Grandmother genealogies: Feminist/ised,indigenist decolonising pedagogies against and beyond the university

Abstract

As a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university we (t)race generative pedagogical experiences of worldmaking cosmopolitics and their (im)possibilities within the University and Politics Disciplinarity. We do this not to redeem or reimagine but to contribute to an enfleshed feminised and racialised undercommons for whom indigenist-decolonial feminist pedagogical-political praxis can never be nor desire to be obedient to the constraints, containments and violences of the settler colonial and its epistemological-pedagogical genocidal project of the Lettered City of anti-Blackness and Indigenous disavowal. We refuse inclusion within, representation as legibility, and the making of community of and as the University. We instead foreground abolitionist categories such as enfleshment, dignity, mutual recognition as exteriority, differential responsible relationship-making, multiple temporalities and the epistemological as ontological, and we centre the knowledges of Indigenist feminised subjects from the exteriority of modernity-coloniality. We are thus selective and explicit about who we choose to walk with, who we make relationship with, and to whom we are responsible and honour. We both guard our right to opacity as well as leave threads of pedagogical meaning-making as invitation to unlearning and relearning new-ancient onto-epistemologies and cosmovisions that move us towards plural pedagogical worlds beyond heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality.

Keywords

Abolitionist university studies body-territory and body-land decolonial feminisms dignity and discomfort indigenist feminist pedagogies

We begin from our survivance, dignity and knowing-being (m)otherwise¹ and our feminist/ised and decolonising Indigenist pedagogies of world-making. I/we do not want to speak (again) of our violent erasure, the epistemological carelessness² of non-recognition and ontological disposability of racialised and feminised people and lifeworlds upon which the modern/colonial project of the University was constructed, and which became more visibly felt and experienced (by some) during the pandemic and this not-post Covid moment. We are tired of this for it is exhausting speaking in the Master’s script of what it is to ‘enter a debate’ and demonstrate ‘expertise’ in ways that leave us breathless and empty. Instead, we focus on our pedagogies of world-making in flesh, spirit and relation despite, against and beyond this Project and its lexicon of knowing-subjectivity and decipherability. We share stories of the undercommons of our manglares/mangroves from the reflections of five women, teacher-scholar and student-scholars: an inter-cultural Indigenous/non-Indigenous collective in the unceded lands of the Worimi and Awabakal peoples in Mulubinba-Newcastle, at and beyond the University, speaking through and with the Grandmothers’ course ‘Global Indigenous Politics’ and in kinship with traditions of Black, Decolonial, Indigenous/ist and Abolitionist feminisms. We embrace the call of brother Eli Meyerhoff (6, 2018) who foregrounds the need to listen (deeply and onto-epistemologically) ‘with the hidden histories of alternative modes of study³ that grapple[d] with the tensions of the university’s ‘undercommons’ – that is, studying in but not of as well as against and beyond the dominant institutions.

We (re)begin from a different genealogy to that of the editors (Timperley and Schick, 2024) in conceptualising the pandemic as not the emergency point of rupture and re-imagining, but rather how we (as in Indigenous/racialised and feminised folx) are always-already in apocalyptic times, denied being-knowing and rendered to the exception of unfreedom that constitutes the rule and the dominant genealogy of normality versus crisis (Indigenous Action Media, 2020; Motta, 2022). We speak to themes of temporality expanding into multiple erotic and lifemaking times and rhythms and a joyous embrace of failing in the dominant scripts of time and the temporal (Motta and Bermudez, 2019; Motta et al., 2023). We speak to themes of embodiment through enfleshment to mark the un-thinkability of our decipherability within the terms of being of capitalist-coloniality- rendered to flesh not body-subject (Motta, 2022). We speak to the ontological as epistemological and/as pluridiversality. We speak to dwelling as its (im)possibility for us within the terms of knowing, being, doing of the modern/Colonial University. We speak to differential responsibilities and (dis)loyalties to these terms of containment and enslavement and together tenderly and viscerally mark the unmarked presence of Whiteness as systemic unfreedom of racialised and feminised bodies of knowledge, flesh and land (Ahmed, 2007). We centre therefore the lineages of worldmaking as onto-epistemological practices dedicated to life in the plural of Indigenous (feminist), Decolonial feminist and Black feminist foremothers and ancestors. We foreground the onto-epistemological nature of the pedagogical and create conditions of possibility for ecologies of intimacies and infrastructures of difference against and beyond settler-coloniality at the epistemological and political heart of such praxis, and the prefigurative presence of emergent forms of education as life as becoming (m)otherwise that vision and enflesh feminist/ised and decolonising university (in the pluridiverse) futurities. Our desire is not to re-imagine the project of the Modern/Colonial (neoliberalised) University. Our desire is its abolition.

