Oftentimes, when we engage with the framework of decolonization, it comes from a very specific theoretical strand within the academy and does not include or interconnect with the lives of Indigenous Peoples, especially those who have survived and continue to survive genocide. This OER engages with the idea of decolonization through a short narrative that highlights a conversation from a grandchild and their grandmother. The story does not adhere to a linear format of time, yet goes back and forth between the past and present, an almost cyclical reflections as one plans and figures out their future. The work of decolonization requires an entire epistemological, ontological, axiological, and methodological shift internally and externally. This is simply the beginning of a lifetime commitment.
 
 Glossary:
ahéhee’ – thank you
k’ad – phrase used to end a conversation or start a new one
kinaaldá – women becoming ceremony
nahjee’ – phrase used for expressing that I’m finished and/or go away. 
shídeezhí – my little sister
shimásaní – my grandma
shiyazhí – my little one
yadilah – phrase used in frustration
 
 
References:
Smith, L. T. (2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London & New York: Zed Books.
 
Tuck, E., & Yang, K. (2012). Decolonization is not a metaphor. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society, 1(1), 1-40.

A Decolonial Memoir: Desires and Frustrations

The history of Indigenous Peoples within the US Empire is a tale of both violence and survivance, which can be difficult to engage and work through for many. This OER uses the process of a body scan, a mindfulness technique, to really get folks comfortable with their body and notice what is happening internally while using poetry as a medium to talk about the history of the Diné, or the Navajo, my community. Yet, this violence is not only unique to many Indigenous communities, but is something that many other marginalized communities have something in common as we all survive and navigate systems of exploitation and oppression in a world that denies us love and freedom. This OER ends with a reminder of how beautiful, brilliant and powerful we are and that our stories of resistance need to be shared and celebrated.

OER Sensory Experience

In My Dreams: A Sensory Experience

This offering is for those who find themselves grief-ridden as they become more aware of how their lives and those around them are structured historically and presently be oppression. It is an approximately ten-minute guided meditation to acknowledge and honor the grief that inhabits the listeners’ bodies. The meditation also invites listeners to self-affirm their presence and survival.  Warsan Shire’s “What They Did Yesterday Afternoon” and Destiny Hemphill’s poem “mapmaking”  serve as anchor texts. Instructors, students, and organizers might find this meditation supportive while learning/teaching about oppression or reckoning with the near aftermath of an oppression-rooted tragedy.

Where Does It Hurt: A Guided Meditation for Grief Over Injustice

Call and response has an important history in traditional West African music, especially in spiritual  music and protest movements. Although the specific expression of this practice varies across the diaspora depending on the geographic location and musical lineage of practitioners, there are striking similarities in seemingly disparate locations, like the southern United States, Cuba, and northern Brazil. The preservation of call and response practices within these locations (and many others) suggests the importance of collectivity when healing from systemic oppression.

With this interest in mind, David Diaz invites students to join into this call and response by listening to and producing sounds and/or movements as they are comfortable. In joining a collective, there is also space for individuality, and even dissonance. In that interest, students can recognize the shared histories and practices that the music reveals, as well as the particularities of specific cultures and historical actors.

Call and Response: The Sounds of Collective Resistance

This offering will be an approximately ten-minute audio introduction to Afro-futurism. Approachable and digestible, this audio short guides students to engage with Afro-futurism not only as an analytic tool but as a conceptual approach to community organizing and creative work. At the end, students will be invited into two different writing prompts. The short concludes with approximately 1 minute of instrumental music, no voice-over.

Other Worlds: An Intro to Afrofuturism

“‘I would have just lived’: Surviving Japanese Internment during WWII” (part 1) is the first of a two part series that features the oral history testimony of Mitsue Salador and was written, researched, and recorded by Tatiana Bryant, with the support of the Pedagogy Lab at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Listeners should note in advance that this audio Open Educational Resource includes themes of grief, xenophobia, racism, and war.

