Abstract
In this review, we synthesize the literature on how an Indigenous, Decolonizing School Leadership (IDSL) framework, from Western and non-Western spaces, seeks to decolonize school leadership and build on Indigenous students’ ancestral assets and knowledges. Though leadership theory and practice has often been normalized within a White, male, Western, capitalist, Christian hierarchy, we interrogate these colonial expressions of leadership, how they interlock with contemporary approaches to leadership, and how they continue to contribute to the colonization of minoritized students and communities.
This review focuses on IDSL values and practices across educational spaces that have been informed by colonial models of schooling, as schools have and continue to serve as sites of colonial oppression and control (Carnoy, 1974; Deloria & Wildcat, 2001). Unfortunately, educational leadership scholarship has not done enough to disentangle school leadership practices from this colonizing legacy. In other words, educational leaders inherited colonial leadership structures and practices that were meant to wipe Indigenous cultures, norms, languages, spiritualities, and epistemologies clean of “indigeneity” (Hohepa, 2013; Minthorn & Chavez, 2015). Within the colonial project of schooling, school administrators and leadership structures have historically served as primary points of contact in eliminating all that is Indigenous about the people they encountered. Evidenced by the infamous words of the Superintendent and founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Richard Henry Pratt, the initial intent of boarding schools and Indian education was “Kill[ing] the Indian . . . And sav[ing] the man,” and “civilizing” the “savages” (Churchill, 2004). While the literature review produced evidence of how these detrimental leadership practices remain embedded in the schools that Indigenous children currently attend, equally present in the literature that contributes to IDSL are the values and approaches that have not only withstood colonial oppression, but speak to the existential dimension of Indigenous knowledge, norms, behaviors, and systems (Brayboy & Maughan, 2009) that have withstood the test of time and space (Deloria & Wildcat, 2001). We speak to the inherent tension this represents by dividing the literature review into two themes. The first theme focuses on documenting and critiquing how Western school leadership for Indigenous and minoritized people reflects the intent of imperialism—to colonize, dominate, and control. Given the persistent ways in which Indigenous and minoritized students have been adversely affected by educational experiences informed by colonial structures, this review is important because it highlights educational practices that have been relevant and useful to minoritized and Indigenous communities outside of existing structures designed to reproduce an imperialist, White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy (hooks, 2004) by assimilating Indigenous students and communities into Western, White ways of being.
The second theme attempts to capture some of the forms and underlying values of leadership praxis enacted by Indigenous and minoritized school leaders from around the world. This theme highlights five expressions, or strands, of IDSL: (1) the prioritization of self-knowledge and self-reflection, (2) the empowerment of community through self-determination, (3) the centering of community voices and values, (4) service based in altruism and spirituality, and (5) approaching collectivism through inclusive communication practices. Prior to discussing these strands and for the purpose of this review, we believe it is important to discuss our hesitancy to directly relate the components of these strands to existing leadership theories and practices and to clarify our use of key concepts, terms, and ideas. We begin by offering a concise discussion outlining our hesitancy to relegate and relate our findings to existing leadership frameworks.
Legitimizing IDSL and Why It Stands on Its Own
As anticipated at the onset of this study, a critical understanding of the way in which knowledge is constructed and reproduced in Western contexts is central to IDSL, and engaging in this work is concerned with resistance to the hegemony of Whiteness, Western beliefs, norms, and values as they materialize in educational research and practice (Harris, 1993). This work is informed by an ongoing struggle for legitimacy that is reflective of how colonial frameworks reproduce themselves when challenged, in the past and present. Given the focus of this literature review, we have sought to resist the tendency to reduce, oversimplify, and relate IDSL to contemporary leadership frameworks. Though one could easily draw parallels between aspects of IDSL and contemporary leadership frameworks, we contend that doing so serves to tacitly reproduce the notion that the voices that inform IDSL research and literature have nothing to add, that the work has been done, ultimately serving to silence them. Furthermore, it insinuates and reasserts the historical and colonial function and legitimacy of schools and school leaders, like Pratt, who pathologized Indigenous knowledges and identities. Thus, while we recognize that contemporary leadership theories and practices may share some overlap with certain aspects of IDSL, we resist (and encourage our readers to resist) situating and interpreting IDSL in ways that resemble White Western practices couched in contemporary top-down educational reform models. Instead, we argue that identifying IDSL as a framework is a critical pedagogical exercise rather than a normative one (Andreotti, Stein, Ahenakew, & Hunt, 2015; Kepa & Manu’atu, 2008), where our intent is not to categorize or dichotomize positions but to inform the distinguishing characteristics of Indigenous leaders who are involved in the “messy, dynamic, and contradictory process [of] decolonization” (Sium, Desai, & Ritskes, 2012, p. II). Though translating Indigenous epistemologies into Westernized “language, categories, and technologies” is a clear limitation of this review, and decolonization efforts (Andreotti, Ahenakew, & Cooper, 2011), we do so because we believe in its potential to generate dialogue about worldviews that “arise in efforts to address modernity’s violence and enact commitments to decolonization” (Andreotti et al., 2015, p. 23). As the fluidity of globalization permeates physical spaces such as borders and nations, developing an IDSL framework can assist in the construction of spaces where pan-Indigenous youth and communities can flourish and communicate across physical and ideological borders and boundaries.
We believe that there is significant benefit in situating our research across Indigenous communities worldwide as opposed to focusing on a particular region of the world. Given that there are more than 600 ethnic Bantu people across the African continent or 645 ethnicities in India, and 562 Indigenous nations along with numerous, minoritized groups in the United States, it is limiting to focus on one particular region of the world. However, with this great diversity comes some risk of generalization of Indigenous peoples and their leadership practices. Our intent is not to generalize, though for the purpose of this literature review, we believe it is useful to construct our argument in this way for two reasons. First, when we highlight similarities that may only exist in some Indigenous cultures, we believe that we can use an IDSL framework as a pedagogical tool to question, inform, and push against the persistence of colonial schooling, and make space for other expressions of IDSL that are not described here. Second, our review across myriad cultures and settings was our methodological approach to theoretical saturation that helped us affirm the IDSL themes identified herein, which are values and practices embodied by leaders serving Indigenous peoples across cultures and spaces. While we discuss the contestations within this review in later sections of this article, there can be some pedagogical benefit to using shorthand and generalized terms, especially as we think of how this article might be positioned to prepare and develop school leaders (who are likely colonizing), as Merriam (2007) points out, We use the (dichotomous) terms because it is a shorthand means of referring to the unfamiliar and because we can most readily understand these unfamiliar perspectives by contrasting them with what we do know, that is, the Western tradition. Further, as Reagan (2005, p. 11) notes, “what begins as a false dichotomy can emerge as an effective way of challenging and reforming racist and ethnocentric assumptions and biases.” (p. 3)
One final point is related to how the meaning of “leadership” is constructed. As this review will reveal, the places of leadership for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are divergent. From a non-Indigenous perspective, the most relevant leadership role would be the school leader. But from an Indigenous perspective, this leadership happens in the community as much as it does in the school. We elaborate in the forthcoming section.
Places and Spaces of IDSL
Bounding the scope of this review, we center the literature on the values and approaches expressed by Indigenous school leaders functioning in three realms, including the mainstream realm, the realm of an oppressed minoritized person, and one’s culturally Indigenous realm—what Boykin (1983) described as the Triple Quandary. The degree to which an Indigenous leader’s values and behaviors mirror their realms depends on the voracity and rigor of colonial influences their fluid spaces are experiencing (Boykin, 1983; White, 1991). In this review, the manifestations of IDSL emerged across three primary spaces that mirror the aforementioned identity realms. First, we review examples of IDSL practices in non-Western spaces that reflect a minimal history of colonial rule. Though rare, there are examples where learning experiences do not have an explicit, interconnected history with colonialism. Aboriginal learning circles (D. L. Hill, 1999), Qur’anic memorization and transmission chains (ijaazat or kuttab), or the “ritual hierarchies” of Arawakan Wakuenai of Venezuela (J. D. Hill, 1984) are all examples of this. Other examples include Hinduism’s first master teacher-leader Guru, or Confucianism’s promotion of a humanistic ideology associated with moral leadership in education (Wong, 1998). In these spaces, a leader’s indigeneity, ancestral knowledge, and communal ways of learning, teaching, and being precedes Western involvement and is vital to their ability to educate and “lead” (Ah Nee-Benham & Murakami-Ramalho, 2010; Minthorn & Chavez, 2015).
