Picking Blue Dawns: Community Epistemologies, Dreams, and (Re)Storying Indigenous Autoethnography

Abstract

As a Queer, Indigenous descendant, and first-generation doctoral candidate, I often write through autoethnography as a theoretical and methodological tool that contextualizes personal experiences through communal onto-epistemologies. In this paper, I share experiences, stories, and dreams in the academy and within my own communal knowledge systems to unsettle the continued settler coloniality of academia and how community-based epistemologies allow me to shape my relationship to knowledge, community, and research. There is often a pejorative view of auto-ethnography, usually referring to it as “me-search,” that argues how writing from personal experience is human-centric, uncritical, and subjective. This perspective further invalidates personal experience as a legitimate source of epistemology and simultaneously encourages hierarchies and superiorities of knowledge. I contribute to the growing field of literature that positions autoethnography as an Indigenous-based methodology, a move I call (re)storying Indigenous autoethnography, that is both generative and imperative in understanding social, cultural, and political worlds.