Teaching as ceremony⁴

The Global Politics of Indigenous Peoples is a directed course in a Major in Politics and International Relations. It runs bi-annually and is woven with decolonising Indigenist feminist pedagogies which embed multiple languages of the political and of reason which centre the body-territory (Women’s Earth Alliance [WEA] and the Native Youth Sexual Health Alliance, 2016) and the body as Earth, Cosmos and Ancestors. This nurtures the enfleshment of other relationalities between students, between texts and languages and between human, more-than-human and non-human subjects as a process of both dignity and recognition for Indigenous student-scholars (Simpson, 2014) and of responsibility-making and (un)learning for non-Indigenous student-scholars (Motta, 2018a, 2018b). The course explores themes – in sacred circle and through ritual as enfleshed reason – that one might encounter in a mainstream settler-colonial rendition of global politics but does so in a way that: (i) begins from Indigenous survivance, dignity and presence; (ii) visibilises in multiple tongues the violences of settler colonial states, governmentality, economy, polity, subjectivity, and practices and policies of health, education, housing and; (iii) learns in embodied and enfleshed relational ways of the other worldings, onto-epistemologies and cosmovisions in dialogue with diverse Indigenous peoples from across Abya Yala and settler colonies like Turtle Island, Aotearoa and so called Australia. Our intention is to hold space and nurture the birthing of senti-pensando (thinking as feeling, feeling as thinking as inseparable) praxis through pluralising and placing⁵ the bodies of/as knowledge and being/doing that we dialogue with and to senti-pensar together the decolonising and unsettling of the settler-state of all things political.

As Nicola, student-scholar, co-creator of our weaving exhibition and co-mother of this paper, describes:

The Grandmother was deeply felt throughout this course.

Her compassion and endurance, her tenderness, her patience.

Grandmothers hold the wisdom and enduring love which births and guides new creations and connections. She nourishes the seeds of compassion, seeds that flowed through and germinated in our course.

Her patience with learning and assignment deadlines, not rushing nor forcing learning but encouraging it with tenderness.

She guided students to learn and engage in the content and creativity in their own way, never forcing conformity or rigid learning.

She respected and honoured the diversity of student engagement and journey within the course, and she carried and held us through our cycles of collaboration and creativity.

This type of patience, acceptance and warmth, is only found in the Grandmother wisdoms and these wisdoms embodied the pedagogy of this course.

The course has got a name so to speak (‘The Grandmothers’ Course’), as have I, convenor of the course and one of the few working-class racialised, Indigenous-Mestiza scholars in the University, for my work on decolonising and feminising curriculum, relationships, positionalities, responsibilities and practices in, against and beyond the University. She (the course, that is) attracts students who are both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, including a high level of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students, racialised migrant students, mature students, single parents, LGBQTIA+ students and others who have faced the violence of othering in their university and broader journey as (political) subjects. The course is articulated as a safe space for plurality and as committed to decolonising and feminist praxis standing shoulder to shoulder, heart to heart and hand to hand with First Nations kin and community in Mulubimba-Newcastle and so called Australia more broadly in the struggle for sovereignty and land back. There is no shying away from speaking the intent or content of the course, for she carries the energies of Kookaburra, her raucous laughter at Power, her irreverence and her direct talking of truth like the Elders and Old Ones (Motta et al., 2023).

She is the Grandmothers’ course because she embodies a commitment I made in the enfleshed bringing to text of our survivance and presence as a racialised mestiza-Indigenous woman and as ancestors and peoples in Liminal Subjects: Weaving (our) Liberations, my most recent book. This commitment is to refuse relegation to forgetting of the Grandmothers’ presence and wisdoms and to walk an enfleshed commitment to the tending and sharing of these knowledges to future generations; and in this way to the healing of the (m)otherlines (Motta, 2018b: 198–200).

This time round after a bit of fight⁶ I was ‘granted’ because the course had over 70 students, a co-teacher. I could invite my comadre Y, an Indigenous-Afro Venezuelan communitarian (m)other to come join me in the weave of the great re-turn of the Grandmothers at this time.

Before the students arrived, we blessed the room, calling in the Grandmothers and invoking the elementals of earth, air, water and fire, calling in Kookaburra and Black Puma, the red-gold thread of the ancestors. We held the space; the (broken) heart of that place and its centre for 13 weeks with an altar marking our presence as we re-inhabited and decolonised in Indigenist feminist ways the palimpsest of the classroom.

