Reframing the past to legitimate the future: Building collective agency for social change through a process of decolonizing memory

Abstract

Subaltern social groups do not see their conceptualizations of leadership represented by the images of leadership and leaders portrayed in the narratives of the “official” history of their countries. This article draws from the experience of an American Indian summer leadership camp in the United States (US) where memory is used by the organization as a resource for legitimizing their power and leadership perspectives to effect social change. Through a leadership work based on rhetoric and framing to decolonize the dominant history of the US, a process of collective sense and meaning-making is unfolded. This work of leadership builds collective agency that contributes to legitimize both American Indian memories and leadership perspectives. Through legitimacy, subordinated social groups develop the capacity to justify that they hold the power to govern themselves and not just to consent and submit to external actors. Eventually, legitimacy of memory and leadership perspectives can be leveraged as power since the group believes in their potential. Through a critical approach drawing from history and sociology, the study contributes insights to both the social change and the Indigenous leadership literature.

Keywords

Social change memory sense-making Indigenous leadership social movements framing rhetoric power

Introduction

In the summer of 2020, global demonstrations lead by Indigenous people to remove monuments were retaking public spaces. These protests’ targets were the statues of individuals connected with a history of colonialism, slavery, and racism. Statues are ideological powerhouses that compress whole systems of authority and social orders and are essential for dominant groups in society to create an official history and memory of a country. Through the imagery portrayed with these statues and other historical monuments, dominant elites decided who belonged and who got excluded from the processes of nation-building. Additionally, statues, monuments, and other dominant narratives transmitted ideas legitimizing who were the heroes and leaders of the nation and what were “good” and “effective” leadership practices.

History profoundly influences the conceptualizations of leadership and leaders. For example, through historical cases, different social groups identify leadership good and bad practices (Grint, 2014). Moreover, memory and the accumulation of all the past experiences have consequences in our present and future leadership possibilities (Carroll et al., 2018). However, such narratives and discourses aimed to explain historical facts and the memory of social groups are not neutral. In this lack of neutrality “lies the first lesson of leadership: history is written, generally speaking, by the winners” (Grint, 2014: 3).

The idea of leadership in general and the work of leadership focused on the recovery of memory in particular are a social construction since they structure social groups, but, at the same time, these social groups are the agents who structure these processes. Different realities compete for being imposed as valid and legitimate and “are constructed through social processes in which meanings are negotiated, consensus formed, and contestation is possible” (Fairhurst and Grant, 2010: 174). Since memory is a social construction, it can influence the present and the future and can be viewed as a resource for either keeping the status quo or enhancing change. Therefore, from a perspective of critical social constructionism, memory needs to be processed through a “work of memory” to avoid its misuse and prevent the imposition of the memory of certain social groups with more power to the detriment of others (Bonnet et al., 2004). In this article, the work of memory is understood as the intentional use of memory as a resource for social change. A use of memory that implies leadership work based on rhetoric and designing frames where people make sense and meaning of their daily experiences and routines. These frames are implemented through discourses and narratives that will be central to either legitimize or delegitimize the memory of a social group and, with it, their leadership conceptualizations and images.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu coined the concept of field, representing a system of social positions structured internally in terms of power relationships (Bourdieu, 1984). More specifically, a field is a social arena of struggle over the appropriation of certain types of capital. By capital, it is understood any resource (economic, cultural, symbolic, and so on) that is significant for a social group such as argued here in investigating the control of history and memory (Bourdieu, 1989). The limits of the field where the struggle of memory is carried out are established by where the effects of the field end. In other words, the past is not over since it still influences the present and future. Combining the idea of work of memory with the concept of field and struggle of memory allows us to better understand how the emergence of leadership is influenced by the social and historical processes of power struggles initiated in the past that still influence present and future possibilities of leadership.

This study aimed to understand how an American Indian organization uses memory as a resource for social change. More specifically, what is the leadership work that the organization implements to deconstruct the “official” memory of the United States? Furthermore, how is memory, and with it the resulting images of leadership and leaders, legitimized to build power and effect social change? Today, although there are more tools and resources for subaltern social groups to recover, make visible their memory, and write their history, dominant groups still accumulate more power to legitimize their discourses and narratives about an official history and memory and impose it as the truth. With the imposition of a dominant memory also comes the imposition of conceptualizations and images of what leadership is and who can be considered good and effective leaders. These discourses about leadership and leaders are functional to reproduce the current hegemonic global system that values individualism and control and legitimizes the concentration of power in a few hands. Since views of leadership are influenced by history and dominant sectors of society have more power to impose their memory as hegemonic, it is critical to know more about the memory and work of memory of subaltern social groups who have been hidden from the mainstream leadership literature. Also, understanding how these social groups implement a work of leadership that uses memory as a resource to change their present and project themselves into the future can shed light on processes of social change leadership that have not been well theorized.

This article is the result of ethnographic work in a Native American organization that offers leadership summer camps for urban Natives. Although this research was conducted in an American Indian organization, this article does not pretend to universalize about what is Native American leadership. More specifically, this article wants to emphasize how subaltern social groups and their organizations use history and memory as a resource to create social change. In the United States (US), there are more than 500 federally recognized tribes (Warner and Grint, 2006), and each tribe has different conceptualizations and practices of leadership. More specifically, the organization described in this article is composed by people who belong to 17 different tribes. Additionally, the members of the organization are urban Natives with an urban Pan-Indianist approach that tries to find a common foundation of what means to be American Indian today as a way of adjusting and resisting. Therefore, Native leadership conceptualizations and practices described in this article, although can find similarities with other tribes around the country, just represent the Indigenous leadership of this organization and its urban Native members.

