Telling our personal story is one of the most powerful tools for self-understanding, the integration of information, and critical insight. This unique approach to ethnic studies and the psychology of identity is designed to utilize autobiographical storytelling to facilitate a process of transformative identity politics.
Ethnoautobiography sees Ethnic Studies and the Psychology of Identity as the critical and transdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, border-crossings, migration, and indigeneity. When we study and understand the historical and contemporary entanglements among the different sets of binaries (victim/victimizer; white/person of color; indigenous/settler, for example), what results is a decolonization process that helps students develop a more complex view of their social, cultural, and political lives. Through the use of a storytelling framework that is indigenously grounded, Ethnoautobiography opens up to other sources of power outside of the established categories that are often centered on whiteness, modernity, and colonial thinking. The experiences and perspectives of people of color within and beyond the United States and the experiences of Indigenous people provide the critical context for the deconstruction of ""white consciousness"" and the remembrance and envisioning of ways to participate in and create civil societies and participatory democracies that support the survival of our planet for the future.
Ethnoautobiography creates safe educational spaces for all to learn the histories, cultures, and academic traditions of Native Peoples, communities of color in the U.S., and their interactions with dominant settler society. Ethno-autobiographies are used as tools for exploring histories of oppression and discrimination, and in order to develop the necessary courage, creativity, and understanding in overcoming racism and other forms of oppression. Liberation practices addressing social justice issues require both the witnessing and resolution of traumatic histories as well as the deconstruction and contextualization of settler, colonial, and supremacist histories. This process honors the complexities of who we are in a circle of storytelling and inquiry which validate the experiences of all citizens.