Second, we include IDSL practices of people in non-Western nations who have experienced colonization, yet have preserved some of their Indigenous worldviews across space and time—what scholars have referred to as trans-Indigenous values and practices (Allen, 2012). Indigenous and minoritized leaders in these spaces have been enslaved in or transported to, colonized spaces, carrying with them minoritized or Indigenous practices and ancestral knowledges that were often re-versioned and hybridized with the practices of other Indigenous communities (Gilroy, 1995; White, 1991). These leaders have thus come to practice IDSL, carving out their own organic and co-constructed methodology and organizational coherence in their educational contexts by resisting the dominant colonial paradigm. For example, the elders of the Massai tribe in Kenya and Tanzania are charged with the responsibility of preserving their identities while creating values of self-determination in their youth in the face of a legacy of colonial oppression (Phillips & Bhavnagri, 2002). Similarly, for the people of Trinidad and Tobago, the purpose of preserving this form of education is to cultivate self-knowledge, foster core personal development of the whole human being, and enhance leadership capabilities within the community (Brown & Conrad, 2007).
Finally, we identify IDSL in schools that are in Westernized Eurocentric nations (e.g., Canada, the United States, Mexico, or New Zealand) that have been shaped by colonialism, religion, assimilation, and deliberate efforts to erase or eliminate Indigenous languages, religions, cultures, and communities (Reyhner & Eder, 2006). This includes, for example, school leadership of the Aboriginal Māori and transnational Indigenous Pasifika groups in New Zealand and Australia, Indigenous Hawaiians in the Americas, Palestinians in the Occupied West Bank, and African Americans, Latinx, and American Indian and Alaskan Natives in the United States (Bird, Lee, & López, 2013; Blackmore, 2009; Faircloth & Tippeconnic, 2013; Grahn, Swenson, & O’Leary, 2001; Hohepa, 2013; Khalil & Rodriguez, 2017; Klug, 2012). These too are a contested way of leading schools but differs from the first two identified spaces in that it exists within Western Eurocentric colonized lands. For these school leaders, their Indigenous identity and relationship to the land, as well as their ancestral knowledge and community culture that preceded colonization are vital to their ability to lead (Ah Nee-Benham & Murakami-Ramalho, 2010). For example, according to Ah Nee-Benham and Murakami-Ramalho (2010), the concepts of ha, place and space, the sacredness of relations and mana, and the concept of individual generosity and collective action are the four guiding principles of Native Hawaiian educational leaders. These four principles are foundational in the study of Indigenous knowledges, as well as in understanding the concept of leadership grounded in the cultural practices of other Indigenous groups (Dei, 2011). This style of school leadership, along with approaches to school leadership enacted by school leaders of color in the United States (Shockley, 2011), is often connected to their ethnohumanist role (Gooden, 2005; Lomotey, 1989), where their educational ideals and practices empower them and their students by drawing from shared funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & González, 1992).
Within this third identified space of IDSL, we recognize the scholarship on settler colonialism. Settler colonialism is a process that violently occupies land and vanquishes the people, exploiting both for economic gain (Arvin, Tuck, & Morrill, 2013; Tuck & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2013; Wolfe, 2006). In other systems of colonialism, aspects of Indigenous language, spirituality, culture, and organized learning may remain; however, within a settler colonial context, everything is destroyed and the people are rebuilt in a subordinated image of the colonizer. Colonizers not only dislodge and occupy land—which is a source of spiritual strength for Indigenous peoples—but they also limit access to land resources, destroy, and rewrite the very ways Indigenous peoples understand the world and themselves. This destruction of Indigenous knowledge, language, spirituality, and epistemology—or epistemicide, as Grosfoguel (2004) and others refer to it—affects populations for millennia to come. Afrikanist Frantz Fanon (1963) argued that “for a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity” (p. 44). Denied such dignity, Fanon (1963) contended, “The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.” This oppression—despite resilience—leads to grave physical and psychological damages to the people that have long outlasted the formal colonial structures. Moreover, while the colonized are molded into desiring a higher (colonizer) status, Indigenous people are never truly given access to this status. And even if they were given colonizer status, it would only continue to contribute to the genocide or epistemicide of their own Indigenous selves.
Who Is Indigenous? Who Is Minoritized?
In this article, we use “Indigenous” to refer to non-White, non-Western peoples whose ways of being in the world are informed by Indigenous knowledge. Indigenous knowledge, in turn, “refers to traditional [Indigenous] norms and social values, as well as to mental constructs that guide, organize, and regulate [their] peoples way of living and making sense of their world” and stands in opposition to imposed colonial norms and practices that center imperialism (Dei, Hall, & Rosenberg, 2002, p. 6). Colonial powers vanquished entire Indigenous populations through oppressive means, from genocide and epistemicide to moving subaltern subjects into nonfamiliar spaces. These processes would allow Western European colonizers to build systems—financial, economic, agricultural, and of course educational—that would suit their needs and reinforce their hegemony. While such oppressive measures were visible, the normalization of Whiteness and Western-ness is often hidden. Decolonization confronts the act of invisibilization, which normalizes Eurocentric Western-ness and Whiteness, and simultaneously subsumes Indigenous knowledges, inhibiting it from development and standing on its own. We choose IDSL as opposed to decolonial leadership because Indigenous educational leadership is not based merely on resisting colonialism but rather on affirming what existed before and in spite of colonialism. By Indigenous, we emphasize the ancestral knowledge, norms, and beliefs that underlie leadership practices that non-White and non-Western peoples possess, even if it is not derived from the spaces they currently reside (e.g., see trans-Indigenous or international Indigenous).
Scholars initially used the term minoritization to describe the process of socialization and acculturation of “foreign” students in U.S. schools (Carey & Mariam, 1980). Over time, the term has been increasingly used in reference to the marginalization of individuals and groups of peoples who have been “othered” or excluded from dominant social structures and systems, particularly schooling (Benitez, 2010; Harper, 2015). In this article, we refer to minoritized students as those who have been structurally oppressed due to differences between these students and dominant social groups. Our review includes, for example, school leadership from spaces that serve African Americans and Latinx in the United States, Jamaicans in the United Kingdom, Turks in Germany, or Algerians in France.
All Indigenous communities and populations have been minoritized in Western spaces, and all minoritized communities possess aspects of indigeneity. Thus, we use the terms Indigenous and minoritized together and with close meaning to demarcate the relationship between communities forced, through the violence of colonialism and slave labor, to draw on their shared experience of oppression, and resistance to imperialist, White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy (hooks, 2004). The literature review reveals that Indigenous and minoritized peoples have developed unique identities and ways of being that are distinct from their colonizers, even if they no longer have physical, linguistic, spiritual, or ethnic connections with the original contexts (Boykin, 1983; Dei, 2011; Tatum, 1997). In this way, individuals attempting to “lead” both subvert the oppression they have experienced while affirming educational practices they have uniquely developed in their positions within colonizing nations and their respective school systems.
Contestations Within IDSL Research
This review is not exhaustive and is limited in several ways. To begin, we acknowledge that each Indigenous nation and language has multiple terms that describe leadership. Moreover, we have no way of knowing these terms without having access to oral and written knowledge in these Indigenous languages; the fact that we only access and report expressions of IDSL that appear in English academic journals is consistent with the very project of colonial domination and linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1996) that we critique. The lack of knowledge about these terms, therefore, limits our ability to fully define IDSL. We are further limited in our search because some sources are recorded in non-English databases or in nonacademic databases. While we learned of a number of Indigenous terms describing leadership within English scholarship, we do not presume to have learned them all.