New-ancient beginnings: Temporal (non)belongings and dwelling (m)otherwise

This was the biggest grandmother course had ever been- big enough according to dominant measures of value to merit co-teacher/co-madre Y, to come journey with us and to both feel and nurture the medicines weaved into the pedagogies and practices of its journey. I re-member how time was put to work in plural ways that both embodied and seemed to nurture in mysterious currents and pathways synchronicity.

The material that we needed for weaving was sold in two places, one in Sydney, and magically I was in Sydney (happens maybe once a year) four days before our weaving was set to (re)begin and was five stops on the trainline from this place. The politics of water and Madre cacao ceremony fell on the full moon at a time of high tide and deepening presence of her waters. The class fell alternatively on the new and full moon embodying the cosmic temporalities and insurgent rhythms and beats of the goddess Chía moon mother and her beckoning into other cycles and relationalities of reconnection, polyrhythmic (epistemological) listening and slow tenderness.

Y and I were both burnt-out and exhausted in connecting yet differential ways: the Institution and its violating logics eroding our capacity to be present in integral ways and reproducing our painful precarities. There is a strange kind of soul-sickness that the modern/colonial University can cause to fester; a double exploitation wrought of our deep commitment to care of and as difference and plurality (epistemological, affective, ontological and/as relational); a double bind(ing) of sorts.

So, entering into the circular space of a classroom at the centre of the building in which the first round of attacks on politics and others had been announced in late 2019, where we had taken back the space for sister Brittney Cooper in 2020, where we had decolonised and feminised with myself, and comadres Rosalba Icaza and Tiina Seppala later that same year; where our School Committee meetings are held during which more containments, constraints and restructuring are unceremoniously pronounced. These memories were present with us; these sisters and violations accompanied us from the veins of time etched into the body of the classroom space.

I knew that be-ing in this central, trunk, spine place of such a disembodied and anesthetised building would be special. I knew we were re-occupying again, centring a (m)other kind of energetic and temporal imprint and calling in a root(ing) of decolonising feminised sovereignty-making and territory claiming that would reverberate throughout all the blank walls and empty spaces far across time.

I noticed too how as the weeks passed and the cocreating and insurgent feminist Indigenist pedagogies of place as body-territory and body-land unfolded, how the soul-sickness that had nearly brought us to our knees started to recede, to dissolve, to float away in the stream of our re-membering and piecing back together a weave of relationality and knowing-being-doing (m)otherwise.

These reflections about coordinating and co-weaving the pedagogies of this grandmother course in the heart of the violating containments of the materiality and the onto-epistemologies of anti-life of the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university (Boggs et. al., 2019; Hall, 2018; Moten and Harney, 2013; Motta, 2019a) foreground temporality, its plurality and in that plurality its (epistemological) relationalities otherwise (Motta and Bennett, 2018; Motta and Bermudez, 2019; Vázquez, 2009). The modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university works through colonising the lifeworlds of its workers and collapsing the time between the homeplace and workplace, demanding and expectating subjects to be on call 24/7. This nexus of temporal (dis)power(ment) augments a productivist and hyper-speed temporality with little respect for the life of our bodies, the needs of our (knowing) being or the responsibilities of our relationships and relationalities (Hall, 2018; Amsler and Motta, 2017). These temporal demands also interpolate student experience. They too are expected to always be on-time and perform~~ing~~ to productivist time so that they might become successful and docile subjects of Empire and the settler colony (Motta, 2019a).

We are wise to listen to the grandmothers and their ancestral calls from beyond settler-time (Rifkin, 2017), to embrace cycles of life, death, rebirth and relationality with our non-human kin of trees, plants and animals and more-than-human kin of the Chia moon goddess and the water beings (Kimmerer, 2013; Motta, 2018a, 2018b; Vázquez, 2009). We re-turn to temporal wanderings that allow dwelling in the non-always-already plural space of the university classroom and to touch layers of emotional relationship and (violent)non-relationship that have marked us differentially as racialised teachers and Indigenous and non-Indigenous student-scholars (Alexander, 2005; Mohanty, 2003; Zembylas, 2020). Time was with us, as a living pulsating presence that guided us as we channelled/enfleshed her to enable the dropping into the territories of the body/self and other, and Country/Madre Tierra/Land (Motta, 2021; WEA and the Native Youth Sexual Health Alliance, 2016) with which to weave knowledges and/as relationships as unlearning and recognition, of rest, and vulnerability, of truth and reckoning (Motta, 2019a; Vázquez, 2009). Such dwelling and failure to be on time or expect such on timeliness enabled a kind of healing, a witnessing of the soul weariness and the sickness, a coming into presence to share wisdoms and stories of our Old Ones and with that rupture the temporal linearity and the values and violations this embeds (Motta, 2025; Motta and Bermudez, 2019).