This study contributes in general to the analysis of context in leadership and in particular to the influence of the spaces of history and memory to constrain or broaden leadership possibilities. Also, talking about context when it comes to Indigenous communities implies to talk about colonialism, the resulting asymmetries of power that are still present today, and struggles of decolonization. Moreover, this article contributes to the social change leadership scholarship focusing on memory as a resource for subaltern social groups to build power for social change. Finally, this study draws from conceptualizations of organizational remembering and discursive leadership and combines it with framing approaches from the literature of social movements offering a more collective lens for analysis.

In what follows, I begin with a brief introduction of the literature about Indigenous leadership and leadership research regarding history and memory as resources for change within organizations. Then, I explore the theory of framing reviewing the literature from leadership studies (Fairhurst, 2005; Fairhurst and Sarr, 1996) combined with research on framing from the social movements’ scholarship (Kuypers, 2009a, 2009b; Snow and Benford, 1986). Finally, the conceptualization of the work of leadership through the struggle of memory as a resource for social change will be illustrated by analyzing an empirical example. The article closes with a discussion of the potential of the concept to contribute to our understanding of leadership and social change.

Indigenous and American Indian leadership

Although research regarding Indigenous leadership is growing, the body of scholarship is still small (Bolden and Kirk, 2009; Calliou, 2008; Evans and Sinclair, 2016; Gladstone and Pepion, 2017; Jimenez-Luque, 2020; Katene, 2010; Kenny and Fraser, 2012; Nkomo, 2011; Rosile et al., 2018; Spiller et al., 2011, 2020; Stewart et al., 2017; Sveiby, 2011; Warner and Grint, 2006). Also, there is a lack of acknowledging context and power relations regarding Indigenous leadership studies (Evans and Sinclair, 2016; Jimenez-Luque, 2020; Rosile et al., 2018; Spiller et al., 2020; Warner and Grint, 2006; Zhang et al., 2012).

When it comes to memory, Spiller et al. (2020) discuss how critical it is for Indigenous people in New Zealand to activate collective memory through the method of Wananga. According to the authors, leadership processes of the present are also influenced by past generations, and Māori collective leadership is an integrated ecosystem sustained from one generation of leadership to the next.

In terms of American Indian leadership and how the dominant history and memory constrained and limited possibilities of leadership and social change, Vizenor’s (1999) talks about the concept of “Indian” in contrast to “indian.” As Vizenor argues, the idea of the ideal Native American person is defined by rhetoric composed by the dominant society through popular media such as, for example, classic Western films and stories. Additionally, dominant narratives create “official” views of American Indians that fix them in a certain cultural pose, which can eventually be internalized and reproduced by Native people. Thus, modern Native Americans need to navigate the tension between finding what are their identity, values, and beliefs while deconstructing those “true” and homogeneous Native ideals prescribed by the colonizer (Deloria, 1972; Vinezor, 1999). Going even deeper, Deloria (1972) states that no American Indian today truly knows what Native American philosophy is, and the last Natives who truly understood what it meant to be American Indian were those who lived before the reservation era, which makes the work of memory critical for cultural resistance.

Regarding conceptualizations of Native American leadership, Gladstone and Pepion (2017) argue that colonizers used their history to impose leadership values upon the colonized by delving deep into conflicts between Western and Native leadership values. For example, the authors describe how colonizers forced their perceptions of societies with only a single overall leader. Additionally, Gladstone and Pepion (2017) explain how the US negotiated treaties with men they identified as leaders and not by leaders identified by the tribes. For example, while the US permanently appointed positional leaders, many tribes did it based on tasks at hand for the tribes. In essence, the colonizers imposed conceptualizations and practices of leadership upon the people colonized.

Since in the US there are more than 500 recognized tribes spread from coast-to-coast and each tribe has its own unique identity, ontology, and epistemology, we cannot talk about a true Native identity, culture, and memory. Overgeneralizing a “true” story or “memory” of American Indians would be to homogenize a huge diversity of forms of being, living, and conceptualizing leadership. At the same time, we would oversimplify the complexity and fluidity of social processes of ethnogenesis. Therefore, this article focuses on the need for a subaltern social group to deconstruct the official history and memory imposed by the dominant culture in the US. To do so, this research analyzes the process of reconstruction of a “new” memory different from the dominant one, understanding memory as a resource for social change. In the following sections, we will briefly see how organizations use memory for change and how social movements use framing for social change.

Organizational approaches to the work of memory and change

Research is scarce regarding the work of memory for social change leadership. However, there are several studies about memory and organizations that view memory as a resource for organizational change. Overall, these studies can be classified based on three approaches to the work of leadership regarding history and memory within organizations: sense-making, rhetoric, and framing.

In management theory, phenomenology is translated to Weick’s (1995) notion of sense-making, and it is understood as the process of interpreting collective experiences. This process of sense-making is focused on human interpretation of events and “is less about discovery than invention” (Weick, 1995: 13). Change occurs in human cognition “when some events are selected out of the ongoing flow of organizational experience and are identified and labeled as ‘change’” (Suddaby and Foster, 2017: 27). These interpretive processes can occur collectively (Gephart, 1984), within organizations (Daft and Weick, 1984), and with larger social groups (Friedland and Alford, 1991). Also, collective interpretations of past events have a significant influence on future behavior (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). Regarding leadership and rhetoric, this approach is based on the “strategic use of the past as a persuasive strategy to manage key stakeholders of the firm” (Suddaby et al., 2010: 157). Participants involved in processes of organizational change create narratives of the past to enhance strategic change in organizations (Suddaby and Foster, 2017). Finally, when it comes to framing, individuals and social groups imagine and construct ideal images of the past and future (Feldman and Feldman, 2006). This necessity to interpret the past implies that individuals make choices in terms of what and how they remember, forget, and learn. Thus, remembering is connected with the self since interpreting experiences distinguishes oneself from others and contributes to creating and maintaining a stable identity over time (Feldman and Feldman, 2006). Persons are guided by frameworks of values and beliefs we call traditions, and “it is in the co-constitution of traditions and everyday practice that spaces for the play of personal identity, power, and morality are opened up (Feldman and Feldman, 2006: 881).

