Rez Ponies and Confronting Sacred Junctures in Decolonizing and Indigenous Education

This chapter narrates a relational ontology of riding horses as both an Indigenous and decolonial practice. Riding horses confronts the incommensurabilities that collide in the nexus of the author’s identity: Christianity, Settler colonialism, white, Navajo, Indigeneity, and Decoloniality. Drawing from Grande’s (2004) red pedagogy, the chapter frames narrative with theoretical conversations around Indigenous/Decolonizing education by exploring borderlands and spatial contradictions to challenge the epistemologies in education that continue to separate critical, spiritual, or Indigenous ontologies by upholding a religious/secular binary. This story shows how Indigenous peoples in the academy navigate the borders of colonial/decolonial. It is an example of how decolonization is a natural embodied practice of thriving for family.