Such temporal plurality opens pathways to learn the importance of refusing and resisting Empire and the temporal logics and containments of the settler-colony and its institutional systems including the University (Alexander, 2005; Love, 2019; Meyerhoff, 2019). However, this is not an opening/invitation that is premised upon the embodiment of such resistance or refusal to remain contained with modern/colonial coordinates of progressive or left-wing militancy and political subjectivity (de la Cadena, 2010; Kimmerer, 2013; Motta, 2017, 2022a). Nor is it premised on the desire of belonging but rather communal disinvestment from the project of the Lettered City (Rama, 1996) for the University is premised upon our non-belonging and therefore we are always-already (im)possibly present. We repeat we are in but not of the University.⁷ Rather, then, we came to embody and share multiple languages of the political in a communal space of deep-listening, as we unlearned hegemonic (including progressive) modern/colonial renditions of the knowing-subject, of political subjectivity and of political-epistemological desire (Motta, 2018a, 2018b, 2019a).

Grandmother canopies, weaving (political) worlds and/as responsibility-making

Such weaving knowing-becomings as epistemological and ecological relationalities (m)otherwise necessarily overflowed the containments of the classroom as we co-weaved our responsibilities to Country, each other, ourselves and to Black sovereignty-making. We honoured the Indigenous matriarchs, two-spirit and feminised subjects as plural subjects of liberation and decolonisation through a co-visioned weaving exhibition. The exhibition and its co-weaved, communitarian nature was emergent from the relational pedagogical praxis forged in the course’s first weeks. The weaving material had become available at just the right time and our Elder in relation was also available at just the right time to teach us the weaving technique as pedagogy. We were thus able to weave timelines of learning, unlearning and dignity-making in each session. Learnings were enfleshed in relational and plural pedagogies in the literal thread, through the touch of our fingertips and the rhythms of threading that drummed a beat of re-membering as I lectured and we reflected, shared story and co-created ritual (Motta, 2018a, 2018b).

They/we foregrounded an embodied critique of the hierarchical dualisms and frontiers of exclusion between mind/body, theory/practice, education/life, decolonisation as abstraction and decolonisation as responsibility-making on the front lines and through body-territory and body as land that are co-constitutive of the mainstream (politics) curriculum. In such education as domination, it is the former which acts as the containment and enslavement of the possibilities of Black freedom and (feminist) decolonisation of the latter (Moten and Harney, 2013; Motta, 2019a, 2019b; Watego, 2021). We share and pluralise in decolonial feminist ways Nishnaabeg scholar Leanne Simpson’s (2014: 10) critique of how academia co-opts Indigenous study projects, knowledges and cosmovisions into the trap of ‘reconciliation’ that maintains settler colonialism. We amplify her call for appropriating academia’s resources for a ‘radical resurgence project’ that intertwines land-based Indigenous study with anticolonial resistance. Too often, too, such re-enslavement is reproduced in progressive pedagogy/modes of study that names itself (feminist) decolonial but reproduces these dualisms, refuses to interrogate, reflect, understand and become disloyal (to) the Whiteness of its authors, and creates a rendition of decolonisation which reproduces Indigenous disavowal and negation of pluridiverse worlds in its logics of inclusion, equity and recognition (Darder, 2009; Hall, 2018; Meyerhoff, 2019: Motta, 2018a, 2018b, 2022; Rodriguez, 2019; Tuck and Yang, 2012; Watego, 2021).

Conversations, reflections and dialogues moved easefully enfleshing and marking Indigenous/ist and Black dignity (Motta, 2018b) and White discomfort (Mohanty, 2003; Motta, 2018a, 2018b; Zembylas, 2020) towards what it might mean to take the front-line, to decolonise and to stand for land back as (body)territory as student-(politics)scholars in the University, and in community and/as politics. The idea of the exhibition to give back to community, to make bridges of connection, solidarity and kinship with Indigenous sovereign community (Gonzalez et al., 2023), to re-occupy the space of the NU modern/colonial transnational building and make visible its logics of displacement and disavowal of Indigenous sovereignties (Motta and Allen, 2019) emerged in one such dialogue. It was the women, Indigenous and non-Indigenous who took up the threads of this co-creation and birthing otherwise with Y and I.

As Nicola a co-enfleshed-visioner of the weaving exhibition that we co-created reflects:

Walking on Bundjalung Country through the hinterland’s sub-tropical rainforests, marvelling at its beauty and power, I stopped to read a sign about the local wildlife and tree species, in particular the endangered night-cap oak, specific to this area, growing up to 40 m high and is what felt like a grandmother tree.

