10th Annual Urban Native Education Conference: Beyond Borders & Binaries

Today, borders and binaries often shape how we see and move through the world. They appear in nearly every facet of life, from issues of governance, geography, climate change, education, and more. The literal and metaphorical boundaries that shape our worlds are complex and everchanging — they sometimes have the power to unite and strengthen; and, at the same time, their enforcement can wield the power to violently erase, divide, flatten, and silence. Though themselves intangible, borders and binaries are often placed on and across the very real and the very tangible — land, water, people, and more — resulting in material consequences that can be felt for generations. Their existence also affects how we understand our relationships to place, time, and one another. Native peoples, along with our knowledge, stories, and more-than-human relatives, have existed beyond these modern-day borders and binaries since time immemorial, traversing and trading across land and waterways in relationship with one another. This continues today in the ways that we make, find, and defend the “in-between” spaces that don’t fit neatly within settler colonial frameworks, whether that be in regard to our homelands, our identities, or our relationships. Though many borders and binaries feel longstanding and permanent, many have only been formed and enforced recently. We’ve existed before these borders and binaries, and we will exist after them. For the 10th Annual Urban Native Education Conference, we gather under the theme Beyond Borders & Binaries. Through the exchange of strategies, tools, and research for Native American education in urban communities, our goal is for attendees to engage in meaningful discourse and come away feeling hopeful and inspired by thought-provoking ideas shared from our collective community. And then, like many of our ancestors who traversed lands and waterways from one camp to another, we want attendees to respectfully steward their newly gained knowledge home to share with their communities. Interactive workshops will be offered on various educational issues, broadly construed, tackling the annual theme of Beyond Borders and Binaries.