In the early 1940s, Japanese American teenager Mitsue Salador was directed to go to college for nursing because Japanese women weren’t hired as teachers at white schools. Dismayed, she entered college in Portland, OR to study nursing briefly, before she was forced into an urban detention center for people of Japanese heritage after Pearl Harbor. Mitsue organized a loophole escape from the detention center by applying to a college in the Midwest where she would be deemed as less of a potential threat away from active war theaters. Isolated from her family, she continued her education while her parents and youngest sibling survived an internment camp and older siblings navigated college and active military service. In part 1, Mitsue Salador of Long Island, NY via Hood River, OR, talks about her lived experience as a college student and daughter of Japanese immigrants before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

"I would have just lived": Surviving Japanese Internment during WWII Part 1

“‘I would have just lived’: Surviving Japanese Internment during WWII (part 2)” is the second of a two part series that features the oral history testimony of Mitsue Salador and was written, researched, and recorded by Tatiana Bryant, with the support of the Pedagogy Lab at the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Listeners should note in advance that this audio Open Educational Resource includes themes of grief, xenophobia, racism, and war.

In the early 1940s, Japanese American teenager Mitsue Salador was directed to go to college for nursing because Japanese women weren’t hired as teachers at white schools. Dismayed, she entered college in Portland, OR to study nursing briefly, before she was forced into an urban detention center for people of Japanese heritage after Pearl Harbor. Mitsue organized a loophole escape from the detention center by applying to a college in the Midwest where she would be deemed as less of a potential threat away from active war theaters. Isolated from her family, she continued her education while her parents and youngest sibling survived an internment camp and older siblings navigated college and active military service. 

In part 2, Mitsue Salador of Long Island, NY via Hood River, OR, talks about her lived experience as a college student and daughter of Japanese immigrants forced to relocate to a detention center after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

"I would have just lived": Surviving Japanese Internment during WWII Part 2

There continues to be a lack of health sex education that is queer and trans inclusive. Many of us 
are not exposed to our resources until later in life yet must learn everything regarding 
heterosexual sex practices and resources. This feels extremely homophobic and transphobic 
given the health induced epidemic we as a community experienced 40 years ago during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Now, in the midst of another global pandemic, remanence of survival’s guilt and potential recollections of the past and feelings of “we’ve been here before”, we must educate and provide adequate resources around health education. In this short I engage in a reflective platíca where I revisit the first date with my partner where I learn about his status of being  HIV+. The aim is to understand how we can move towards destigmatizing sex in our  communities that are impacted by HIV and provide current resources, practices, and ultimately share how I am positively in love.

Positively in Love

Queer Chisme is a cultural intuitive way of knowing rooted in survival by womxn, queer, trans, and those at the margins to survive cisheteropatriarchal structures (Gonzalez, 2021; Gutierrez,  2017; Trujillo, 2020). The chisme, exposes power imbalances and cultivates community and safety with those who we can build kinship with to resist and exist in collective spaces. I use chisme as a way to share care, to mobilize towards advocacy, and expose inequities in higher education (Gonzalez, 2021). I invite you to listen and use this queer chisme sensory audio experience to reflect, move towards healing, and learn more about the power within you.

BBQ+ Summer Pedagogy

Vamos a Chismear: Queer Chisme with QTPOC Community College Students

Queerness, Race, and Reproduction: Exploring the Politics of Childcare Through and Beyond Lee Edelman and José Muñoz

This open-access education resource explores the political, social, and theoretical issues surrounding children, childcare, and reproduction. It begins with a personal reflection on how my queer friends and I would speculate about the possibility of having children as undergraduate students. I observe that our queerness made these questions so salient to us as we recognized the unique challenges that we had as queer children. I then explore a tension within queer theory between scholars Lee Edelman, who characerizes childrearing as a necessarily heteronormative endeavor, and José Muñoz, who critiques Edelman’s argument for ignoring the fact that society does not value Black and brown children in the same way as it does white children. Despite Muñoz’s influential critique, I caution against assuming that critiques of the imperative to reproduce necessarily exclude racial analysis by drawing on the work of Black studies scholar Christina Sharpe, who calls attention to the ways that racist institutions have forced Black people to reproduce in certain contexts. By putting these scholars in conversation, the audio reflects on the wide-reaching practical and theoretical consequences of reproductive politics.

Queerness, Race, and Reproduction: Exploring the Politics of Childcare

Audio open educational resources (OER) from The Pedagogy Lab

Vamos a Chismear: Queer Chisme with QTPOC Community College Students

The Pedagogy Lab

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