This sign spoke of the diverse roles these trees play within this ecosystem. Their leaves transform carbon dioxide into oxygen for our atmosphere, their long branches and trunks act as homes for the many types of moss and lichen ferns. They are habitats for birds, with broken and dead branches being homes for animals, and their roots deeply stabilize the soil upon which the tree was birthed.

Everything in this ecosystem is strongly collaborating, weaving and working together to allow each other to thrive. I reflect for a moment and pay my gratitude and respect for these trees and this land. It makes me reflect on the beauty and power of our weaving exhibition and co-creation on Awabakal and Worimi Country. The soil that grounded us and allowed us to create was a similar sense of deep collaboration, working with each other and allowing our strengths from our diverse backgrounds to flourish. Roots of trust, listening, respect and care- never excluding nor forcing, generated a space to create.

Just like the trees on Bundjalung Country this creation had many layers and branches, branches that reached the internal and external. Reaching ourselves and our own learnings and lives, each other, our class, our university, our community and the Country we live on. Honouring and centring Indigenous feminist practices that are often devalued. Honouring practices of weaving, painting, drawing, voice, poetry, ceremony, processes of reflection and expression. Being given time and space within a university and especially in a politics course is very sacred. It not only expands the possibility of what learning, creation and politics can be, it returns us to what learning and creation has always been.

When I look up at these ancient trees on Bundjalung Country and the trees that are all around us, I reflect on our weaving exhibition and how similar and sacred they both are.

Nicola’s reflections foreground the pedagogies of diverse languages and literacies of the political/epistemological that run like the streams beneath the land in this course. Her words centre the co-created, horizontal and plural relationalities which give voice to unmarked settler certainties and myths premised in forced state forgetting and disavowal of Indigenous sovereignties (Motta, 2018a, 2018b; Simpson, 2014). They also foreground all that we re-membered of survivance, and the re-connections to (m)otherlines and deep wisdoms as Indigenous women/feminised subjects that was experienced. This enabled four women student-scholars to lead in new-ancient ways the gestation, tending to and birthing of the weaving exhibition in which economies of gift (Adese, 2014; Kimmerer, 2013) were embodied in giving back to community and caring for Country through the recognitions and learnings weaved in the threads and poetry, spoken word, art and music shared and co-created during the course (Harrison et al., 2017; Kimerer, 2013; Simpson, 2014; Tuck and Yang, 2012). In both process and physical-epistemological-spiritual-cultural enfleshment an ecology of intimacy (Motta, 2022; Simpson, 2014) and infrastructures of care of and as plurality and difference against and beyond settler-coloniality (in complex plural forms) were weaved.

The delicate and tender relationalities between inner and outer territories that are central to feminist indigenist pedagogical-political practice and that enflesh the deep onto-epistemologies that are both the weave and the basket, individually-in relation and collectively in common without the erasure of the plural is also felt through Nicola’s reflection. The epistemological-ethics of nurturing conditions of possibility for deep listening in which to drop into the magic, majesty and wisdoms of the territories of Country/Madre Tierra and our feminised and racialised bodies comes to the fore (Bishop, 2023; Motta, 2018a, 2018b; Ungunmerr-Baumann et al., 2022). As the canopy of the grandmother trees holds space for the life of a rich inter-generational and inter-relational ecology of non-human, more-than-human ancestors and humans to sit in learnings and reverence, defence and custodianship together, so the pedagogy and/as energy that the Indigenous women facilitators of the course brought was to hold space like the Grandmother trees. They tended to the emergence, recognition and nurturing of our lives lived in responsible relationship as students, as Indigenous (on and off Country) and non-Indigenous peoples, and as members of our communities and kinship networks (see for Indigenist pedagogies of kinship-making e.g. Donald, 2021; Lees and Bang, 2023).

Grandmothers’ healing hands as trans-indigenous liberations

Such responsibility-making and economies of gift foreground the inner and outer territories of body and Country/Madre Tierra that are the (onto)epistemological fonts of knowledges that in creating and embodying are transformative. The student-scholar or teacher-scholar is not external to, nor does she remain in non-relation with such processes and practices of feminist Indigenist decolonisation. We (teacher(s)) held and tended the grandmothers’ widsoms that cultivated pedagogies of dignity and recognition for Indigenous student-scholars (Motta, 2018b). These subjects-in-relation were often used to facing non-recognition and denial in politics and other classrooms, in which Indigenous disavowal is reproduced in modes of learnings, texts and curriculum and conceptualisations of the political. Entering these unthought modern/colonial violating politics classrooms takes courage and strength to pass, and to refuse to assimilate or self-deny (hooks, 1994).

