Videos by Edward Valandra
Dr. Edward Valandra interview with moderator Richie Richards concerning such topics as Native Stu... more Dr. Edward Valandra interview with moderator Richie Richards concerning such topics as Native Studies, Indigenous Politics and Self-Determination, and Native K12 Education 169 views
Books by Edward Valandra
#Native Reads: Stories of the Oceti Sakowin, 2020
One of the First Nations Development Institute's ten recommended books for 2020. This Native Read... more One of the First Nations Development Institute's ten recommended books for 2020. This Native Reads is an Indigenous Literary Sovereignty project.
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Forthcoming, 2020
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Book Chapter by Edward Valandra
Colorizing Restorative Justice: Voicing Our Realities, 2020
How can settlers in restorative justice, while citing restorative justice/ restorative practice's... more How can settlers in restorative justice, while citing restorative justice/ restorative practice's Indigenous roots and committing themselves to repairing harms, live on land stolen from Indigenous Peoples through genocide and not act to undo this catastrophic harm? How can settlers in restorative justice credibly hold children accountable for stealing others' property or personal belongings and not hold themselves accountable for the mass fraud and crimes that their settlement in North America involves--crimes from which settlers benefit and Indigenous Peoples suffer everyday? By calling these questions out of silence, unsettling as they are, I aim to heighten critical awareness of how White fantasies keep harms against Indigenous Nations off settlers' radar and prevent settlers in restorative justice from "walking the restorative talk."
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Standing With Standing Rock: Voices From The #NODAPL Movement, 2019
This chapter explores both a Native worldview that motivated the Water Protectors to defend the M... more This chapter explores both a Native worldview that motivated the Water Protectors to defend the Mni Oyate (Water Nation or People) against western development’s genocidal harm and how this action to protect the Mni Oyate decenters the West’s beliefs about modernity. Stopping first the Keystone XL pipeline (KXL) and then the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), the Oceti Sakowin Oyate have raised global awareness about the Natural World as possessing personality. For the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, then, DAPL particularly ignores and violates what it means to be a Good Relative. Hence, being a Good Relative is the way non-western peoples experience the Natural World. Having personality also means that the Natural World has agency and therefore it is capable of forming relationships with us, or not.
But the West chooses not to have such a relationship with the Natural World. Instead it chooses, as it has done with Indigenous Peoples, a default stance of perpetrating colonizing relations. Within days after Trump assumed the US presidency, he signed several executive actions in the service and promotion of western development. While signing these and other executive actions, he invoked culturally coded words such as “jobs” and “construction.” These coded words reveal, among other things, that western development persists as an internalized good for western people, despite evidence to the contrary. That the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, other Indigenous Peoples, and their allies are challenging western development as far from positive calls the western worldview to account; especially as it continues to disrupt humanity’s most fundamental relationships with the Natural World (e.g., climate change).
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Articles by Edward Valandra
First Nations Development Institute: Exploring Native Justice, 2023
In this essay, Valandra reflects upon the differences between tribal and
settler perspectives on ... more In this essay, Valandra reflects upon the differences between tribal and
settler perspectives on justice. Specifically, he explores the meaning of justice among his own people, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Oyáte. He warns that colonization has distorted current understandings of justice in tribal society and emphasizes the importance of adopting a “responsibility-based” rather than a “rights-based” approach to Native justice.