We recognize the dominance of colonial regimes and Western imperialism, and that educational institutions are based on Western colonial models, despite their location; thus, we acknowledge that Whites and Europeans also have unique school leadership practices that are Indigenous to Western Europe; however, they are simply seen as normal. Therefore, we chose not to include these ways of leading because of the manner in which they have contributed to colonializing educational practices that have been disruptive and deleterious to Indigenous and minoritized peoples.
We present this work as a way to begin conversations about how Indigenous and minoritized students and communities can be better served, with the understanding that a study like this can never really be “completed.” To look for a totalizing, static leadership quality that will be present in all successful leaders is not necessarily how Indigenous practices are represented or discussed. In fact, perhaps the biggest challenge to this work is that Indigenous leadership practices are neither fronted nor highlighted in ways that scholars discuss non-Indigenous leadership. For example, traits of humbleness and humility that would deflect—if not completely obscure—attention away from a leader’s visibility are present in most IDSL models we encountered. This is vastly different from the mostly hierarchal, individualistic, self-promotive standards where leaders must apply for positions of power in the bureaucracies that permeate colonial schooling models. Indigenous leaders may intentionally avoid discussing their own leadership roles because of their desire to remain anonymous, as they do not “see” themselves as leaders and would instead emphasize the whole, as opposed to the individual.
Indigenous approaches to educational leadership often exist in contrast to Eurocentric leadership models as they are not institutionalized or promoted within formal structures; nor do they use organizations as a source of legitimacy or protection, or enact bureaucratic, top-down leadership (Ah Nee-Benham & Cooper, 1998; Knaus & Brown, 2016; Lovett, Dempster, & Flückiger, 2014; Santamaria, 2014). This binary depiction of hierarchical versus shared leadership does not fully capture Indigenous models. Because of different decolonization efforts, unpacking the paradoxes and tensions between what is more Indigenous and less colonizing ultimately rests on the extent to which violence has been inflicted toward imperialisms’ goals.
Finally, the notion of “school” leaders is problematic because learning is a lifelong journey—unconfined by walls or time or space—and therefore “school” leaders in this literature review were also often educational and community leaders. Shujaa (1994) distinguishes between “schooling” and “education,” explaining that where schooling entails a Western hierarchal standardization that supports White Western spaces, education promotes communal development. These concerns will continuously pose problems for works that analyze indigeneity and IDSL.
Research of Indigenous People?
We suggest that it is not possible for non-Indigenous researchers to ever fully understand the needs of Indigenous peoples, nations, and communities. Smith (2005) contends that Indigenous epistemologies possess the power to generate new knowledges, experiences, and outcomes, all of which inspire new sets of research questions, along with approaches to educational leadership. While it may seem intuitive to situate and relate IDSL within contemporary leadership frameworks, doing so further serves to delegitimize its ability to stand on its own. Indeed, even the way that Western researchers currently approach leadership and culture is often informed by colonial and imperial frameworks and is deeply entrenched in business models that prioritize organizational efficiency and profitability (Jacobs, 2009). For example, Hofstede’s GLOBE categories of power distance, performance orientation, gender egalitarianism, future orientation, assertiveness, and even humane orientation are all deeply rooted in Western epistemologies (Hofstede, 1980; Hofstede & Bond, 1988). These lenses are represented in the fact that many of the studies included in GLOBE studies forwarded the research agendas of Western nations. As such, we focus specifically on articulating overlapping and shared values, norms, and practices of a pan-IDSL framework, resisting the temptation to reduce the nuances of IDSL to existing educational leadership frameworks.
Methodology
The purpose of this literature review was to examine the research literature on non-Western, decolonizing, and Indigenous leadership. Online database and website searches were performed by combining terms related to this focus. A combination of Boolean terms such as AND and OR were used with the keyword list, and combinations of these terms were used in searching major education research databases (including Academic Search Premier, EBSCO MegaFILE, Education Source, ERIC, and JSTOR) as well as Google Scholar. We summarized each source, noted which studies were empirical, as well as their common themes. The initial searches of “school leadership” and “culture” yielded scholarly writings that were so broad and disconnected that we found the need to continue our search using far more specific cultural terms. We searched for leadership in Indigenous regions (e.g., “leadership” AND “Africa,” “Asia,” OR “South America”; or “leadership styles” AND “non-Western”). We also used leadership and nation-country-specific terms such as “leadership + school + Kenya,” “Navajo + leadership + education,” or “culturally + responsive + leadership + Peru,” “Korea + culture + leadership,” and multiple variation of these terms with substitutions of other countries. Our review was not limited to leadership styles by nation-states; rather, we were also interested in leadership styles as they relate to particular cultures or belief systems (e.g., Confucianism or the Guru tradition). In our initial search, we found 12 journal articles, two books, and one report related to non-Western forms of leadership.
By employing this search methodology, we aimed at finding and including all of the articles on postcolonial leadership, Indigenous leadership, and culturally responsive school leadership. We utilized these keywords and a host of other keywords in our searches. An overview of the literature that emerged from our review is presented in Table 1. Our initial review led us to other search terms that were widely represented in the literature; we thus added “decolonizing school leadership” as well as “school leadership” AND “Indigenous” AND “indigeneity” to our review. This led us to literature relating to, for example, studies of the Indigenous education models of the Māori people in New Zealand, which had not surfaced in our initial review due to our focus on non-Western nations. Our expanded search allowed us to more fully understand leadership approaches not only of non-Western nations and cultures but also of Indigenous communities within Western contexts as well. An additional 20 sources were identified and reviewed, for a total of 35 sources. Also, though the literature on headmasters or principals was most often discussed, distributed leadership, teacher leadership, and shared community leadership were well represented in this review. While we recognize that there is some overlap between IDSL and popular leadership frameworks, we remind the reader that our focus is to demonstrate how IDSL, holistically speaking, stands on its own.
Review of Scholarly Sources in Literature Review.
Finally, we sought non-Western expressions of school leadership behaviors and discourses that counter colonial influences and narratives. This phase of the search required an additional level of scrutiny as the hegemonic reach of postcolonial models of education in African, Asian, and other non-Western schools, as well as the hybridized or Indigenous school leadership practices in the Western world, are firmly rooted in all literature. Thus we were seeking to identify leadership behaviors that were informed by non-Western, non-White, noncolonial, and nonpatriarchal leadership practices (i.e., womanist/feminist), despite or because of the location of these leadership practices.
Findings
The findings of this literature review can be categorized into two broad themes. First, we found that the school leadership practices around Indigenous communities are imperial, colonizing, and vanquishing, and have destroyed or had irrevocable, negative impacts on the culture, epistemologies, knowledges, and self-determination of Indigenous peoples. Second, we identify five decolonizing Indigenous leadership practices that have been reported in Indigenous schools and communities throughout the world. Once again, we remind the reader that while there are elements of prominent leadership theories present throughout what we describe here as IDSL, it is important to situate this within the context of time and space (see Dei, 2011). As we will demonstrate, IDSL and its development depend on our ability to recognize the way in which the hegemony and reproduction of colonized structures remain embedded in the everyday process of schooling. It also requires that we recognize, in our own profession, how colonial structures inform and continue to inform the policy choices and reform efforts that forward neocolonial agendas.
Theme 1 Findings: How Is School Leadership Colonizing?
Educational institutions that were built and continue to operate on colonial structures pose problems for Indigenous children and communities worldwide. That is, there are tremendous similarities between “Indian schools” in the United States that targeted Indigenous communities, and Indian schools in India that were meant to colonize Indians into serving British imperialistic needs. In both cases, Indigenous epistemologies and knowledges were regarded as primitive, rural, mystical, or backward, and were “cleansed” out of students in these schools (Churchill, 2004). Adjei (2010) writes that “as soon as I went into a colonial classroom, I was told that this knowledge—the knowledge of my mother, grandmother, and the entire ancestry—is primitive, myth, and superstition” (p. 82). Adjei argues that colonization attempts to not only make inferior but also to pathologize Indigenous knowledge. For example, in “Indian” schools, community expressions of shared, spiritual, narrative-based, or land-connected leadership were not included in the structures or policies of colonial schooling. Schooling was used to reshape and control local Indigenous populations. Yet in many cases, Indigenous peoples came to resist the colonizing school contexts, and reconnect with their own unique ways of knowing and learning. This reconnection was more successful in some Indigenous contexts than in others, and despite decolonization efforts in both Western and non-Western colonial education systems, colonial ways of education are still ingrained in schooling practices and are often reproduced (Marsh & Knaus, 2015; Shizha, 2013).
