Brave Storytelling: Diasporic Indigenous Students, Vulnerability, and the Arts

Abstract

In this article, I explore how vulnerability is imposed on diasporic Indigenous students in U.S. classrooms and how, through the arts, language and literacy educators can remove these vulnerabilities. For this, I weave elements of storytelling to first introduce Mariela and diasporic Indigenous students. Then, I share two examples of how my diasporic Indigenous students used poetry and drawing in our high school English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) classroom to overcome vulnerabilities imposed on them by our school system. For clarification, throughout this manuscript, I use the term diasporic Indigenous students to describe Indigenous students who migrated to the United States from territories known today as Latin America. My hope is that the experiences described in this article will urge literacy and language educators to consider vulnerability as a condition imposed on students rather than as a characteristic or deficiency that learners bring with them.