Indigenous cosmologies and black onto-epistemologies in gender and education

Abstract

This issue of Gender and Education explores the relationship of Indigenous and Black ontoepistemologies, cosmologies and practices to gender and education in the broadest sense. It serves as an instance of how to rethink the colonial underpinnings of our contemporary understandings of gender and education. It is not news that feminisms have been confined to colonial logics and settler colonialist ideals. As Shari Huhndorf and Cheryl Suzack (2010, 1) wrote more than a decade ago, ‘despite [important] interventions and the urgency of gender analysis specific to Indigenous communities, Indigenous women and feminist issues remain unexamined in contemporary feminist theory’. Black feminist writer bell hooks also warned long ago ‘that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement’ (hooks 1981). Drawing on Indigenous feminist and gender theories and Black feminisms, this special issue is a crucial (yet minor) step towards decolonial and anticolonial knowledge production in gender and education. The collection of articles, taking seriously this journal’s feminist commitment, challenges the dominance of colonial thought practices in educational academic work. Without a doubt, the authors in this issue push the field of gender and education studies in unique directions, recognizing both the indebtedness of feminist research to Indigenous and Black onto-epistemologies, cosmologies and practices, as well as the knowledges from the margins that have been ‘developed, in a wide range of forms, over thousands of years, prior to and outside of the creation of universities’ (Coburn 2020, 430). As guest coeditors, we enter into this special issue from different locations and position (alitie)s. Veronica is a settler in (what is for now called) Canada; she grew up in Argentina under military coups, from which she inherited a process of whitening the nation state. Veronica’s work in early childhood education seeks to unsettle the violent colonial acts of child development always already embedded within pedagogy (e.g. Pacini-Ketchabaw and Montpetit 2019; Vintimilla and Pacini-Ketchabaw 2020). Tuija is a feminist Indigenous scholar coming from educational gender studies. Originally from a small village in the northernmost part of Finland, she is an Inari Sámi Indigenous person from a workingclass background. The strengths, positionalities and vulnerabilities of that mixture have