Scholarship on school leadership in both Western and many non-Western contexts finds that modern schooling can be primarily traced back to oppressive colonial models. As Table 2 demonstrates, many schools continue to institute a number of very specific colonial practices. That is in itself problematic, given the intent of colonialism, but what is more troubling is that minoritized and Indigenous students who attend schools still encounter the remnants of oppressive structures and practices of schooling that push them and their families out of schools (Kaomea, 2003; Kumashiro, 2000; Zywicki, 2016). These colonizing aspects of school leadership do not mean that schools are totalizing environments where it is impossible for things like joy, learning, friendship, care, and agency to occur. Indeed, they all do. Instead, this section claims that since schools can be colonial (read: hegemonic and oppressive toward Indigenous students), this oppression must be continuously identified, defamiliarized (Kaomea, 2003), and resisted in school. Because the field of educational leadership remains predominantly heteronormative, nonspiritual, middle-class, White, and masculine, it is that much easier for schools to be situated in ways that remain colonial to children and communities (Fitzgerald, 2003). Moreover, the structural aspects of schooling resulting from this narrow hegemonic epistemology—and assumptions about this aligning with all others—has been damaging. Fitzgerald (2003) explains as follows:
Colonizing Aspects of School Leadership.
Just who might be leaders and how circumstances of social class, location, ethnicity and cultural worldview might underpin their work and identity is not fully discussed and disclosed. Essentially while these discourses of “masculinity, rationality and leadership” (Blackmore, 1999, p. 4) and the search for a normative theory of leadership (Duke, 1998) remain gendered, they also remain raced. That is, considerations of race and ethnicity are not uncovered to examine ways in which these trajectories impact on the exercise of educational leadership. (pp. 9-10)
In our interpretation of the literature, we consider how settler colonial leadership has been expressed and continues to play out in schools. Then, we highlight specific ways that schools reinforce Western ways of learning and being, and how various student epistemologies are either normalized or othered in invisible ways.
Colonialism in Leadership
This review suggests that the most current school leadership practices are direct vestiges of colonial administrative practices, which intended to completely remove Indigenous epistemologies, languages, religions, and practices, and replace them with those of Western Europeans (Ahlquist & Hickling-Hudson, 2004; Bray & Koo, 2004; Khalifa, Dunbar, & Douglas, 2013). To be concise, one of the primary goals of colonial schooling—and its contemporary manifestations—is to eliminate or marginalize Indigenous knowledge and ways of being in the world (Deloria, 2004; Lomawaima, 2000; Lomawaima & McCarty, 2006). Regarding leadership and administration, characteristics of colonizing schools are evident in several practices: the institution of a single, authoritative top-down leader; prioritization of school-based perspectives and policies over community-based perspectives and practices; the understanding of knowledge and how it is conveyed but not experienced; the inferiorizing and subsequent dislodging of the educative process from elders and oral community traditions; and, above all, the use of schools and the curriculum as a means to monitor and control Indigenous and minoritized populations (Ahlquist & Hickling-Hudson, 2004; Bray & Koo, 2004; Calderon, 2014; Obiakor, 2004; Tikly, 2004). In this way, education leaders, through schools and schooling, have been powerful tools used to disrupt the very existence of Indigenous ways of being (Jacobs, 2009; Wolfe, 2006). Therefore, educational leaders must now be vigilant in identifying and resisting schooling practices that continue to dislodge indigeneity and oppress Indigenous and minoritized students.
Education as Colonial
We recognize that there are some experiences and outcomes for minoritized and Indigenous people and from (post)colonial schooling that are often presented as positive. Increases in test scores, graduation rates, postsecondary attendance and employment rates are often cited as indicators for how schools have helped minoritized and Indigenous people. We agree that Westernized measures may signal progress for those who embrace Western education. However, standardization is not always the goal for Indigenous communities, and they have not been linked to community empowerment and progress. In fact, colonial schools have served to stifle the self-determination and existence of Indigenous peoples. As described by Tikly (2004), colonial education contributed directly to the development of global trade and commerce in the colonial era by providing Indigenous labourers with the basic skills and dispositions required by the colonial economic and administrative systems. However, because colonial education only typically offered a very limited education and was never universal, it contributed to the subsequent marginalisation of postcolonial African economies through failing to develop an adequate skills base on which these societies could develop. (p. 113)
Ultimately, Indigenous scholars are very clear about the importance of these indicators, and refocus the data on one question: Have these indicators positively changed the condition of and contributed to the sovereignty and self-determination of minoritized Indigenous communities? In this way, normalized Western educational measures are relevant only to the extent that Indigenous communities and lands achieve self-determination and empowerment.
Western notions of educational advancement are not reflective of the ways in which Indigenous people measure educational progress. Broadly speaking, Indigenous peoples are most interested in how educational experiences will improve communities, humanity, or natural resources (Ah Nee-Benham & Napier, 2002; Brayboy, 2005; Henderson, Carjuzaa, & Ruff, 2015; Pheko & Linchwe, 2008). Rodney’s (1972) groundbreaking work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, illustrates the arresting and devastating impact of the tools of colonization. He demonstrates that colonial and postcolonial apparatuses are so exploitative that they countered any positive economic development that might have otherwise occurred in Africa for the sole benefit of European societies, leaving little to nothing for African peoples to fulfill their own self-determination and development (Obiakor, 2004; Rodney, 1972).
With this understanding, it is essential to consider the work of Hallinger and Leithwood (1998), who suggest that Western frameworks have ignored alternative epistemologies in the study and practice of educational leadership. Furthermore, they argue that because culture shapes a society’s shared values, it also determines the educational goals that will dominate the educational system. Educational leaders have been responsible for carrying, implementing, and monitoring Eurocentric (and mostly non-Indigenous) perspectives and practices in school settings that have been a primary tool in their domination.
Invisibilizing, Normalizing, and Othering
Another salient concept that emerged from this literature review is directly related to why reviews like this are even needed—the ways that Western epistemologies and structures became “normal” and Indigenous ways became “othered.” Colonial schools played a pivotal role in normalizing Western epistemologies and inferiorizing Indigeneity. This review suggests that the processes whereby Western European education became standard and normal—and thus unquestioned—has not been an open and transparent process (Grosfoguel, 2008; Wolfe, 1999). Rather, it happened through oppressive practices that have since been sanitized, invisibilized, and excluded from official historical accounts and popularized understandings. We are left with a very White, Western way of being, without really understanding how we arrived here.
Educational leaders played a crucial role in crafting schools that discounted Indigenous ways of learning. Indigenous epistemologies were pushed out of approaches to learning and leadership. For example, Mapuche (south-central Chile) knowledge was seen as “cultural” and “rural,” while Mapuche identity was seen as provincial and primitive (Ortiz, 2009). These reductive labels are how othering and coloniality begin (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). What is often ignored is that “schools themselves are embedded in larger systems that privilege certain students, certain knowledge, certain ways of being—at the expense of other students, other knowledge, other ways of being in the world” (Tompkins, 2002, p. 408). Similarly, Phillips and Bhavnagri (2002) suggest that language in the postcolonial educational structures in Maasai lands are harmful to children in that “content and skills taught are irrelevant for pastoral people who travel on foot and have no running water” (p. 143). Maasai spirituality, language, and culture are framed as primitive and have not been included in non-Indigenous education systems.