Since the work of memory implies the separation of “what is ‘good to think (with)’ (Levi-Strauss, 1971) from what is easily and ‘best’ left forgotten” (Feldman and Feldman, 2006: 871), power is critical to decide whose memory to enact and whose memory to silence. More specifically, the belief in the legitimacy of that power will be critical. As Weber (1947) argues, the most solid foundation for domination and oppression is not power in itself but the belief in the legitimacy of power. For example, at a social and national level, historians and sociologists have found that history and traditions are invented and change in response to a group’s needs and interests (Collingwood, 2014; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983). Also, traditions help forge “imagined communities,” as in nationalist claims (Anderson, 2016; Gellner, 2009). Thus, although memory can be used to control and maintain the status quo, the work and struggle of memory can also be used as a resource to unfold change at either organizational, social, and national levels. A key element for social change leadership will be to build legitimacy or believe in the particular power or order of subordinated social groups. As Weber (1947) argued, legitimacy understood as the capacity to justify that some individuals and social groups hold the power to govern and that the rest need to consent and submit. Deconstructing the internalization of the legitimacy of mainstream perspectives where leadership is for a few chosen ones while legitimizing more collective nonmainstream approaches seems critical for balancing asymmetries of power between social groups and their different leadership perspectives. Combining the literature of memory and organizational change with theories of framing within organizations and social movements can offer more depth to understand the use of the work and struggle of memory as a resource for social change leadership.

Framing for organizational and social change

In the organizational sciences, there is varied research on reframing for organizational change (Bartunek, 1984; Weick, 1979), problem framing and its impact on decision-making processes (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Tversky and Kahneman, 1981), or political actors using framing to promote a particular definition, interpretation, and treatment of a problem (Entman, 1993). However, although the ways of approaching framing from different disciplines vary, “one commonality is the casting of framing as both a cognitive device and a communicative activity defined by selection, emphasis, interpretation, and exclusion” (Fairhurst, 2005: 167). According to Fairhurst and Sarr (1996), framing can be defined as

The ability to shape the meaning of a subject, to judge its character and significance. To hold the frame of a subject is to choose one particular meaning (or set of meanings) over another. When we share our frames with others (the process of framing), we manage meaning because we assert that our interpretations should be taken as real over other possible interpretations (p. 3).

The literature on social movements has explained the process of social movements through the concept of framing since those movements not only are carriers of beliefs and ideologies but also create meaning for their members and their competitors (Snow and Benford, 1986). The term “frame” is borrowed from Goffman (1974) to denote a “schemata of interpretation” that enable individuals to situate, perceive, identify, and label phenomena that emerge during their lives. Thus, frames give meaning and make sense of those phenomena and “function to organize experience and guide action, whether individual or collective” (Snow and Benford, 1986: 464).

In terms of frame analysis as a rhetorical perspective, Kuypers (2009a) states that frames are powerful rhetorical entities that “operate by making some information more salient than other information” (p. 181). According to Kuypers (2009b)

Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner. Frames operate in four key ways: they define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies. Frames are often found within a narrative account of an issue or event and are generally the central organizing idea (p. 7).

Thus, the rhetorical criticism of the social movement literature states that framing is a rhetorical process, and, as such, it is best examined from a rhetorical point of view, which aligns with the discourse turn in leadership studies and from where this research draws.

Methodology

This study examined how an American Indian organization that offers leadership summer camps for young urban Natives uses the work and struggle of memory as a resource for building power and legitimacy for social change. An ethnographic approach was selected since ethnography emphasizes participant observation, and it is a way of understanding deeply organizational discourses and leadership work going beyond individual leaders and their personalities (Sutherland, 2018). This ethnographic study conducted for 4 months, which included observations, gathering artifacts, and conducting interviews, allowed for a deeper appreciation of the interrelationship between context, power relations, and leadership.

Positionality

One of the main problems facing non-Indigenous researchers who wish to study Indigenous groups is the problem of being an outsider wanting to study a population with whom they do not share an identity (Chilisa, 2019; Smith, 2013). For this study, it was central to have a gatekeeper, a well-recognized Native leader in the region I worked with during several years in the past, and establish trust with the members of the organization for several months participating with them in many formal and informal events. Moreover, every step of the process (research design, data collection and analysis, and findings) was in consultation with the elders and positional leaders of the organization, and I had their approval to disseminate the results of this study. Although for more than 10 years I have worked with Indigenous communities and people of African descent in different countries of Latin America, as Warner and Grint (2006) ask, is it possible to know the other without being the other? Probably not, this is why, as a non-Indigenous scholar, I needed to acknowledge my biases and assumptions regarding Indigenous people first and then design and conduct the study based on the idea of constant collaboration with the participants who, at the same time, become scholars.

