A mother’s hopes and dreams for her daughter: the parallel journey between two Mohawk leaders in different contexts and careers.
Date
2011-04-28
Authors
Coughlin, Camela Dawn
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Abstract
Educational institutions have not yet succeeded in their quest to formally educate Aboriginal students with success. In an effort to increase the graduation levels, many school districts have implemented mandates to hire more Aboriginal teachers and administrators. Through sharing her lived experience as an Indigenous elementary principal the researcher argues that although many bureaucratic organizations have formal policies to hire Aboriginal people into leadership positions, they still seek to maintain their power to keep the status quo in their organizations.
This qualitative autoethnographic study acknowledges Indigenous ways of knowing through the sharing of stories and experience. The experiences will highlight emotional and cultural struggles that one can face when differing cultures and values emerge in a bureaucratic system based on colonialist viewpoints. Due to the vantage point of an insider, the researcher has traced her life from childhood and shared experiences and stories as a mixed-blood Mohawk woman and leader in the education system. Through an examination of signifying moments these stories depict a personal struggle for identity in her role as a female Mohawk principal in a school with a predominant Aboriginal student population. Chosen stories and incidents are recounted to reveal the social, political, historical, institutional, and cultural systems that are embedded within society. Both the researcher and her mother’s stories are universal in terms of experience that transcends understanding among Aboriginal people who are aiming to create organizational change.
This genre of qualitative research will allow the reader to see the ongoing transformation that has occurred in the researcher’s first five years as an administrator in the public school system. Her upbringing and her mother’s teachings are internalized and become the catalyst for navigating through turbulent times and allow for continuing growth as an Indigenous leader in education.
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Keywords
Administration, Leadership, Aboriginal, Indigenous, Principal, Elementary, Education, Mohawk, colonialism, Decolonization, Autoethnography, Storytelling, Qualitative, Story, Graduation, Experience, Phenomenology, Bureaucracy, Status Quo, Culture, Mixed-blood, Identity, Political, Institutional, Structural change, Indian, First Nation, Transformation, Shapeshifting, Blood memory, Indigenous memory, Historical