To summarize, it is difficult to understand how schooling was ever beneficial to the Indigenous peoples that it claimed to uplift. Schools were primary sites for colonial expansion and control, and school leaders—Western and Indigenous—were primary actors and beneficiaries in this process. This happened vis-à-vis settler colonialism and the subsequent enslavement of Indigenous people and the occupation of Indigenous lands. Yet the oppression did not stop at physical vanquishing; it was intended to also completely erase cultural, linguistic, spiritual, and educational memories that Indigenous people held. However, it is this ancestral Indigenous knowledge, particularly as it pertains to leadership, which fashions the second part of this review. Below we discuss five expressions, or strands, of IDSL.
Theme 2 Findings: Emergent Strands of IDSL
This section outlines the five broad strands that saliently emerged from this literature review: (1) the prioritization of self-knowledge and self-reflection, (2) the empowerment of community through self-determination, (3) the centering of community voices and values, (4) service based in altruism and spirituality, and (5) approaching collectivism through inclusive communication practices. A summary of sources for each strand is summarized following the conclusion of this article in Table 3.
Charting Characteristics of Indigenous, Decolonizing School Leadership Practices.
Strand 1: What Is Known? Prioritizing Self-Knowledge and Self-Reflection
Given the practice of colonialists to eliminate Indigenous knowledge (i.e., epistemicide) from Indigenous communities, the role of knowledge—and how people continue to see themselves in that knowledge—is of particular importance to scholars (Doxtater, 2005; Grosfoguel, 2008). In fact, the literature acknowledges the ways in which knowledge is both constructed and reproduced in the Westernized, White-supremacist, Christian, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal world system, and how this system serves to negate Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge (Grosfoguel, 2008; hooks, 2000). Thus, the first strand of Indigenous leadership embodies what is known, how it has come to be known, and the way in which it is reflected on, through self-knowledge and self-reflection. As Barnhardt and Kawagley (2005) have posited, knowledge, in relation to Indigenous leadership, is rooted in experiential knowledge and ancestral ways of knowing, though it is not all-encompassing, complete, or definitive.
Smith (1999) contends that decolonizing research methodologies offer “a more critical understanding of the underlying assumptions, motivations and values which inform research practices” (p. 20). Practices informed by Indigenous experiential knowledge translate into meaningful Indigenous leadership praxis that can foster the possibility of drawing on the knowledge of Indigenous communities that identify and focus on the educational goals and needs of these communities (Hohepa, 2013). Through this co-construction of knowledge, “pedagogical decolonization or cultural diversity and good pedagogy are conceptualized as those relationships produced in innovative and worthwhile learning contexts that are not fixed but are created and e-created as students, teachers, and communities engage in schooling” (Kepa & Manu’atu, 2008, p. 1811). However, curricula that fail to include the voice and experiential knowledge of Indigenous peoples can lead to “cultural repression, misrepresentations, misinterpretations, and devaluation” (Shizha, 2013, p. 1). This often happens within global economic and educational reform movements that neglect the cultural practices and needs of Indigenous youth and communities and thus contribute to normative assumptions of learning and leading (Baker & Campbell, 2013; Hallinger, 2004; Marsh & Knaus, 2015), while diminishing opportunities for the generation of co-constructed knowledge.
Ultimately, these scholars argue that the knowledge of self, community, and the world are all uniquely understood by people based on their own histories; this is true for White people too. In light of disruptive colonial history, Indigenous people have sought to recenter their own knowledge. This emphasis on Indigenous knowledge is closely linked to the motivation and will of Indigenous people to set educational goals and agendas for their own children, including but not limited to, using Indigenous languages, centering Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge, determining what learning is, and what aspects of learning are valuable. Barnhardt and Kawagley (2005) discuss how Indigenous (specifically, Alaska Native) knowledge systems can be incorporated into non-Indigenous curricula and teaching practices. The authors explain, To bring significance to learning in Indigenous settings, the explanations of natural phenomena are best understood by students if they are cast first in Indigenous terms to which they can relate. For example, when choosing an eddy along the river for placing a fishing net, it can be explained initially in the Indigenous way of understanding by pointing out the currents, movement of debris and sediment in the water, the likely path of the fish, the condition of the river bank, upstream conditions affecting water levels, the impact of passing boats, and so on. Once students understand the significance of the knowledge being presented, it can then be explained in Western terms. (p. 12)
Bang et al. (2014) discuss how they countered settler colonial land narratives by designing a project to support youth in better understanding Indigenous connections to urban Chicago. The scholars sought to “center Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies by (re)storying [their] relationships to Chicago as altered, impacted, yet still, always, Indigenous lands” (p. 3). The project involved sharing with youth how Chicago was originally a wetland that had been filled in for development, yet continued to be home to medicinal plants; rethinking the language used to describe certain plants; and reaffirming that the (now urban) lands were originally home to Indigenous ancestors.
Strand 2: Why Resist? Enacting Self-Determination for Community Empowerment
Self-determination can bridge the gap between trends in Indigenous leadership literature by examining leadership from a commonly shared motivational perspective while acknowledging the complex, interactive character of leadership within colonial environments (Ah Nee-Benham & Napier, 2002; Bird et al., 2013). As an analytical strand, self-determination helps explain the role of Indigenous leaders who uplift their schools in militarized or colonized zones by understanding the relevance of their communal historical experiences and shared geographical spaces (Maldonado-Torres, 2007). As noted in the literature, Indigenous school leaders often advance the struggle for autonomy as the relatable aspiration across community and society, which provides coherence and an identifiable common objective. As the backbone for “sovereignty as a people” (Shanley, 1984, as cited in Ross, 2009), Indigenous leaders enact changes that mediate in-school behaviors and minimize external pressures. Self-determination is especially prevalent among Indigenous school leaders who administer their schools within the confines of a political paradigm that stifles the right of people to self-determination (Bird et al., 2013; Brayboy, 2005; Brayboy & Castagno, 2009). As an example, Palestinian school leaders faced with military occupation often respond to restrictions by holding classes at home or public spaces such as local gardens, and by sending home assignments and packets (Holt, 2001). Their desire for self-determination gives Indigenous school leaders a framework to act and engage their community in ways that are authentic, emblematic of a shared historical experience, and collective desire to be independent (Stone, Deci, & Ryan, 2009). Indeed, self-determination provides Indigenous school and community leaders with a sense of destiny and shared values that propel them to act in spite of their social and political environment.
Indigenous school leaders who are aware of their communities’ colonial, patriarchal, and racist history are more capable of operating within the confines of their restrictive environments, and can provide their students and school community with a sense of purpose to challenge the status quo and usher change (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005). For example, Manuelito (2005) found that self-determination in the Ramah Navajo community schools was “understood as consisting of four processes: community-based planning, maintaining an awareness of self, being proactive, and persevering” (p. 80). Māori schools in New Zealand and Australia are centered on the notion that the right to self-determination leads to pedagogies that empowered students and had students and teachers co-construct their narrative (Bishop, 2003; Harrison & Papa, 2005). Historical oppression as the common, relatable experience provides Indigenous leaders with the motivation to be engaged meaningfully with the school community. Relatedness builds Indigenous school leaders’ sense of worth and provides the school community a shared sense of volition and an experience of choice (Gagné & Deci, 2005; Stone et al., 2009).
Self-determination has also been closely linked to emancipatory leadership practices for women. Indigenous women leaders described their work as belonging “more to the people” than to themselves and reflected a strong commitment to the community (Fitzgerald, 2006), particularly in Aboriginal Indigenous schools in postcolonial Western spaces (Ah Nee-Benham & Cooper, 1998; Alston, 2005; Naidoo & Perumal, 2014). For example, self-determination can be witnessed in spaces that are governed particularly by women of color in postcolonial countries with Eurocentric patriarchies. Researchers explain that “stereotypical cultural expectations and prejudicial beliefs have restricted [Indigenous] women’s opportunities to lead” (Naidoo & Perumal, 2014, p. 810), especially as these women face the challenge of walking between “two worlds” both as women and as Indigenous in a “white man’s world” (Fitzgerald, 2006).
