Into the Tapestry
My students and colleagues nominated me for a thing. And I am a little overwhelmed. A lot overwhelmed. The kinds of things they are saying about me sound like the kinds of things people said about my mom.
And my dad.
And my grandfather.
To be placed in one’s ancestry like that… well, let’s just say I keep finding myself trailing off…
But it is not just my genetic ancestry that has me overwhelmed. It is the outpouring of kind words I have received from students and colleagues I have had the great fortune to work with. My community.
I don’t come by recognition easily. I am a Midwesterner – and a Montanan. I’m programmed to ‘aw-shucks’ and shrink from the spotlight. But that is not really what I am thinking about. My ancestors won’t let me take this lightly – neither my genetic forebearers nor my intellectual relations. These are the people I am answerable to. Their affirmation carries weight.
One of the voices that is often in my head when it comes to equity, inclusion, decolonization, and matters of working toward a more just world is Dawn Adams (Choctaw). Her voice is regularly in my head for a number of reasons, but these past couple of weeks I have been reflecting specifically on her keynote presentation at the first meeting of the Intercontinental American Indigenous Research Association. She began by talking about how much she had been looking forward to the meeting, knowing she would be in a room filled with other Indigenous folks – and knowing she would be able to say what she meant without worrying whether they would get it. But… she couldn’t explain that to her White friends. Because, when she did, they got offended. They couldn’t see why she didn’t think they would get it – because they all thought they were one of the good ones.
I don’t often remember my internal monologue – especially 10 years after the fact. It is usually nattering-on constantly, so it would be an impossible task to record all of it. But I do have a clear memory of that moment. When Dr. Adams said her White friends all thought they were one of the good ones, I thought:
“White people [shakes head, rolls eyes]… wait…”
“But am one of the good ones.”
“aren’t I?”
“Okay, I realize that does sound like exactly the sort of thing that someone who thinks he is one of the good ones would say…”
“But I am at an Indigenous research conference. I have done the anti-racism training. I know the right words, laugh at the right jokes… surely that means… I get it more than… the people who haven’t done that stuff… right…?
“So why do I feel compelled to recite my CV like that… to myself, in my head…”
“Am I part of the problem?”
“But people like Aida and Georgia trust me – they must see something in me….”
“…right?”
“but…”
It went on like that for a while. Years actually. It was a REALLY disorienting experience. It left me with a suspiciousness that arises any time I start feeling like I “get” someone else’s experience. It is a suspiciousness that I think is healthy for anyone who has experienced so much unearned privilege in their life. But it also gave me a perspective I can’t unsee. I see and hear “the good ones” everywhere in higher ed.
I see the good ones loudly demand equity – while someone else ghost advises the students whose progress they document in their own annual reports. I see them make comments admonishing a student of color for using “charged language” and being “too emotional” in her discussion of White supremacy (citing bell hooks, Angela Davis, and Cornel West) – before walking out the doors of the closed, comprehensive exam to advertise their own decolonizing agenda. I hear them in stories of students of color who experience racial microagressions in the classroom, only to be gaslighted by the instructor when they ask for something to be done about it – because the instructor presumes to have more expertise on their experience. I hear them in stories I am told by people of color working in offices focused on multiculturalism, diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, etc. About how routinely they are criticized by people who Whitesplain their jobs to them – because, you know, they read a book. I see the M.O. of one of the good ones who makes #gracious offers to mentor students and staff in research or teaching, only to leave them to figure out how to do all of the work on their own – and show up in time to put her name on it and tell us all what a great opportunity she created. Every one of those cases involved someone who believes themselves to be doing the work of inclusion – rationalizing their behavior with a sense of entitlement that comes from being one of the good ones.
