Finding Our Voices Through Narrative Inquiry: Exploring a Conflict of Cultures

“Let us put our minds together to see what life we can make for our children” —Tatanka Iyotaka-Sitting Bull As a director of a tribal Head Start program in South Dakota, I encountered problematic and often contradictory tensions centered on my roles as an early childhood program director, a graduate student at South Dakota State University, and a Native American female seeking to change current constructions of what it means to educate young children in my culture. My goal at the outset of this exploration was to construct a better understanding of how the his-torical and cultural experiences of my tribal community have influenced cur-rent views of early childhood education on my reservation, Lake Traverse. I chose to explore these influences through narrative inquiry, because it is a method that is culturally relevant to the Dakota people—our stories keep us connected to the past and the future. What follows is a description of my narrative inquiry and its impact as a transformational learning experi-ence. This story, which I tell and retell through images, photos, poetry, auto-biography, and other forms of representation, is both mine and that of those who have lived and remembered what it was like to be educated in my tribe. Renetta Goeson, MA, is a member of the Sisseton