One way Indigenous woman leaders seek self-determination is to be inclusive of community; Kamara (2009) reports that the principals empowered the community by involving them in school decision making and by using a “non-bureaucratic communication strategy” that involved consultations with elders, parents, and the greater community. In supporting sustainable opportunities for Indigenous woman to self-determine and lead, stakeholders must be willing “to learn from rather than about those who primarily think and operate from a non-Western epistemological system. This creates opportunities for a re-conceptualization of assessment standards that recognize issues of sovereignty, identity, culture, and place” (Carjuzaa & Ruff, 2010, p. 75). Ultimately, self-determination is connected to the overall well-being of the community, and without centering this, education is not useful and is often destructive to Indigenous communities.
Strand 3: Centering Whom? Committing to Community Voices and Values
Community leadership is a central component of IDSL because, for many Indigenous communities, education and community cannot be separated. Recent scholarship (Ahlquist & Hickling-Hudson, 2004; Cooper, 2009; Douglas, 2014; Nakata, 2002) has highlighted the central role of the school leader, who serves as a community broker that leverages community resources for the academic success of children (Crowson & Boyd, 2001; Epstein, 2001; Henderson & Mapp, 2002). For example, school leaders may create spaces that are welcoming to community and Indigenous knowledges. Ahlquist and Hickling-Hudson (2004) describe one school in which “community elders are regular visitors to the school. They drop into classes informally to tell the children stories. Two dance educators visit regularly and teach the children in every grade traditional Aboriginal and Islander music and dance” (p. 46).
Responsive leaders are those who are aware of their communities’ colonial history and current opportunities and challenges, but continue to advance student teaching and learning by honoring students’ ancestral teachings and values (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005; Gay, 2002; Khalifa, Gooden, & Davis, 2016; Khalifa, 2018). Indigenous school leaders also leverage their personal language, knowledge, ethnic backgrounds, economic status, and history (Barnhardt & Kawagley, 2005; Elsaid & Elsaid, 2012; Gay, 2002; Kalyanpur, 2003; Lovett et al., 2014), and consequently enhance the cultural capital of families and students and improve student behavior and school community culture (Briscoe, Smith, & McClain, 2003; Hohepa, 2013).
Western school leadership theory and practice have largely ignored the relevance of mutuality and entrenched overlap between the school leader and school community (Avolio, Walumbwa, & Weber, 2009; Hiller, DeChurch, Murase, & Doty, 2011). The motivation of the Indigenous school leader, when driven by shared communal common goals, is an asset in bridging differences to achieve organizational success. Indigenous school leaders draw on their community’s shared cultural experience (historical exclusion) to help build community consensus (Hicks, 2002). While school leaders often share similar functions and responsibilities, a leaders’ personal experiences, culture, and values influence their strategic interpretation and response to situations. Indigenous community leaders are powerful social agents who commit to respect their Indigenous ideals by leading in spite of external biases that aim to diminish their shared, communal cultural values (Alfred, 1999; Cooper, 2009).
School community leaders will either further marginalize the communities they serve, or will help liberate them; they can either play an affirming role by employing authentic and meaningful partnerships or reinforce traditional partnerships that are unresponsive to the challenges their students face (Oakes & Rogers, 2006). Responsive community school leaders play a constructive role in influencing student success and have the acumen to build systematic community support to advance student teaching and learning (Gutiérrez, 2006; Perez Carreon et al., 2005). Meanwhile, nonresponsive school leaders are more likely to employ superficial parent and community partnerships that could bring resources that are cursory in nature and will not provide long-term systematic support. Accordingly, the measure of an embraced Indigenous school leader depends on their ability to lead and unify their community around common goals of resisting colonial forces that diminish Indigenous cultural values and restrict their right to dignity and autonomy (Alfred, 1999). While operating in colonial occupied spaces carries risks for Indigenous school leaders (Gagné & Deci, 2005), they often possess the legitimacy and authenticity within the school community and society to affect youth. Researchers have explored the negative impact of unrelenting oppression (Bell & Nkomo, 1998; Dominick & Ebrahimi, 2010); yet oppression plays an essential role in unifying community support to end oppression (Du Bois, 1995; Gagné &Deci, 2005; Stone et al., 2009). Likewise, such external pressures help unify the school community around a common goal that improves academic success (Epstein, 2001). Kamara (2009) found that the “appointments of principals in remote community schools must, at all times, be accompanied by adequate consultation and participation of community leaders and/or their relatives and community representatives” (p. v). In sum, the roles of school and community leaders are closely linked, if not indistinguishable, and to ignore this Indigenous form of educational leadership is to promote a colonizing form of schooling that is disruptive to Indigenous communities and students.
Strand 4: When Are We Whole? Serving through Altruism and Spirituality
Spirituality shapes the behavior of Indigenous leadership practices. The literature revealed that to remove spirituality from schooling is to remove an important source of Indigenous students’ ways of knowing. Writing of the Māori in New Zealand schools, Fraser (2004) explains, “To ignore the spiritual is to expect Māori to divide and fragment their lives and their values. When this happens, schooling limits human capacity, driving the soul underground” (p. 93). Spirituality and theology are two distinct terms (Zinnbauer et al., 1997), as spirituality relates to an individual’s values that enforce positive ethical behavior toward others (Scott, 1997; Zinnbauer et al., 1997; Zinnbauer, Pargament, & Scott, 1999), theology and religion are associated with systemic moral beliefs that dictate a set of responsibilities toward the followers of the faith and all living beings. Both are associated with a sense of interconnectedness to a higher being and a set of ethical standards that guide members’ day-to-day practices (Elsaid & Elsaid, 2012), and both situate its members’ well-being as central in allowing leaders to be accepted, respected, and in many cases empowered.
The literature suggested that the inclusion of spirituality in all facets of life—including education—is an integral part of Indigenous life. According to Bhagwan and Chan (2004), Indigenous people’s epistemology is derived from their immediate environment, from stories handed down through the generations, from spiritual experiences and interactions with others and from transpersonal experiences through dreams, intuition and inspirations, and through the wisdom of elder traditional healers. (p. 2)
Marcos (2009) elaborates to explain that Indigenous spirituality, as defined by women at the First Indigenous Women’s Summit of the Americas, is rooted in a sense of nature and interconnectedness; it is “born from this vision and concept according to which all being that exist in Mother Nature are interrelated. . . . The intersubjective nature of men and women is interconnected with earth, sky, plants, and planets” (p. 44). Scholars argue that the sustainability of Indigenous woman leadership rests on their servant leadership (Alston, 2005; Kamara, 2009), as it reflects the leadership traits associated with spiritual, moral, and maternal values (Ah Nee-Benham & Cooper, 1998; Ngunjiri, 2010). Similarly, in the Islamic traditions, Muslim servant leaders utilize Qur’anic verses to envision social justice “for all humans in the totality of their existence across the public-private continuum” (Barlas, 2014, p. 184).
Indigenous school leadership embraces students’ spirituality and embodies a sense of altruism and servant-based leadership. Winston and Ryan (2008) discuss how a servant-leader is altruistic, builds a sense of trust with his or her followers, and focuses on their well-being, developing a sense of humility in working with others. Evidence of servant leadership exists in Africa (e.g., Ubuntu, Harambee) and East Asia (e.g., Taoist, Confucianism; Winston & Ryan, 2008). Ubuntu’s Bantu-language-speaking population in southern Africa places value on community, harmony, and hospitality. Similarly, the Swahili harambee personifies and reflects the strong ancient value of mutual assistance, collaboration, social responsibility, and community self-reliance. In East Asia, Chinese and Hindu moral–spiritual philosophies that promoted love, altruism, compassion, generosity, and kindness emerged in the millennium BC (Said, 1978; Wong, 1998). Here, IDSL speaks to compassion, generosity, the will to give, and the will to serve (Marty & Appleby, 1996; Winston & Ryan, 2008). A good servant-leader leads by example, demonstrated by “‘being’ rather than ‘doing’” (Sendjaya, 2010, p. 39).