To enter then into a politics classroom that actively unthinks and resists these modern/colonial violent containments and renditions of the political, of knowledge, of pedagogy and of being-knowing of teacher-student scholars, fosters a space of relative safety in which the masks and contortions of passing (Ahmed, 1999: Gonzalez et al., 2023) can tenderly and with caution be removed. It does not negate our right to opacity (Glissant, 1997; Motta, 2025) for we can never truly be present in all our depths of wisdoms and being-knowing and worlding in such institutional confines, but it does allow for elements of a methodology of stripping (Motta, 2018b). We consciously and actively disrupt antiblackness in which the racialised and feminised other is reproduced as monstrous, indecipherable and relegated to non/mis recognition. We are rebellious as popular educators, as Indigenous-Mestiza and Afro Indigenous working-class women in our 40s/50s calling in our ancestors, rebellious to all established disciplinarity and forms of govermentability and/as pedagogy. Breathing through our fear with the certainty of the strength and wisdoms of the abuelas, we decolonise and feminise the terms of the conversation within the politics classroom in Black/Iindigenous terms of mutual recognition between us monstrous and indecipherable others(ed).

Such a space-time and/as relationalities centre us in our deep dark and ancient life-making and nurturing Black monstrous feminine power (Motta, 2018b; Motta and Abeydeera, 2025). As Donna an Indigenous grandmother, mother, sister, daughter reflects on her journey with and beyond the course:

These weaved pieces of fibre made with my hand came to hold my knowledge, my art, and my grief.

Each fibre taking a form of its own to carry these pieces of me.

Formed from the gift of silent reciprocity between my cohort, my lecturers and their knowledges. In a room that adopted a unique level of acceptance only found in the arms of a grandmother. Her heartbeat was felt through every teaching, through every conversation and at times you could feel her tears and on occasions hear her smile. The room was full of her energy, her scent and her love as we sat learning and weaving those fibres into one. Her place and position was solidified in a room previously cold and lifeless.

My tears became hers as we weaved fibres moulded into one.

This kinship of grandmother to grandchild contains our family lineage of those before me, and those who will come after me. For now, I hold this space and use each strand of fibre to transmute pain into love, sorrow into knowledge and struggles into victories. With each piece weaved into the other for strength and endurance, resembling the endurance of grandmothers’ hands. Her heart carries the past and present, right and wrong, triumphant and challenge. Her hands guide me as a I weave the pieces of fibre to form one chain of endless love.

Donna could be present within and as an essential part of the feminist decolonial and Indigenist weave of space/time and relationality (m)otherwise. Her presence is both a refusal of her rendition to non-being and non-recognition and enfleshes a communal break from the violences and exhaustions of passing (Ahmed, 1999: Gonzalez et al., 2023). Her multiple and plural presence was not only a revealing of that which is otherwise kept safely opaque but also a re-connection to the wisdoms and healing of her motherliness, of her own grandmothers, and of her re-turn to wholeness and internal and external recognition in a society premised upon her/their/our non/misrecognition. She moves from an economy of emotion which attempts to re-produce us/her as the gagged and ‘happy slave’ (Ahmed, 2004; Meyerhoff, 2018, 8-12) to an undercommons of enfleshment of presence on her own terms, her own voice and in-relation (m)otherwise.

Grandmothers’ wisdoms: Discomfort as invitation and gift of world-making

Discomfort (Motta, 2018b; Motta and Amsler, 2019; Pereira, 2012) is a condition of possibility for the rupturing of an economy of emotion (Ahmed, 2004) that reproduces the unfreedom and onto-epistemological disavowal of Indigenous subjects and lifeworlds. It involves embodying the undercommons which is in but not of the University project and which demands a refusal of a settler-subjectivity of mastery, zero-point epistemology and disembodied knowledge-making as codification and confinement (Hall, 2018; Meyerhoof, 2018; Motta, 2016, 2018a, 2018b). As Indigenist scholar-teachers enfleshing the Grandmothers we refuse this economy of emotion as mastery. The conditions of (im)possibility we nurture are not to foster forced discomfort as self-rejection, or fast-paced discarding of subjectivity, or guilt-making or debt-inducing for non-Indigenous students. Rather, we tend to the revealing of the fault-lines and sensed violences of which they have been (un)knowingly apart so that they might come to being-knowing-otherwise as responsibility-taking/making in feminist decolonial ways. Our praxis honours the grief of letting go of hard held beliefs and loyalties to Empire and its Truths and/of Politics based on unfreedom and violation. We hold space for the unravelling of logics and (ir)rationalities of possession and how these too mark in differential ways the body-territories of settler-subjectivities (Fanon, 1967; Motta, 2017). Our logics are not those of enslavement, possession or domination; but of gift and mutuality in/as plurality (Kimmerer, 2013; Motta, 2018a, 2018b, 2022; Simpson, 2014). We embed disruption and refusal of the violences of Empire and the settler-colony in (onto)epistemological pedagogical intimacies through invitation to join us, (un)learn and step into responsible-relationship in the mangrove swamps of our multiple sovereignty-makings (Motta, 2022). This is a pedagogical politics of decolonial love (hooks, 1984, 1999; Love, 2019; Motta, 2019b; Simpson, 2014).