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Thousands of Water Protectors from more than three hundred Native nations, as well as allied supp... more Thousands of Water Protectors from more than three hundred Native nations, as well as allied supporters from a range of social movements, gathered at the Standing Rock Sioux Indian Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota during 2016 to halt the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The DAPL threatens to cross under the Mni Sose (the Missouri River), which is the fresh-water supply for millions of humans and countless nonhuman relations. By blocking settler access to capital through direct action, the enactment of political counterclaims to the land and river through ceremony and legal challenges in U.S. courts, #NoDAPL front-line protectors are directly challenging the fossil-fuel industry’s centrality in colonial accumulation and demonstrating that climate change is indelibly linked to historic and ongoing colonialism and Indigenous erasure and elimination. Contributors to this Hot Spots series consider the social, historical, cultural, and political significance of the #NoDAPL movement, situating it within Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation) history, leadership strategies and direct action/organizing, Indigenous anticolonial resistance across Turtle Island, and conditions of ongoing state violence against Indigenous bodies and lands. [Source: Dhillon, Jaskiran and Estes, Nick. "Standing Rock, #NoDAPL, and Mni Wiconi." Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, December 22, 2016. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/1010-standing-rock-nodapl-and-mni-wiconi]
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This article analyzes the first dissertation written about the significant role that Native Studi... more This article analyzes the first dissertation written about the significant role that Native Studies scholar Elizabeth Cook-Lynn has played in the development of Native Studies. The dissertation, Reading Cook-Lynn: Anti-Colonialism, Cultural Resistance, and Native Empowerment, written by Kodjo Ruben Afagla, identifies the initial challenges to developing Native Studies as a discipline. Afagla's work explores Cook-Lynn's influence on how Native Studies has addressed—or, in her view, fallen short of addressing—these challenges. In Afagla's narrative, Cook-Lynn established herself as a leading Native Studies spokesperson in the mid-1980s. Her consistent call to Native Studies has been that, without a sharp focus, the discipline would become fuzzy and uncritical; it would not step up to the original tasks before it: decolonization, nation building, defense of Native peoples, and cultural revitalization. Arguably, disciplinary fuzziness could give rise to a claim that Native Studies is for everyone—that Native peoples hold no special relation to the discipline and cannot hold the discipline accountable. For Native Studies to serve Native peoples, disciplinary coherency remains the discipline's primary challenge. In this article, I also emphasize how groundbreaking Afagla's 2010 work is. Approaching its fiftieth anniversary, Native Studies has an opportunity to self-reflect, to assess its contribution to Native Country, and to rethink its disciplinary evolution since 1969. The article engages an important dialogue about the first fifty years of Native Studies as a discipline and envisions where Native Studies needs to focus its intellectual capacities over the next fifty years.
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Videos by Edward Valandra
Books by Edward Valandra
Book Chapter by Edward Valandra
But the West chooses not to have such a relationship with the Natural World. Instead it chooses, as it has done with Indigenous Peoples, a default stance of perpetrating colonizing relations. Within days after Trump assumed the US presidency, he signed several executive actions in the service and promotion of western development. While signing these and other executive actions, he invoked culturally coded words such as “jobs” and “construction.” These coded words reveal, among other things, that western development persists as an internalized good for western people, despite evidence to the contrary. That the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, other Indigenous Peoples, and their allies are challenging western development as far from positive calls the western worldview to account; especially as it continues to disrupt humanity’s most fundamental relationships with the Natural World (e.g., climate change).
Articles by Edward Valandra
settler perspectives on justice. Specifically, he explores the meaning of justice among his own people, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Oyáte. He warns that colonization has distorted current understandings of justice in tribal society and emphasizes the importance of adopting a “responsibility-based” rather than a “rights-based” approach to Native justice.
But the West chooses not to have such a relationship with the Natural World. Instead it chooses, as it has done with Indigenous Peoples, a default stance of perpetrating colonizing relations. Within days after Trump assumed the US presidency, he signed several executive actions in the service and promotion of western development. While signing these and other executive actions, he invoked culturally coded words such as “jobs” and “construction.” These coded words reveal, among other things, that western development persists as an internalized good for western people, despite evidence to the contrary. That the Oceti Sakowin Oyate, other Indigenous Peoples, and their allies are challenging western development as far from positive calls the western worldview to account; especially as it continues to disrupt humanity’s most fundamental relationships with the Natural World (e.g., climate change).
settler perspectives on justice. Specifically, he explores the meaning of justice among his own people, the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Oyáte. He warns that colonization has distorted current understandings of justice in tribal society and emphasizes the importance of adopting a “responsibility-based” rather than a “rights-based” approach to Native justice.
The Oceti Sakowin Oyate’s response to the white abuse of our children coincided with other 1960s social justice movements that challenged whites’ racism and settlers’ colonization. In the early 1970s, we determined that our greater Sicangu community wanted control over our children’s educa-tion, so we formally established Saint Francis Indian School (SFIS).
Assuming educational responsibility for our children has meant, among other things, that we need a dedicated faculty corps that is not only highly qualified but also culturally competent. Thus, SFIS’ Professional Development and Learning Plan (PDLP) involves not only recruiting, retaining, and training its faculty corps, but also having its faculty become vested in SFIS and high standards of learning. Our PDLP reflects this priority by investing in our faculty.
Investing in our faculty is a most effective strategy, because our faculty and children intersect in the classroom. The former has a direct and therefore dramatic impact on the latter. Consequently, faculty, are a priority group when it comes to allocating professional development and learning re-sources and thereby raising the school-wide educational experience at SFIS.
This address, with the exception of including the opening statement, minor edits for clarity, and reformatting is the original in all other aspects. The original address was first published in the March 2004 issues of the Lakota Journal and Sicangu Sun Times.