Yet servant leadership is demonstrated in unique ways in different Indigenous communities throughout the world. For example, for many Indigenous communities, serving the community also includes accessibility and direct face-to-face communication to gain insight into a moral dilemma (Hallinger & Leithwood, 1996; Kamara, 2009). This approach to resolving conflict, popularized in the term restorative justice, has more recently been used by minoritized leaders in U.S. urban schools as an alternate measure to “discipline.” Lomotey (1989) speaks to how African American principals’ commitment to the education of African American children, compassion for and understanding of their students and of the communities in which they worked, and confidence in the ability of all African American children to learn are tied to their servant-based leadership styles. In sum, spiritual and altruistic leadership are indispensable traits that Indigenous and minoritized peoples expect of their school leaders (Henderson, 2007; Henderson et al., 2015); if lacking, school leaders will likely reproduce approaches to leadership and schooling linked to the colonial impulses that have always disconnected Indigenous people from their ways of being.
Strand 5: How to Connect? Prioritizing Collectivism in Communication
The ways that leaders communicate is directly linked to their cultural backgrounds and community relationships. While leadership in colonizing contexts is characterized by more individualistic leadership practices with dominating information flowing unidirectionally from federal, state, and district offices to schools, the literature revealed that IDSL practices are characterized by collectivist communication practices. Hofner Saphiere, Kappler Mikk, and Ibrahim DeVries (2005) explain that communication styles represent “a very important link between surface-level culture (what we can observe) and the values and beliefs that make up deep-level culture which may be hidden or obscured” (p. 10). Similarly, school and district leaders deemed communication a quality interconnected with commitment to minoritized learning spaces. In other words, the way in which we communicate reflects what we value and that which we prioritize.
For example, Baker and Campbell (2013) explain that leaders in Ethiopia “operate from beliefs and values that tend towards groupthink and group before self” (p. 5). Such cultural contexts emphasize the collective paradigm of family (both extended and immediate), relationships and interpersonal harmony. Understanding these cultural values lends insight into why school leaders in precolonial contexts emphasize consensus and group discussions among teachers and community members (Pheko & Linchwe, 2008). Warren and Quine (2013) similarly found that in Australia, “collective decision-making in Indigenous communities has always been an essential aspect for demonstrating respect of all opinions” (p. 19). Unfortunately, this collectivist approach can come into conflict with contemporary leadership practices that are reflective of Western leadership models; such models are often individualistic in nature and tend to value self-expression over group decision making (Pheko & Linchwe, 2008).
Garcia and Shirley (2013) extend an understanding of Indigenous communication styles to how leaders can engage with students. The authors argue that Indigenous leaders and students must engage in mutual dialogue and that schools should be considered a “sacred space of engagement” where curriculum and pedagogy are influenced by Indigenous knowledge systems (p. 77). Specifically, educational leaders should be purposeful in their communication with students such that they acknowledge Indigenous value systems within colonial schooling contexts.
One way that educational leaders can prioritize Indigenous value systems is by creating opportunities for students to utilize storytelling and narratives in their schooling experiences. Blakesley (2010) explains that “from the perspective of Indigenous cultures in North America . . . Teaching stories and oral histories form an important teaching and learning method with both moral and factual purposes” (p. 7). Also, allowing students to incorporate and draw on their identity, life experiences and existing knowledge through storytelling and time with elders is a crucial component in operationalizing educational growth for Indigenous youth and communities. Such an approach allows students to preserve and advance their learning (Blakesley, 2010) and serves to develop the next generation of leaders. In this regard, storytelling and counter-storytelling are critical in both research and practice and are central to decolonial praxis (Marsh & Croom, 2016; Smith, 1999; Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). In essence, Indigenous epistemologies and cultures are closely linked to language and ways of communicating. School leaders who serve Indigenous youth must empower students and families by embracing collective, mutual, and community-based communication.
Discussion and Implications
This literature review revealed several key findings. One of the most palpable findings was that school leadership, in virtually all spaces, was developed in colonial form, and many practices once known as colonial now exist merely as normal schooling. Moreover, this literature review found that, like other oppressive structures in schools, colonizing forms of schooling and educational leadership are systemic in nature; that is, leaders do not need to consciously embrace colonizing educational leadership practices (Brayboy, 2005) because they are so systemically embedded in schools that leaders will automatically reproduce them unless intentionally contested. Unfortunately, even colonized peoples, knowingly or unknowingly, enact colonial structures in their approach to educational leadership, likely as an outgrowth of maintaining legitimacy in relation to existing relations of power and the struggle for ideological legitimacy. This internalized oppression happens through the promotion of values, stature, and leadership behaviors of Western Eurocentric schooling.
However, this review also unearthed Indigenous epistemologies and practices that have implications for school leadership. We suggest that all school leaders—those serving Indigenous and minoritized students, and those who are not—could benefit from the traits and qualities of leadership inspired by Indigenous ways of being. The literature suggested that IDSL also promotes agency and the affirmation of Indigenous ways of knowing.
Affirming Indigenous Ways of Knowing (Epistemology)
School leaders who embrace and affirm Indigenous ways of knowing resist the persistence and ubiquitousness of colonial oppression. Shared cultural values offer Indigenous leaders a strong connection to students and school community, and enable them to persevere in the face of bias and discrimination (Green, 2015; Klug & Whitfield, 2003). We believe that non-Indigenous leaders could better serve their communities by embracing these practices. Indigenous school leaders operate in ways that recognize the racist culture that surrounds them but are still capable of using Indigenous practices that motivate the school community to engage in anti-oppressive and inclusive work. Accordingly, these leaders are inclined to be transformative and play an inspirational role in their schools and communities (Walker, 2009). The shared historical narrative is extremely relevant for school leaders to contextualize and communicate relatable experiences, and to be able to transform the social and political confines they inhabit (Buckmiller, 2015). It is particularly crucial for non-Indigenous school leaders working in Indigenous spaces to “defamiliarize” (Kaomea, 2003) and unlearn dominant schooling practices that privilege Western knowledge that is not compatible in the educational spaces they serve (Blakesley, 2010; Buckmiller, 2015; Kitchen, Cherubini, Trudeau, & Hodson, 2010). For example, in New Zealand and Australia, the Rakaumanga community instituted a Māori language immersion program for students to maintain the native language of the land, provide children with the knowledge and confidence in their heritage, and increase student achievement (Harrison & Papa, 2005). Even White New Zealanders are centering Māori epistemologies and language for White students (Sleeter, 2015). The program and others replicated throughout New Zealand and Australia further provided opportunities to teach students Waikato-Tainui knowledge, histories, and the ways of life through their curriculum immersion (Bishop, 2003; Harrison & Papa, 2005; Tomlins-Jahnke, 2013; McNaughton & Lai, 2009). The Rakaumanga community believed that combining Indigenous teachings within the dominant British education framework would create a sense of self-confidence and individual self-determination for Māori children in knowing their own traditional cultural background, particularly as it relates to Pasifika, Samoan, and Tongan language nests (Tollefson & Tsui, 2004). The inclusion of Indigenous culture fostered a sense of empowerment and collectivist identity among Indigenous students, teachers, and leaders (Warren & Quine, 2013).
Policy and Research of Colonialism and Indigenous Peoples
Postcolonial policies and structures
As a matter of educational policy, colonizing schools have always been disruptive and deleterious to Indigenous community epistemologies and ways of learning. Quijada Cerecer (2013) found that native bodies are colonized through schooling in two ways: (1) schools neglected students’ educational needs and views and (2) schools marginalized Native students through specific policies. Indeed, as Brayboy (2005) argues, “U.S. policies toward Indigenous peoples are rooted in imperialism, white supremacy, and a desire for material gain” (p. 429). This is the nature of colonial schooling. Colonizing educational policies and structures, by default, serve the needs of the colonizer and further oppress the aspirations of colonized communities. It is plausible, then, that current school leadership structures and behaviors serve to contribute to the opportunity gap of minoritized students (Altman, 2009).
