships to place, Indigenous feminisms are concerned with the role of white cis-male dominated heteropatriarchy that dictates what constitutes “acceptable” relationship formations for families, communities, and places (Arvin, 2013; Sailiata & Teves, 2022). Acceptable relationship formations within settler colonialism, are those that divorce people from expansive, land-based kinship ecosystems while feeding into capitalist structures of abstraction and identity production. Settler colonial education reinforces such structures of identity within curricula that normalize disconnections between land, people, and more-than-human life forms. This curriculum creates harmful identity formations for Indigenous peoples who are historically and currently legally codified through governmental blood quantum, Western-informed tribal citizenship practices, and other forms of state and federal recognition. Indigenous feminisms reveal the techniques implemented to create disconnections within our communities, among other Indigenous peoples, and within ourselves.

Indigenous feminist praxes reveal and produce radical thinking against settler colonialism that reflects genealogies of resistance, while providing glimpses of Indigenous futurities that are not reliant on the educational practices of the current university.^[1] Indigenous feminist theoretical frameworks assist in creating systems meant to heal and recover our communities, families, and practices of belonging. For example, Indigenous feminisms are concerned with the project of rematriation, which entails restoring non-heteropatriarchal relationships to land. Rematriation includes the returning of land while reestablishing relationships that moves beyond property or extraction. Rematriation is necessary to address the ruptured relationships between land and people (Gould & Rock, 2016; Gray, 2022). Bound within Indigenous feminisms, the “next university” must focus on the physical rematriation of land in order to restore relationalities to place and people. This will involve land as pedagogy and education that fosters relationalities to the local (Tuck, 2011; Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, 2013; Calderon, 2014; Simpson, 2017). Restoring relationships to land enables healing and interdependence and provides models of education based on kinship.

Focusing on the “next university,” I offer three Indigenous feminists’ praxes in my meditation: Indigenous cultural kīpuka, genealogy of mentorship, and trans-Indigenous education. This meditation focuses on education for life’s sake and challenges the maintenance of settler colonialism and neoliberalism. This reflection is not intended as instructional; instead, I hope it will enable future oriented discussions of education focused on healing, restoring relationships to land and people.

Indigenous Cultural Kīpuka

Indigenous feminist analysis asks us to seek alternatives to systems of education that destruct Native lifeways and kinship models. Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua discusses Indigenous education that seeks to renew Indigenous life. She likens this process to the metaphor of a cultural kīpuka (2013). She explains the Hawaiian concept of kīpuka as the places where plants and trees survive despite direct lava flow (2013, 2). Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua explains,

For kīpuka to regenerate life, they must grow. Trees and ferns find and expand cracks in the hard, dry lava, thus expanding and changing the conditions of possibility… [the] function of kīpuka is to transform conditions of death and destruction and to renew the potential for life (2013, 8).

Indigenous people are the trees that have survived the multiple flows of settler death. Whereas settler colonialism and settler education attempt to eliminate the Native, cultural kīpuka works to center and affirm Indigenous epistemologies, lifeways, and practices. Kukahiko et al. (2026) attribute cultural kīpuka to preserving Indigenous identity while also cultivating leadership. Like edgewalkers within the university mediating place, kīpukas are the physical and epistemic spaces in education that regenerate life.

Edgewalkers work between the current systems of education while meditating new ones. Leigh Patel describes the creation of spaces in education that challenge settler values as “spaces of fugitivity” (2021). Similarly, Patel describes the importance of these learning spaces and states, “Settler colonialism has been such a long-standing structure in the Westernized world that its ability to absorb, contain, and dilute demands for liberation and abolition should never be underestimated” (p. 147). Patel articulates fugitive acts as a form of learning that challenges the status quo through pedagogical techniques of struggle and liberation (Patel, 2021). Fugitive acts of learning challenge settler education that continues to disconnect and alienate Indigenous peoples from land, people, and their own bodies. Patel (2021) describes how we need to let go of what we know to “reach for unknown possible futures beyond those settler-driven ranking and separation” (p. 147). Like cultural kīpuka that focuses on the life that survives death, meditating on the creation of the “next university” needs to focus on regenerating lifeways. Centering Indigenous relationalities is essential for creating kinship models within education that connect people and reproduce responsibilities through place-based ecologies and kinship models through a web of relationalities.

Genealogies of Mentorship

Education as kinship also responds to the disconnects in human relationships identified by Indigenous feminisms, further encompassing relationalities between land and people. Education as kinship emphasizes connectivity and is supported by the praxis of genealogies of mentorship. Genealogies of mentorship create relationalities between people(s) and place(s). Instead of education as an individual endeavor, education as kinship creates communities of mutual support through understandings of responsibility and accountability. Education as kinship encourages collaboration and partnerships in which students and teachers view education for life’s sake. This education process values epistemologies and practices of people and communities that are currently suppressed by the existing system of education. In this dynamic, genealogies of mentorship center local land pedagogies that are shared by Indigenous caretakers. Place-based learning ecologies create mentoring genealogies that honor those who have come before while reminding us of those who will come after.