The organization

As a result of colonization and cultural assimilation, Indigenous people, in general, have been struggling to keep and recover their cultural traditions and leadership conceptualizations. The organization selected for this study represents a unique case because its members organize leadership summer camps for young urban Natives who want to become leaders. At the camps, the organization implements leadership work that emphasizes recovering their history and memory, which partially has been lost as a consequence of suffering colonialism, the destruction of their knowledge or epistemicide, and historical displacement.

The organization examined in this article is mostly lead by women and has provided leadership summer camps for urban Natives since 1987. They were created to teach young American Indians living in the city about American Indian culture and develop future civic leaders for the community. These leadership camps were the foundation of a bigger organization that was created 2 years later which, in addition to organizing the summer camps, focuses on offering health services to the urban Native population and resulted in a bigger research project where I was involved and that I mention in some of the findings. The leadership summer camps have continued to the present day increasing the number of young Natives participating and graduating each year.

The organization has a vision of community that pursues spiritual, cultural, and traditional American Indian values. Organized every summer from May to August, the camps are designed for young urban Native grades 7–12. Their slogan is: we will learn “to be a Warrior, Nurturer, Scholar, and Community Activist.”

Participants

The participants in this study were the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Human Resources Director, and members of the organization who work in different positions (positional leaders and followers) in each of the three services of the leadership summer camps: children and youth, academic, and logistics services. The selection of participants was based on a sample of eight positional leaders and 21 positional followers working at the different departments of the organization to have a broader vision of their relationships and the collective process of meaning-making within the organization. The selection was also based on the members’ level of involvement or understanding of the work and struggle of memory in the camps, as the central phenomenon of the study, specifically, and on the identification of informants by other informants (Garson, 2012).

Methods of data collection and data analysis

The study included (1) observations for 4 months to understand how the organization implements leadership work through the struggle of memory for social change at both, the organization, and other settings where the members of the organization carried out leadership activities for the leadership camps (local school, local swimming pool, local parks, etc.); (2) gathered artifacts related to the process of the organization to recover memory (including document analysis of the organization elaborated at internal and external levels) for 4 months; and (3) conducted eight interviews (individually and with groups) of approximately 90 min each interview with participants of the organization (positional leaders and followers). The individual interviews (positional leaders) and the group interviews (positional followers) were taped and conducted with staff working at each of the three services in charge of the leadership summer camps: children and youth, academic, and logistic services.

Notes and memos from the observations and the transcripts from the interviews were coded through NVivo software and by hand, and the analysis involved codes, categories, and finally themes (Creswell, 2013; Lincoln and Guba, 1985; Saldaña, 2012). Additionally, since all the previous methodologies mentioned are Western-centered, the research design was a collaborative process, and for each of the different stages of the coding process, I met with the organization’s elders and positional and informal leaders to discuss codes, categories, and themes as Smith (2013) and Chilisa (2019) suggest.

In what follows, I apply the concepts of memory and organizational change and framing for social change reviewed in the previous pages to an American Indian organization that offers leadership summer camps for urban Natives. This relatively rare population in mainstream leadership research makes visible leadership work not recognized as such before and enlarges the empirical instances and alternative worldviews from which to theorize collective understandings of leadership for social change.

Findings

Through a leadership work of rhetoric and framing based on history and memory, a collective process of sense and meaning-making is unfolded. This process implies increasing the collective agency of the participants and gaining legitimacy of their power as a social group that can be used to create social change. The members of the organization belonging to each of the different services provided during the camps engaged in leadership work of (1) decolonizing (disrupting and reframing) the official memory to develop collective agency and (2) using the past to make sense of the present and giving meaning to legitimate the future. These findings show the result of leadership practices and collective processes of sense and meaning-making that occurred within the summer camp and between the participants at the camps and external actors within a context resulting from colonialism in the US. Although presented linearly, the two main findings represent a process of leadership that emerged more interactively and holistically.

Finding one: Decolonizing (disrupting and reframing) the official memory to develop collective agency1

As with most official histories, the official history of the US is the history written by the winners. Historically, dominant social groups have had the power of imposing their memory about events and facts from the past as the truth. In general, Indigenous communities worldwide and American Indians in the US have been portrayed as primitive and against the progress. More recently, they have been stereotyped as substance abusers living in decadent reservations and not able to govern themselves. The power of dominant groups not just legitimizes their memory and leadership perspectives but at the same time delegitimizes the history and leadership approaches of subordinated social groups who are not represented by the official narratives. One of the employees of the organization denounced the history books used at schools and colleges in the US: “When they do treat on topics of Native American history or more contemporary issues that we face, they have been written from a white perspective and they sort of depict us as being ancient versus here today” (PF1).

In terms of the work of memory and relations of power, remembering represents the separation of what is good to recover from the past and what is best to be forgotten, and power implies whose memory is going to be enacted and whose memory is going to be silenced. According to one of the leaders speaking about the marginalization and exclusion of Native people throughout history and the processes of memory, she said:

We’re the forgotten. We have all our celebrations, our cultural events, and things like that. We choose not to let anybody forget us, but I see us as being forgotten, or maybe not even forgotten, but just put aside. I just see this as somebody that we were put aside on our little reservations, and hopefully never seen or heard of again (PL2).

Native people suffer from the imposition of an official memory written by the winners that excludes them and delegitimizes their history and leadership perspectives. As one of the leaders of the summer camps stated: “In our public school systems, we’ve been really told a bunch of lies, and so you’re deeply entrenched into really make good conscious decisions. We’re not going to do that anymore” (PL1).

