Ka Pichahna ‘Akkala (My Research Story)

In the chapter “To Make Story Again in the World,” Deborah Miranda speaks to the ways our California Indian stories "aren’t easy, they are fractured” (p. 193). In Bad Indians, Miranda shares ways “to make them whole,” an extremely demanding task, one which is contemporary California Indian scholarship. We are directed to a “multilayered web of community reaching back in time and forward in dream, questing deeply into the country of unknown memory” (p. 194); to “look at more than one interpretation simultaneously, … at both the blessing and the genocide” (p. 196); to search out stories that still exist “like underground rivers” that run alive and are singing nonetheless, and call us back (p. 203); and to listen deeply to our bodies, which “like compasses, still know the way” (p. 208). Taking cues from Miranda, this “experiential story” (Archibald, 2008, p. 85) honors this author’s ontological lens and tribal epistemology as a Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo person. The piece integrates koya-’aklanna (paintings/art), storytelling, and Native languages, as the author is “culturally ready” (Kovach, 2021) at this moment. This story is part of a curriculum about the ethics of locating one’s positionality in a context of colonial amnesia, cultural genocide, and linguicide at a predominately White institution. The intention of this publication is to respectfully share story as living relationship in the discourse on Indigenous methodology and culturally sustaining approaches to research and pedagogy. This research story, as a multilayering of koya-’aklanna1 (paintings/art), dreams, embodied knowing, and Native languages, is a quest to be in relation with many relationships simultaneously; to make whole.