Students are encompassed in successive generations of mentoring genealogies. Learners take part in a network as both mentor and mentee, building education and research grounded in the needs of people and communities. The “next university” values reciprocal relationships and emphasizes interconnectivity. Instead of settler education that suppresses collaborative organizing and efforts, mentoring genealogies emphasize the connections that people have to one another. While people have different cultures and worldviews, the “next university” will emphasize the importance of learning from diverse epistemologies and lifeways. This, in turn, can aid in contextualizing education as a place-based endeavor that honors the Indigenous genealogical caretakers, working to meet the varied needs of different lands and communities, and for reciprocal exchange that combats the flattening discourses and practices of capitalism.

Trans-Indigenous Education

In my previous writing, I detail the importance of trans-Indigenous recognitions (Vaughn, 2019) and trans-Indigenous educational spaces in post-secondary institutions (Vaughn & Ambo, 2022). I propose that trans-Indigenous education provides intentional programming and space that centers education among diverse Indigenous communities. In other words, trans-Indigenous education instills relationalities between students and communities, situating land and genealogical responsibilities in the local context. This work in turn creates mentoring genealogies that refuse erasure by the settler colonial university and that disentangle Indigenous students from curricula that are focused on settlers—settler life, norms, and aims.

Trans-Indigenous education is malleable and involves more than one Indigenous group, creating spaces for Indigenous students to learn from one another. Trans-Indigenous education challenges the individualized nature of settler education and supports the collaborative efforts between Indigenous people. Sumida Huaman (2019) poignantly affirms that diverse Indigenous people continue to collaborate in efforts towards decolonization. These efforts happen inside and outside of educational settings. Trans-Indigenous education centers diverse Indigenous epistemologies and cultures, challenging the naturalized colonial order that establishes the university.^[2] Trans-Indigenous education creates and sustains educational spaces that create expansive kinship models that center land and place in the local context.

Indigenous feminisms challenge the individuality of the current university by honoring mentoring genealogies that offer kinship and support. While the current university reinforces settler colonialism, trans-Indigenous education is a decolonial praxis grounded in Indigenous futurities—because it connects the past to the present and future. The current university rarely provides Indigenous students with the curriculum, staff, or faculty support to learn about their cultures, histories, and methodologies, let alone other Indigenous groups and nations. Centering educational exchanges between Indigenous students at universities, highlights the diversity and brilliance of different Indigenous communities and their students. Within trans-Indigenous education, relationalities, interdependence, and reciprocity create kinship between students, staff, and faculty. In this multidimensional web of relationalities, students learn and remember their responsibilities to their home communities while also understanding their responsibilities to the land and people where they study and work.

Conclusion: A Brief Meditation on the Next Place-Based University

A lot of healing must be done as we move between this university—with its spaces of complicity and resistance—and the “next university.” At this moment, detailing the state of the current university is an important part of the methodology, highlighting the structures and practices that cannot simply be “reformed” in the “next university.” Indigenous feminist critique and praxes highlight that a reckoning with colonialism needs to occur while envisioning the “next university.” As an Indigenous feminist scholar and edgewalker in the current university, I summon multiple worlds in a practice of meditation towards the creation of a new one.

Meditation: In the next university, learning will take place on the land and from those with intimate knowledge of cosmologies, planting cycles, the moon, and animals, in hopes of living in balance with a given place and its resources. Students will learn the planting, gathering, and harvesting cycles as well as the different medicinal uses of plants. Students will study the stars and stewardship techniques that the First peoples in the area have engaged with since time immemorial. Depending on the context, other Indigenous leaders from similar and related places can exchange knowledge of techniques and systems that helped restore place after Western heteropatriarchal and capitalist ravaging. Others with expertise in health, science and technology, art, and education will be asked to exchange knowledge for people in communities to grow and learn how to maintain healthy connections between bodies, lands, and people. Depending on the needs of a specific place, people attending university are encouraged to explore their passions while keeping the local community's needs in mind. All will have access to this university. It will be place based and will incorporate genealogies of mentorship. The land will be the first teacher. Second will be people who have intimate relations with the land. The goals of this next university will be to live in balance with the local environment and reconnect and heal land and people. Healing the land will heal people. Knowledges of place will return, and exchanges will proliferate.

Author Information

References

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Notes

1. I pluralize Indigenous feminisms as a collection of diverse knowledge sources deriving from different communities, places, and histories. Indigenous feminisms represent a constant dialogue that is neither competitive or hierarchically or as having one definitive meaning. ↑

2. Please see my previous writing where I detail programs within post-secondary institutions that serve American Indian and Pacific Islander students—Vaughn et al., 2022. ↑