ABSTRACT
This chapter explores socio-cultural and socio-political theory as they arise in intercultural rituals and arts-infused instruction. Project-based learning as an example of re-indigenization of curricula serves as the platform for interdisciplinary conceptualizations of math, dance, and literature. Formal and informal rituals represent opportunities to invite others into the teacher’s analyses of her community immersion and pueblo pedagogy. Peak rituals in her personal and professional lives center content-heavy discussions with family, close friends, and students. Frustrations with social constructions of race and the persistence of classed hierarchies in colonized territories frame key conversations about colorism, victim blaming, and forced supplication to nationalism. Applied instructional activities focused on formal and informal arts as resistance to the colonial history of US schooling are woven through student empowerment and expression. Questions of intersectional dimensions of school-based oppressions and political complexities of navigating cultural appropriation in inter-racial and inter-cultural partnering surface in reciprocal learning opportunities for the teacher and her merging family and social circles. The teacher takes her theoretical crises to relationships in multiple spheres of interpersonal connection, and contemplates the privilege of judgment when examining historical events and culturally-politicized practices.