Through an understanding of history as sense-making and rhetoric, the organization unfolds a work of leadership based on interpreting the past for strategic purposes of enhancing students’ agency and empowering them to take control of reality. The members of the organization create narratives and stories of the past that are transmitted in different courses and events at the camp to enhance strategic change in the organization and eventually build legitimacy of their power as a group for social change.

One of the priorities of the organization is to reconnect the students with their cultural background and enhancing a collective process of sense-making around the work and struggle of memory. For example, when the students arrive to the camp, they are organized into five different Native clans wearing T-shirts of different colors with the logo of each clan: Coyotes (orange), Salmon (blue), Eagles (red), Turtles (green), and Bears (violet). These groups help to transmit elements of Native culture and the collective values that they represent. In every course, the students sit down in circles to read, talk, or eat, and when in some significant events, like the opening and closing ceremonies during the camps, there are collective prayers.

Also, another priority of the organization is that in the stories they tell the students at the camp, always emphasize the idea that despite all the structural and systemic barriers Native people face resulting from colonialism and assimilation, they have agency and can overcome some of these structural challenges. One example of a story that was transmitted to the students in the “Origins” class, a class where they talk about the foundation of the organization and the barriers they needed to overcome, went as follows:

We passed the hat. Literally, a baseball cap. And 15 Indians we came up with just a little over a hundred bucks to open a bank account. Then, we found out that the incorporation cost was 150. So, one of the members had an old Pinto car, bright orange, and we took it up to Cusick pow wow and raffled it off. We got enough money to get the incorporation money, and then [two people] wrote a grant. A federal and unprecedented. And never happened that anyone you talk to that you write your first grant you get it funded. And not only get funded, but it was a three-year federal grant (PL3).

They emphasized agency more collectively. One of the leaders who founded the organization: “The secret for growing was the Indian way. Much collective work, sacrifices, quality services, and saving, along with good audits that attracted more money from loans and particularly from donations” (PL1).

Since often stories rather than statistics can be more effective in changing attitudes of people, narratives and stories are used in the camps as tools that deliberately reinterpret the past for present and future purposes. One of the most popular stories in the organization describes the relation of American Indians with the local police department. As one of the elders who teach Native history in the camps explained remembering one day when she was at the health clinic where the organization provides health services to the community:

Our police came in uniform to meet with [the CEO] and we had one patient run to the bathroom, one patient turned around and went out the door, one patient refused to come through… It was just like that, but also it can be traumatic for kids. I saw a little kid and when she saw a policeman started crying because she said “that’s when my uncle died and they came into the house and they took me away and blah, blah, blah, and all this,” you are like “God!” …That’s your memory of the policeman (PL4).

This is an example of the traumatic memory that Native communities have regarding their relationship with the police. However, at the leadership camps, they discuss these issues to emphasize their agency and portray them as survivors rather than victims, which is crucial for collective empowerment and building legitimacy for future social change. As another example, they invite the law enforcement agencies to the camps to meet with the students, and police officers participate in the commencement ceremony delivering diplomas and prices to those who graduate. Furthermore, by the end of the ceremony, every clan takes a picture with the professors and leaders of the organization where the police officers are included.

As another leadership practice to disrupt and reframe the dominant memory, the organization creates a sense of division between the past and the future, discrediting the official memory and the image that this dominant narrative offers about American Indians. Thus, they offer courses about “Native American history” and “Culture,” where the dominant memory regarding those topics is deconstructed, and at the same time, offer other courses where students can learn about creating artwork, building drums, or practice dances and songs, to recover their traditions and worldviews. This process is critical for young urban Natives who are not very aware of their culture and can be disconnected from their cultural roots due to cultural assimilation processes into Western culture.

At the “Reading” class, they read two books in particular: Sacagawea for the younger students and Her Name Was Seepeetza for the older. The first one is the story of Sacagawea, the daughter of a Shoshone chief who was captured by an enemy tribe and sold to a French-Canadian trapper who made her his wife and ended up joining the Lewis and Clark expedition as an interpreter. The second book is about Seepeetza, a Native girl forced to go to an Indian residential school and saw how her name was changed to Martha Stone, and her culture was almost destroyed. Through reading these books, the professor explains the history of Native tribes in the Northwest to the students while asking them critical questions that make them connect the situation back in the time and the situation today.

Another strategy of disrupting and reframing the official history that delegitimizes American Indians portraying them as primitive and living in devastated communities is framing a discourse through the use of artifacts and role models. Thus, the organization is intentional in showing an immaculate and well-conserved space full of beautiful Native artwork where highly qualified Native American professionals work. These artifacts and the role models represent a new frame that opposes the frames of the dominant view and deconstructs negative images of Native people internalized by these young Native Americans. As one of the employees said: “I think it’s empowering as an employee or student to walk through those doors and see a lot of beautiful artwork and different Natives specializing in a lot of different areas. I know when I started with them, I was just like blown away. I am like ‘Wow these tribal members from different tribes all coming here for the greater good of the community and our people’” (PF3). Helping them to “forget” about the official memory that has been internalized and portrays Native people as inferior and not capable to govern themselves is a key strategy used by the organization and its leaders as a first step to build legitimacy of their history and leadership perspectives. Recognizing that it is a process of interpretive reconstruction, the camp leaders advocate for the students to take up their agency as collective empowerment through which legitimacy of their power as a social group is built. As one of the employees who graduated from the leadership camps when was younger argued: “When I first came, even though myself I am Native, I was very much an urban Native. I had never been on the reservation. I’m an enrolled [Indian tribe], but I never lived on the reservation, so I was very white. I did have to learn to navigate between cultures then and get educated. So, they’ve done a great job” (PF2).