Implications for theory and research in educational leadership
Culturally Responsive School Leadership (CRSL) and TribalCrit emerged from this literature review as two theoretical and practical tools that recognize and center the agency of Indigenous leaders in contributing to the IDSL framework. CRSL is both disruptive and affirmative, as well as sustaining and revitalizing (McCarty & Lee, 2014; Paris & Alim, 2014). It is disruptive in that it resists oppressive (colonial, societal, educational, etc.) structures that also permeate schools. CRSL serves as a liberatory and affirmative systemic leadership response to the historically based ways that schools have contributed to or been complicit in the marginalization of Indigenous and minoritized students and communities (Khalfia, 2018). But CRSL is also affirmative in that it embraces and institutionalizes Indigenous and community-based approaches and epistemologies in schools. CRSL has become increasingly important to research on culturally responsive education, reform, and social justice education, with recent research focusing on the agency of teachers and leaders in sustaining and revitalizing cultural tools of resistance to colonial schooling. CRSL essentially has four clarifying strands it may be enacted with—critical self-awareness, teacher preparation, school environments, and community advocacy. This research is distinct in that it primarily focuses on the context of schools in the United States, but draws from knowledge and practices from Indigenous spaces across the globe (Khalifa et al., 2016).
An additional theoretical contribution of this review is the emphasis on decolonial theories used by researchers and scholars to critique colonizing school structures and policies. Most notably, scholars used TribalCrit (Brayboy, 2005) to critique imperial behaviors and colonial systems that are oppressive toward the education and self-determination of Indigenous people. Like CRSL, TribalCrit both critiques colonial oppression and affirms the self-determination, ontologies, and epistemologies of Indigenous people. In similar ways that Critical Race Theory exposes and critiques racism, or that feminist theories critique the oppression of women, the components in TribalCrit point to the fact that “colonization is endemic to society” (Brayboy, 2005, p. 429). Given this, TribalCrit “endeavors to expose the inconsistencies in structural systems and institutions—like colleges and universities—and make the situation better for Indigenous students” (Brayboy, 2005, p. 441).
In addition to CRSL and TribalCrit, the literature emphasized the need to further explore “the intersection of identity with leadership [as it] is a mostly unexplored area of scholarship and literature” (Minthorn & Chávez, 2015, p. 3). This work requires what Solórzano and Delgado-Bernal (2001) refer to as transformational resistance, which begins with internal reflection for the purpose of transforming oppressive colonial systems and structures. Leaders must consciously acknowledge schooling as a colonizing structure in both past and present tense. This level of consciousness requires recognizing that within such structures, leaders have and continue to be required to lead in ways that are inherently imperial and colonizing. Expanding one’s conscientiousness necessitates critical reflection not only on the way in which these colonizing structures are deeply embedded in contemporary schooling practices and educational policy (Delpit, 1995), but how they can be contested. While such colonizing structures are viewed as being implemented in the distant past, Jacobs (2009) contends that the “genocidal policies of forced hegemony” aimed at Indigenous populations persist, embedded in the heavily corporatized, militarized, and standardized educational reform policies in the United States and abroad, and through authoritarian pedagogies, which requires authoritarian leadership (p. 171). Reflecting on the five strands of IDSL outlined in this review, it is imperative that we co-create spaces within leadership theories and discourse that center Indigenous voices while also remaining vigilant in acknowledging how contemporary Western notions of leadership continue to be informed by the same colonizing power structures that work to silence them. As such, in forwarding IDSL, it becomes critical for educational leadership scholars and researchers, as well as students, to explore the work of Indigenous and decolonial scholars who have been engaged in this work, though they are largely ignored in the field. It is impossible to engage in Indigenous, decolonial praxis without engaging the work of foundational anticolonial scholars such as Césaire (1972), Fanon (1963), Smith (1999), Said (1978), or Spivak (1981). Furthermore, it is vital for educational leadership scholars to engage the recent work of contemporary scholars, including the groundbreaking work of Grande (2004), Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernández (2013), Smith (1999), Grosfoguel (2008), and Calderon (2014), who have made substantial contributions to understanding the struggle of Indigenous youth and communities. In centering Indigenous voices and placing them in conversation with one another, we can develop a more powerful understanding of how these structures function and reproduce themselves, while also discovering new ways to dismantle them.
Finally, Indigenous and minoritized womanist and feminist epistemologies (Fitzgerald, 2003; Suzack, Huhndorf, Perreault, & Barman, 2011) are invaluable to understanding the interlocking (Collins, 1986) and intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989) nature of oppression in colonial models of schooling and education, particularly in relation to the interplay between imperialist, White supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal structures that work collectively and independently to divide, silence, and stifle Indigenous and minoritized women in their struggle against the patriarchy of colonialism (hooks, 2004; Khalil & DeCuir, 2018). While not explicitly utilized in articles in this literature review, the five key challenges Arvin et al. (2013) emphasize as critical to the work of Indigenous feminists include problematizing settler colonialism and its intersections, refusing erasure while doing more to be inclusive, crafting alliances that directly address differences, recognizing Indigenous ways of knowing, and questioning academic participation in Indigenous dispossession.
Implications of school leadership practice
The findings in this study pose pressing questions for current school leadership practices. There are three basic questions that school leaders must ask themselves as they critically self-reflect about how they may be active or complicit in colonizing school practices. First, we urge all educational leaders to ask if they are enacting a colonizing form of school leadership that leads to the oppression or marginalization of Indigenous students and students of color in their schools. Second, we encourage educational leaders to reflect on their leadership identity and consider the ways in which their behaviors are informed by Eurocentric worldviews, values, and goals. Third, we ask that they consider leading with expressions of IDSL with Indigenous and minoritized communities. Other questions for consideration are the following: Do leadership practices support the Indigenous community’s visions for self-determination and spirituality, or do their practices resist Indigenous ways of being? Are community elders involved as co-leaders of schools? And finally, we encourage all leaders, emergent, novice, or experienced, to consider their leadership identity development to be as ongoing as the structures of schooling, and that their effects on Indigenous communities are ever evolving.
Conclusion
In this review, we described two major findings from the literature on Indigenous and decolonial school leadership. First, current school leadership practices—both in Indigenous and non-Indigenous spaces—are closely aligned with the practice (and purpose) of schooling in colonization. We shared multiple ways that schooling was intended to colonize Indigenous students by making them more European and vanquishing their indigeneity. Colonizers claimed that to de-barbarize, Christianize, and civilize the Indigenous people would be to humanize them. That notwithstanding, a more likely goal for colonizers was to use schools to develop Indigenous workers and managers who would ensure that the human and natural resources of the colonized lands would flow exclusively toward the colonizers and European lands. Though their intentions may not be the same, principals in schools for Indigenous and minoritized students still administer in ways that colonize and marginalize students. They must understand that they are a part of this legacy and confront that legacy in their practice.
But what was more promising in the literature was our second major finding: that there are five common strands that school leaders of Indigenous and minoritized youth possess. These strands include the practices of (1) prioritizing self-knowledge and self-reflection; (2) enacting self-determination for community empowerment; (3) centering community voices and values; (4) serving through altruism and spirituality; and (5) approaching collectivism through inclusive communication practices with parents and students. It is important to point out, however, that Indigenous cultures are very diverse and that these five strands do not represent all Indigenous cultures. There are other leadership characteristics that may not be represented in these five strands. We see this only as a starting point to both expand into more IDSL qualities and as a place to push up against colonizing school leadership practices.
Here we posit that for school leaders to recognize that they inherited some form of colonizing schools is only a first step. We believe that for leaders to embrace and enact these IDSL practices is part of resisting colonizing schooling. In other words, we believe that any school leader—regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, language, ability, citizenship, or gender—can lead in ways that are decolonizing and promote students’ indigeneity. We suggest that IDSL must be considered in existing leadership frameworks, and that it is necessary for the affirmation of Indigenous and minoritized students, as well as the humanization of non-Indigenous students. We view this synthesis as the impetus for more discussion around IDSL, and we hope that others will build on IDSL in ways that make it even more relevant and accessible to school leaders.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biographies
).