Honoring the Treaty: School Leaders’ Embrace of Indigenous Concepts to Practice Culturally Sustaining Leadership in Aotearoa* * * Aotearoa is the Indigenous name for New Zealand.

Abstract

As a field, school leadership has maintained a colorblind stance, marginalizing practitioners’ awareness of culturally sustaining practice, and erasing the experiences of Indigenous and other minoritized groups of students, teachers, and families. Looking to research and practice that attempts to embrace racial and cultural difference in order to make schools more culturally sustaining places to be is imperative in order for the field to respond to the growing diversity in schools. This article specifically explores culturally sustaining and Indigenous school leadership practices. Using data collected from interviews with ten school leaders in Aotearoa (New Zealand) as well as school documents, this article presents new insights into the implementation of culturally sustaining school leadership, which has implications for theory and practice in the field of educational leadership, which has been too long dominated by white ways of knowing.