In summary, the leadership camp focuses on a leadership work of rhetoric and framing to decolonize (disrupt and reframe) the “official” memory with the aim of recovering their own memory and stories of what means to be American Indian for the members of the organization through a collective process of sense-making. Combining “forgetting” and “remembering” in different courses and activities, the leadership camps are spaces where narratives are created as tools for social change, and the art of rhetoric and framing is unfolded not only through language but also through artifacts and role models aiming to empower young urban Natives. Finally, the camps are the space where collective processes of sense-making of present problems and challenges emerge to increase the collective agency of the group. Within this space, the work of leadership in general and of memory, particularly, has implications for building collective agency and shaping meaning to gain legitimacy for their power as a social group that can be used into the future for social change.

Finding two: Using the past to make sense of the present and giving meaning to legitimate the future

The work of memory implemented in the camp is intentional leadership work that unfolds a process of sense-making to deconstructing collective assumptions about history that delegitimize the memory of subordinated social groups and their leadership practices. Through the process of organizing and making sense of experiences from the past, the organization influences the present increasing the collective agency of the participants. Additionally, collective agency gives meaning to legitimate their power as a social group and envision a new future.

Through a work of rhetoric and framing, the leaders at the organization start defining the problems that American Indians are experiencing. As one of the leaders teaching Native history at the camps explained regarding the “white curriculum” in the official educational system and the need to recover their memory: “I feel like learning starts traditionally in the US in the classrooms, and I feel like a lot of the history books that are written are written not from an Indigenous perspective. And I feel like we have to become the teachers of our culture. We’re tasked with that” (PL4).

One of the founders pointed out the causes of the current challenges they are facing when described American society as still colonized and claimed that one of the main reasons for the leadership summer camp was to create a space where Native people could deconstruct the collective assumptions delegitimizing their memory and leadership perspectives that they have internalized: “I want to be decolonized. And it’s really hard because I’m not. I’m not, you know? Especially at this age we’ve been… like especially in our public school systems we’ve been really told a bunch of lies. That is why our young kids need to learn” (PL1).

As part of the leadership work based on rhetoric and framing to suggest remedies and solutions to problems American Indians are experiencing, at the different courses and activities at the summer camp the students can collectively interpret events and experiences from the past to help them make sense of their present. As one of the leaders argued regarding the young urban Natives:

They need to know like oral history. They need to know the historical context of why they work here. They need to know about trauma. They need to know the truth about what happened to Native people. We’re sitting in this building today as a direct result of historical trauma. The genocide and how it shows up now. They killed almost most of us, so we better be onboard all hands-on deck to save what is rest of us (PL2).

American Indian problems are not “American Indian problems” as if there was something wrong with them and their cultures, but the result of hundreds of years of colonialism, violence, cultural assimilation, and asymmetries of power. This is why the leadership work of the organization in the summer camps is focused on pointing out to the historical roots of the problems seeking to make sense of their present and give meaning to their projects for social change in the future.

Although leadership in general and the work of leadership, in particular, may reside in individuals located in many parts of a collective, leadership also resides in artifacts that facilitate joint work of sense-making for its members. For example, at the leadership camp, classes are full of Native artwork like blankets, cushions, or dreamcatchers, and the professors wear Native clothes, bags, and hats, as an effective way of transmitting culture and making sense of the present for the students. There is a big billboard with the logo of the organization at the parking lot that combines seven stones representing seven generations backward and forward and four feathers that symbolize the four elements of the Earth. Inside the building, besides artwork in every room, there is elegant furniture with patterns related to Nature and Native elements. In the main room designated for meetings and events, the four walls have been painted representing women (West), men (East), family (North), and the creator (South), composing a framework of inclusiveness and complementarity in horizontal terms.

Another leadership practice emphasized in the summer camp is to be very intentional with the language that they use in different courses. Language can frame a vision that gives meaning and legitimizes new visions, classifications, and categories, that go beyond the dominant ones. For example, the slogan of the leadership camps that one can find in every classroom, whiteboard, or notebook is “be a warrior, nurturer, scholar, and community activist,” and when the students graduate, they get a jersey that says: “Decolonize, indigenize, revitalize, mobilize.” One of the founders described how important it is to offer a purpose and empower employees in general and the youth in particular. She said:

This is a really good place to work that if you took any other dominant society business like ours and put us next to it we would still score better. I mean, not only do they work in a brown place, they work in a really good brown place” (PL1).

Throughout different courses, activities, and events at the camps, the organization develops a work of leadership that emphasizes the creation of shared interpretations of what happened in the past, not just to make sense of the challenges of the present but to shape meaning and create a purpose to project themselves into the future. In essence, the leaders of the organization enhance an interpretive shift in the cognitive frames that define the reality of American Indians in a disempowering way and substitute them with new ones that are meaningful and empower them for the future. An example of an interpretive shift in terms of frames internalized from the dominant memory and the new ones adopted by an employee who graduated a few years ago from the camps:

I think there’s genocide still happening in this country. And slavery in the prison system. We’re being taught in our school system that that stuff was over with and done for and not happening because it was ancient history. It was a lie. They’re happening. It’s affecting our lives. Affecting our cultures. And we’re not taking ownership. There’s a lot of ownership that’s not been taken or taught about what’s still happening in our country (PF4).