Non-Indigenous students dropping into deep listening and respectful relationship and accountability-taking were gently invited into unthought and unfelt territories in relation to others and themselves; territories that gestured towards refusal and unravelling of relationalities of unfreedom. Nicola’s response to Donna’s journey embodies this:

Journeying, learning with, connecting to, and being guided by our ancestors was a central part of our learning experience, an incredibly expansive and unfamiliar practice for myself as a non-Indigenous student. Donna expresses the deep creativity, warmth, acceptance and love of the Grandmother and the feminine ancestral lineages that were present and guided the course and exhibition. What is felt in this reflection is personal, communal and ancestral connections that deeply influenced the creation of our artworks and how these weaved fibres are physical representations of personal and collective journeys that were birthed and initiated from Indigenous and Feminist pedagogies of learning-being.

Within my personal journey, accepting this invitation to connect with my ancestors, to un(re)learn ways of education, politics and community was central and expansive; a journey that rarely happens with such care in a settler-colonial university space. To understand and embody my broader responsibilities as a non-Indigenous student, I shifted towards not just myself as an individual learner but focusing, instead, on having authentic relationships built of collaboration, care and listening with Indigenous studenst, scholars and teachers, the university community and broader Mulubinba-Newcastle community.

Learning that the webs of connections we build and nurture with community is more important than just individual pathways, success and academic achievement. In particular, embodying the responsibility to support and protect space for First Nations sovereignty-making, recognition and decolonial feminist practices. This process birthed and nurtured new territories of (re)learning.

Or as Izzy a non-Indigenous student expresses:

Our learning space shifted into something deeper each week – these woven changes moved with depth and time. Walking into the space, held in a high-rise classroom in Newcastle City, we were welcomed and grounded by a circular altar, rooted in this land and ancestry. Learning with Sara brought our class to life, not merely learning the subject, but rather developing and gaining knowledge to be understood and held close. Our class was not immediately comfortable to this space – a circular, reciprocal classroom is not the norm. But with our weaving, conversations and deep listening, our class became a deeply connected place that called on our placements and invited us to deeply listen to the Indigenised and feminised knowledges paramount in learning Indigenised democracies.

My own journey wove into the transformation from subject to student to deep listener – having this space to weave, play and connect with deeper transformations . . . Working with our hands pulled in a physical and tangible connection to our feminised knowledge systems – which has been disregarded and degraded – with the weaving encouraging a deeper relationality. Working and learning on land to understand our placement built on this ecological relationality in a way that textbooks could not.

When I think back to our weaving journey, I remember the feelings more than definitions; the grief, strength and survivance of Indigenous women and communities entwined within these knowledges Sara gave to us. The classroom was a space for sharing knowledge and connecting to our families, environment and all that entails – knowledge and deep listening now built into my placement and my responsibilities that I will carry with me into my work and life.

Nicola’s and Izzy’s reflections bring attention to the modes of learning/study as world-making (Meyerhoff, 2019) that are seeded through decolonial Indigenist feminist pedagogies. These plural(ising) pedagogical practices foster relationalities that escape and overflow, amd tenderly rupture the unfreedom of dominant pedagogies. This praxis nurtures a becoming communal without erasure of difference and the refusal of the desire to posses such difference which manifests as the unjust taking of authorship or the becoming of an authoritative voice re-inscribing a zero-point (onto)epistemology which re-confines Indigenous/ist difference within settler-coloniality. These are modes of constructing emergent communities in but not of, against and beyond the classroom and the Modern/Colonial project of the University.

Conclusion: Refusal, enfleshment and pedagogical worldmaking beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university

We co-weaved this piece through a call to and channelling of the Grandmothers. We threaded the weave of our offering through ceremony as writing, reflection, thematisation and the cultivating of a collective of inter-cultural women moving in but not of, and against and beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university. We (t)race generative pedagogical experiences of worldmaking cosmopolitics and their (im)possibilities within the University and Politics Disciplinarity. We do this not to redeem or reimagine but to contribute to an enfleshed feminised and racialised undercommons of education as life for whom indigenist-decolonial feminist pedagogical-political praxis can never be nor desire to be obedient to the constraints, containments and violences of the settler colonial and its epistemological-pedagogical genocidal project of the Lettered City of anti-Blackness and Indigenous disavowal.

