ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of Indigenous and decolonizing paradigms, how they shape Native student development within higher education, and how they critically call into question the primacy of the individual that has been infused into dominant understandings of college student development. Relationship gave mentors opportunities to practice generosity with others, harmony with land, and ways to develop their own pathway to an idea. Although student development theories no longer explicitly emphasize individual autonomy as the end goal of development, they do still centralize it as a part of the developmental process. Indigenous and decolonizing paradigms highlight how Indigenous peoples make sense of themselves through the world around them. Indigenous and decolonizing paradigms point to the need to decolonize and Indigenize the ways in which we think about college student development.