But that one of the good ones thinking isn’t just in the behavior of self-referent, self-important, self-aggrandizing, self-promoting individuals. The culture of higher ed is shot-through with it. Let’s be honest, it is mostly a faculty problem. Not entirely. It is everywhere in higher ed. But it is a siren’s song that draws faculty in like Deinocerites to a CO2 cloud. Nowhere is it better evidenced than in the way we can take months to develop 1 paragraph of policy language. We nit-pick every word; every comma placement. We argue about and define terms everyone uses, but not (apparently) in the way we mean them. We go around in circles until we have worn ourselves out and concede to just get something drafted for the department meeting. Then, after a ceremonial contest to determine who knows the most minutia about Robert’s Rules, another group of faculty nit-picks all of the words and punctuation again, making and unmaking revisions, until it is different enough we can all feel like we have weighed in. Someone finally calls the question, we vote, stick the new DEI policy on the website, and get back to what we had been doing.
Don’t get me wrong. Language matters. Words matter. It matters that the room in which the Tapestry induction ceremony takes place is called the Anishinaabe Theater. It matters that students did the work for it to get that name. And the work didn’t stop with the naming. There are also resources on the NDSU website to understand what it means (or, perhaps more to the point, who it means) and how to properly pronounce the name so we can all respectfully participate in the meaning of the naming. That matters.
But sometimes words are just… words.
Meticulously crafted policy without action is empty words (a clanging gong as it were). If you want to see what policy does on its own, you need look no further than the SCOTUS decision in Brown v. Board. It has been 70 years since the highest court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional. And US schools are more segregated now than when desegregation ‘with all due haste’ became the law of the land. Good policy is important, but it is impotent without action.
I am getting sidetracked though. That is not really my point.
I don’t doubt the motives of the students and faculty who were involved in the naming of the Anishinaabe theater (and other rooms in the Memorial Union). I do doubt the motives of faculty members who feel a compulsion to generate their own definitions of words that are well defined elsewhere. As though what matters most is their own input. And I doubt the motives of people who represent themselves as researchers and then sequester themselves in conference rooms to generate definitions and policy related to inclusion without any pretense of consulting extant literature or empirical evidence. Especially when the evidence is right there in front of us every day.
And the evidence is in front of us. I have heard students talk about Kaelen Napoleon like she is their academic mama. I’ve seen their body language when they are around her. They hold themselves like someone who is well and properly mom-ed. I have heard people who have been mentored by Laura Oster-Aaland talk about how she saw capabilities they didn’t know they had, put them in positions for those potentials to blossom – and then taught them to do the same for other people around them. In fact, I know people who have been mentored by people who were mentored by Laura – and they say the same things about Laura’s former mentees that those former mentees say about LOA. That is a proper legacy of inclusion. I have been in the room with Larry Napoleon when we are among a group genuinely committed to a shared goal of supporting students. I have felt the room get quite when he speaks – felt it change as he pulls us together into shared vision. I’ve gotten to watch Derisa Collymore listen to people who don’t feel like they belong, spot the gifts they have to offer, and then make space for them to share those gifts in a way they become resources of the group. I see who trusts Michael Strand and Chris Whitsel. I hear from students who know they can be successful because Tara Nelson is in their corner. Kara Gravely Stack has already got you taken care of. And that is just a handful of the individuals I know, who have been (or are being) inducted into the Tapestry of Inclusion. There are so many more. The university is full of people doing the work of inclusion. Masterfully.
The authentic work of inclusion is other-focused. It starts when people are seen. And everyone I just mentioned sees people. Not for what they lack, but for what they are capable of. As importantly, inclusion is figurative language. It is a container metaphor. You can’t be included abstractly. To be included is to be included IN something. Just as to belong is to belong TO something – to become a part of that something. Doing the work of inclusion requires cultivating an environment people would want to be included in – a community worthy of belonging to.
The problem – one of the problems – with the good ones proliferating definitions, policies, committees, and so forth is that it is done in a vacuum. The definitions, the policies, and all that posturing become ends in themselves. But here is the thing, anyone who thinks they have made a complete statement by simply claiming to value inclusion, is relying on an unstated assumption about inclusion in what. And if that assumption is justified by a tacit belief that whatever the good one has to offer is better than what the other has already, then that sounds to me like someone has just put a new name on the same old, parentalistic master’s tools.