Since the work of memory influences the present and the future, it is a critical resource to unfold change. Thus, besides reviewing the history and memory in every course, in some classes, particularly with the younger students, professors are very intentional asking them about what they want to do when they get older, or they continuously refer to them as the future professors, lawyers, social activists, and so on of the city. This is an interesting practice that tries to empower the students, making them think about their future, and enhancing their agency through the creation of a purpose in their lives. Most of these students come from families with difficult backgrounds where some of them have some of their parents in jail, issues of domestic violence, substance abuse, or suicides. Thus, the organization focuses on deconstructing the frames for interpreting the past that are disempowering them and where they do not believe in their potential. Through the creation of new frames, students can make sense of their present and gain meaning for a future where they will have meaningful roles to play.

Another example is a class where the students learn to draw comics, and they create the story of a superhero who fixes the wrong in society. After explaining the story and showing the comic’s design to their classmates, the professors, two professionals of the comic industry in the city, create a picture of a superhero with each student’s face. This exercise is connected with the slogan of the camps “be a warrior, nurturer, scholar, and community activist” and the idea of enhancing agency and shaping meaning for the youth to overcome unjust structures and struggle for social justice.

Enhancing interpretive shifts is part of the work of leadership that happens simultaneously within each individual at the organization. Additionally, collective interpretations of past events have a significant influence on future behavior since offers a purpose for the group. Also, reframing the official history and shaping meaning, the organization builds legitimacy for the organization and its members who believe that they can be governed by themselves rather than by others. This legitimacy or belief in their own power as a social group can be used as power for social change. Gaining legitimacy of their memory implies building legitimacy of their leadership perspectives and practices and the will to be involved with processes of leadership not just as followers but also as leaders. Today, around 30% of the organization’s employees on the payroll participated when they were kids in past editions of the leadership summer camps, and most of the rest of the graduated are currently involved with social change organizations in the area. One of the employees of the organization who graduated from the leadership camps argued:

I think working here I have become prouder, and feel more celebrated, and hopeful. Before I came here, there wasn’t really a place that had a bunch of professionals who were like, “Hey, you’re awesome as you are. Come join us.” That kind of thing. And when I came here and then saw these people who are movers and shakers in the community, who are doing awesome things, who’ve asked me to sit at the same table as they have... I didn't have to sit at the kids’ table (PF6).

From a dominant memory that does not allow to unfold the potential of young urban Natives as human beings and leaders, the work of leadership of the organization created collective agency and built legitimacy for their power as a social group offering strategies for the present and a purpose for the future. As one of the leaders said regarding the future:

I think there’s hope though. I think the future is going to be a lot better. I just think any time something like that happens there’s a cultural bonding between different communities where they kind of come together and bridge together. Because if they don’t, then the oppressor wins, and we’re just not going to let that happen” (PL3).

Furthermore, the same leader continued to explain the “dream,” as the framework that gives sense and meaning to their struggle: “Those conversations that happen in DC don’t strip us away from being strong minded, and don’t tear down the dream that we have. If we have a will, we’ll find a way, and there’s always a will, and there’s always been a way” (PL3).

In conclusion, the work of leadership focused on decolonizing (disrupting and reframing) the official memory through an emphasis on rhetoric and framing was critical to raise the collective agency of young urban Natives and try to empower them building legitimacy for the organization and its members. Additionally, using the past as a resource for collective sense-making, the organization makes sense of their problems and challenges of the present and gives meaning and purpose to project themselves into the future.

With the work and struggle of memory at the leadership camp, the memory of urban natives is legitimized through the work of leadership based on rhetoric, framing, and sense-making. This work of leadership builds collective agency that contributes to legitimize both American Indian memories and leadership perspectives. Through this process of legitimation, subordinated social groups develop the capacity to justify that they hold the power to govern themselves and not just to consent and submit to external actors. Eventually, legitimacy of memory and leadership perspectives can be leveraged as power since the group believes in their potential. This power will be critical for social change since change, in general, will be seen as feasible and social change in particular as something that is constructed through their daily actions and routines rather than something inexorable.

Discussion

This article introduces the idea of struggle of memory for better understanding the influence of power in general and of legitimacy of power in particular when an American Indian organization tries to use history and memory as a resource for social change. As Deloria (1972) argues, the last Natives who truly understood what it meant to be American Indian lived before the reservation era, and today it is really difficult for any Native American to know what American Indian philosophy is. Thus, the work of memory of the participants of this study represents their particular view of what means to be Native American as a challenge to a system of oppression.

Specifically, I argue that it is within the leadership work on rhetoric, framing, and sense-making to recover and legitimize the memory of the subaltern social group where conceptualizations of leadership emerge and are either legitimized or delegitimized. Therefore, any work and struggle of memory coming from subordinated social groups not only represents a challenge to the “official” and “legitimate” memory imposed by dominant social groups but also to mainstream ideas and images of leadership. Additionally, I identify particular practices and strategies of the leadership work of marginalized social groups that emphasize the use of memory as a resource for building legitimacy of their power that can be used as power for eventually creating social change.

This work makes three main contributions to leadership studies. First, this article shows that Indigenous leadership emerges from the bottoms and the margins as a process of resistance and a challenge to systems of oppression. These arguments are connected with other research about Indigenous leadership that criticizes the lack of context in studying these populations (Evans and Sinclair, 2016; Warner and Grint, 2006; Zhang et al., 2012). In essence, it is not possible to understand Indigenous leaders and their leadership without acknowledging that they are constantly involved in a struggle for gaining legitimacy of their leadership perspectives and practices. Mainstream management and leadership approaches neglect how historically constituted power relations are embedded in the sociocultural norms and discourses that organizational members reflect upon to make sense of their work relations and settings (Gordon, 2014). Moreover, what is leadership and how it should be performed is historically rooted in larger narratives and discourses of the day (du Gay and Salaman, 1996; Fairhurst, 2014). This study describes how the emergence of leadership is constrained by dominant narratives and discourses and offers a more comprehensive approach of power drawing from other disciplines such as history and sociology going beyond mainstream organizational and leadership studies.