We refuse inclusion within, representation as legibility, and the making of community of and as the University. We instead foreground abolitionist categories such as enfleshment, dignity, mutual recognition as exteriority, differential responsible relationship-making, multiple temporalities and the epistemological as ontological, and we centre the knowledges of Indigenist feminised subjects from the exteriority of modernity-coloniality and its geopolitical (onto)epistemological Imperial project. We are thus selective and explicit about who we choose to walk with, who we make relationship with, and to whom we are responsible and honour. We both guard our right to opacity as well as leave threads of pedagogical meaning-making as invitation to unlearning and relearning new-ancient onto-epistemologies and cosmovisions that move us towards plural pedagogical worlds beyond heteropatriarchal capitalist-coloniality and the University.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Sara C. Motta

Notes

Author biographies

Sara C. Motta is a proud Indigenous-Mestiza of Colombia Chibcha/Muisca, Eastern European Jewish and Celtic lineages living, loving, resisting and re-existiendo on the unceded lands of the Awabakal and Worimi peoples, NSW, so called Australia. She is mother, grandmother, curandera, popular educator and award-winning poet and political philosopher who is currently A/Professor in Politics at the University of Newcastle, NSW. Her latest book Liminal Subjects: Weaving (Our) Liberation (Rowman and Littlefield) was winner of the 2020 best Feminist Book, International Studies Associate (ISA). She is a prolific writer of texts as breath and survivance, has co-created numerous projects of decolonising feminist queering education as healing sovereignties in Abya Yala, UK and Australia, is a founding member of the women’s/feminised survivors sanctuary project in Mulubimba-Newcastle and is currently dreaming into being her project (M)otherwise: a politics of the wilds comprised of a documentary, podcasts/mini-history of (m)other militants, book and pedagogical resources. Find further details of her work at: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/profile/sara-c-motta and Contact her if you resonate with refusal and joyous rebellion beyond enslavement and the containments of the (settler) colony and towards the mestizaje wilds at: sara.c.motta@newcastle.edu.au

Donna Marzinotto is a mother, grandmother, wife, daughter, sister, aunty, niece and cousin. She grew up on Eora Country with her Wiradjuri mob, however her biological father is from Bundjalung Country. This makes her a proud Wiradjuri Bundjalung woman who has always identified. She is married to an Italian man who has added value to her cultural worldview. She has just completed a Bachelor of Global Indigenous Studies at University of Newcastle and us currently studying via the cross institutional pathway with La Trobe University to complete the last three subjects in the Bachelor of Social Science.

Nicola Hutchinson is a young non-Indigenous woman who grew up on Kuringai and Darug Country, and spent considerable time on Bundjalung Country with her Grandmother and family when growing up. Her family has lived on these lands of so called ‘Australia’ for 4-5 generations, coming from English and German lineages. She is now living, working and learning on Awabakal and Worimi Country. She is a granddaughter, daughter, sister, cousin and friend and currently studying a Bachelor of Global Indigenous Studies majoring in Politics and a Bachelor of Development Studies majoring in Environmental Sustainability.

Jessica Rodham is a non-Indigenous daughter, granddaughter, sister, niece, partner and friend. She grew up on Wiradjuri land with her family. She is a recent graduate of the University of Newcastle situated on Awabakal and Worimi land. She graduated with a Bachelor of Development Studies (Honours) and a Bachelor of Business. Jessica completed her honours in the Pacific Islands, and she is set to return to the Islands to continue to work and learn alongside the Pacific on climate change issues.

Isobelle Sullivan is a non-Indigenous daughter, sister, cousin, niece, and granddaughter who grew up on Kamilaroi/Gomeroi country, and has spent considerable time on Gamilaroi country. She is now living and learning on Awabakal and Worimi Country. She is a soon-to-be graduate of the Bachelor of Development Studies, majoring in urban and regional development, and the Bachelor of Business, majoring in politics and international relations. Isobelle has worked and learned with non-government and government organisations in Australia and the Cook Islands, within environmental and social spaces. She endeavours to continue learning and growing in these spaces.

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Grandmother genealogies: Feminist/ised,indigenist decolonising pedagogies against and beyond the university

Abstract

Keywords

Teaching as ceremony 4

New-ancient beginnings: Temporal (non)belongings and dwelling (m)otherwise

Grandmother canopies, weaving (political) worlds and/as responsibility-making

Grandmothers’ healing hands as trans-indigenous liberations

Grandmothers’ wisdoms: Discomfort as invitation and gift of world-making

Conclusion: Refusal, enfleshment and pedagogical worldmaking beyond the modern/colonial (neoliberalised) university

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biographies

References

Teaching as ceremony⁴