So ultimately, the good ones, have an astronomical bullshit quotient. I’ve written about this before, so I won’t reiterate the whole argument. The important part is that bullshit is not motivated by truth – or meaning. It is always in service of some ulterior motive. And in the case of academics who think they are one of the good ones, the ulterior motive I cannot unsee is maintaining sense of moral (and intellectual) superiority. It is an entirely self-focused ploy to re-order the hierarchy to install themselves in positions of power over others.
Where was I going with all of this…? I know it seems like an oddly fraught rant for someone being inducted in the the Tapestry of Inclusion. Part of what I was trying to do is explain why this feels like a big deal to me. And I don’t know how to do that simply. Partly, I really did wonder if I could accept the nomination when I wasn’t sure who nominated me. And partly to set some context for explaining why I was so profoundly honored when I discovered who did nominate me.
More than a decade ago, I sat in a classroom with Aida Martinez Freeman and a group of students, the first time I taught program evaluation. I was trying to get them to recognize the implications of the word “value” there in the middle of “evaluation”. They weren’t having it. I wasn’t experienced enough to have done a good enough job setting up a nuanced discussion of an evaluator’s responsibilities when values are instantiated, by definition, in making judgments. And I wasn’t a skilled enough facilitator to push them beyond the simplistic conclusion they had gravitated to: they would just be objective and let the data speak for themselves. Aida pushed too, trying to draw them into a more thoughtful discussion, but to no avail. As the rest of the group happily absolved themselves of professional and ethical responsibility, Aida and I caught each other’s gaze and shared a moment’s recognition that we were allies in a lost cause.
Aida and I came back to that moment many times in subsequent months as we dove into literature and dialog about critical theory, beloved community, liberatory praxis – and the importance of being seen. My perspective and sense of responsibility radically shifted and I am profoundly grateful to my dear sister Aida for opening new possibilities for me.
Figuring out what to do with all of that in the classroom was a different story. It was a long and clumsy learning process as I slowly became a very different teacher. Fortunately, I get to work in classrooms filled with students who are themselves master teachers, about the genuine work of inclusion. I benefited from the generosity of dozens of students-teachers who have seen what I was up to and in spite of (perhaps because of) my clumsiness decided ‘I can help with that.’ And they did. They showed up, took risks, supported each other, and co-created environments we all wanted to be in. Because they got into the arena with me, I saw what was possible when a whole group decides to turn away from competing to see who fits and toward creating a soft landing site. It was a vision of a genuinely inclusive community I hadn’t known to hope for.
The teacher I am now strives to open space for people to bring their whole selves to the classroom. It feels less clumsy now. Or maybe I have just gotten more comfortable with my natural gift of awkwardness. I don’t know. But it feels less and less like I am trying to create the environment and more and more like I am simply a conduit for those previous generations to work through me. I do, however, feel a growing responsibility to be a good steward with the gifts that have been entrusted to me.
Perhaps the reason being inducted into the Tapestry feels so weighty is that it is only my name on the agenda, to be recognized for what is, properly, the work and collective wisdom of my community. My nominators are all part of that community, so I don’t feel like I am stealing someone else’s credit. But it isn’t just about me. I’m a representative of something much bigger. The teacher I am was shaped by the students and colleagues who were in the arena with me. And I am answerable to them.
But I suppose the bigger reason I am so overwhelmed by all of this is that, while I am a very different teacher now than when I started at NDSU 16 years ago – I am also not different at all. Academics (especially the good ones) tend to have a misguided obsession with teaching methods and so-called “best practices”. But that is all bullshit. Teaching doesn’t cause learning any more than roads cause traffic (not a prefect metaphor, I admit). People looking for simple teaching hacks are teaching hacks. None of that crap causes people to learn. What makes the difference is when we, as Parker Palmer says, teach who we are. Teaching, done well, is fundamentally relational. Authentic relationship is only possible when we show up as who we genuinely are. And it turns out that who I am as a teacher, was right there in my ancestral inheritance all along.
I am profoundly grateful to my community for helping me find my way to where I was all along. Inclusion is about seeing people and drawing them into something worth being included in. You saw me and you drew me into a wonderful community I didn’t know I needed or could hope for. Thank you.
Nothing matters like people do. … Everything goes. Everything. Except for the love we pour into others and into the world. – John Green