Cultivating relationships for Indigenous futures: developing a model for university, Tribe, and Land partnerships in educator professional development

This article analyzes the efforts of Cultivating Relationships Collaborative partnering with teachers and Tribes to integrate Indigenous and science, technology, engineering, and mathematics school knowledge, a project of re-learning, un-learning, and the development of Indigenous Land pedagogies with kindergarten to year 12 (K-12) public educators. Cultivating Relationships Collaborative is a co-designed yearlong teacher professional certificate program that partners university faculty from different disciplines and departments from four Tribal Nations, in Idaho and Arizona, USA, to ask schoolteachers to think deeply about the sensitive relationships between people, place, Land, and waters. In four distinct cultural and environmental geographies, we use the conceptual lenses of pedagogies “of and with” Land and decolonial praxis to understand how Cultivating Relationships Collaborative teachers, both Indigenous and settler, grapple with multiple epistemologies for learning. Findings from the program’s first year highlight potentials for Tribal-led teacher learning and coming to know in relationship with people and Land.