Second, this article presents empirical research that describes the use of memory as a resource to enhance collective agency for social change (Foldy et al., 2008; Ospina and Su, 2009). Through the work of leadership based on rhetoric, framing, and sense-making, the members of the organization develop strategies and implement practices that eventually result in collective agency. This research shows how agency is enabled through multiple and competing narratives and discourses with various empowering and disempowering subjectivities (Fairhurst, 2014).

Previous research has described how creating collective capacity involves developing power (Ospina et al., 2012), and building on that research, this study adds the concept of legitimacy of power as the capacity to believe in their power as a social group that results from collective agency and meaning-making. Besides a collective process of sense-making for developing collective agency and power, shaping the meaning of phenomena and giving purpose to a group of people enhances the use of their power since they believe leadership is for everybody and not just for an elite or specific social group.

Moreover, understanding memory as a field for struggle, this article goes beyond the organizational concepts of storage bin and organizational remembering (Feldman and Feldman, 2006; Musacchio Adorisio, 2014; Suddaby and Foster, 2017; Suddaby et al., 2010). Previous work on memory and organizational change has not incorporated the idea of context and power. Thus, this study offers a more comprehensive and relational perspective to better understand how leadership emerges and how change is created.

Finally, this article argues that leadership is a collective process of sense and meaning-making that emerges within the work of leadership implemented to achieve a specific goal. Drawing from Bourdieu’s idea of field and the concept of struggle of memory from the social movement literature, this article emphasizes that leadership is co-constructed through processes of rhetoric, framing, and collective sense-making. Previous research regarding how sense-making emerges from collective processes of leadership is scarce (Foldy et al., 2008; Ospina and Su, 2009; Pfeffer, 1981; Smirch and Stubbart, 1985). This work provides a lens to understand the collective work of leadership and how groups of people make collective sense and meaning of this phenomenon. Also, mainstream perspectives of leadership focus on the leader and promote hierarchical approaches where the leader accumulates power at the top (Pearce and Conger, 2002; Tourish, 2013). Additionally, dominant theories of leadership do not acknowledge the context and the power relations resulting from that context. It is a narrow vision of leadership that creates a fantasy or myth to legitimate a specific social order (Gemmill and Oakley, 1992; Jimenez-Luque, 2020). This study offers empirical research showing how the phenomenon of leadership emerges within a context and how leaders and followers struggle against the asymmetries of power that each specific context establishes. More specifically, leadership is co-constructed within the practices and strategies implemented to achieve a goal. As these practices and strategies occur, a shared understanding of what is leadership and who is a leader is co-constructed and enacted.

Conclusion

Today’s official history of most countries results from the imposition of the memory of those social groups with the greatest power to win the struggle of memory. Besides establishing a particular way of making sense and meaning of reality that excludes other options, with the imposition of memory also comes the domination of conceptualizations and images of what leadership is and who can be considered a good and effective leader. Through these collective assumptions of leadership and leaders, it is legitimated and reproduced a hegemonic system that values individualism and control and legitimizes the concentration of resources and power in the hands of an exclusive elite. This article describes the struggle of memory of a group of American Indians who have been hidden from the mainstream leadership literature. Beyond theorizing about dominant populations and the conventional singular heroic individual, focusing on marginalized groups and their collective struggles contributes to knowing more about distributed ways of leadership and the emancipatory possibilities of this phenomenon. Also, instead of emphasizing what leaders do, it is critical to understand leadership as a collective process of sense and meaning-making to achieve a particular goal and shape the future. Additionally, when it comes to subordinated social groups, it is critical to acknowledge how this process is influenced by relations of power and resistance resulting from a context of colonialism and cultural assimilation that has an impact on both mainstream and nonmainstream approaches of leadership. Thus, leadership emerging from the top will be very different than leadership from the margins and leadership practices for domination completely different than leadership actions for emancipation. Finally, understanding in-depth how this subaltern social group uses memory as a resource to change their present and project themselves into the future illuminates strategies and tools of social change leadership within a context of asymmetries of power in society that have not been well theorized. As a contextualized-influenced and dynamic phenomenon that combines structure and agency, leadership must be looked for where it is unexpected and, if necessary, looked at beyond what is visible.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Antonio Jimenez-Luque

Note

Dr Antonio Jimenez-Luque’s work, broadly speaking, explores how cultural, social, and historical perspectives influence conceptualizations and practice of leadership understood as a relational process of mobilization, emancipation, and social change. At the intersection of critical theory and intercultural studies, his research topics are (1) organizational culture, identity, and change; (2) leadership and framing for sense/meaning-making; and (3) critical interculturality and global social justice. From 2004–2013, Dr Jimenez-Luque was the Coordinator for the International Cooperation for Development at the University of Barcelona Solidarity Foundation. He designed and implemented projects on topics related with human development, peace-building, human rights, and critical interculturality with local governments, universities, grassroots organizations, and social movements in Algeria, DR Congo, Vietnam, Colombia, and Bolivia, among other countries. In 2014, Dr Jimenez-Luque moved to the United States where he worked at Gonzaga University for the Associate Vice-President for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion as Intercultural Research Associate and taught a variety of classes including Leading Across Cultures, Democracy and Human Rights, and Latin American Politics. Since 2018, he is teaching at the University of San Diego and developing his research agenda on issues of leadership and social justice from a critical, global, and intercultural perspective.

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