Connecting with Swirls through Autoethnography: Perspectives on STEM Education as an Assimilated Quapaw

The purpose of this autoethnography is to explore my own lived experiences as a Quapaw who was adopted out at an early age, and to better understand my perspectives on STEM (Science Technology Engineering Math) education as an assimilated Quapaw. This autoethnography explores my previous educational experiences and my journey through different research efforts to deepening the understanding of Indigenous peoples and STEM Education. This study stresses the importance of stories as data for research, and how stories are explored, described, connected, interpreted, and shared. This process is nonlinear. Aligning myself as an Indigenous Researcher (Whitinui, 2014; Bishop, 2020) has helped to clarify my approach to doing research. Through the use of Tribal Critical Race Theory (Brayboy, 2005) and The Transformational Indigenous Praxis (Pewewardy, 2017), this autoethnography has brought to light the importance of connections and the impact of a lack of connections. Connections are important, but how I learned to view those connections was found to be equally important. The term connecting, while at times seems linear, can also be observed within swirls. Swirls connect in nature, like galaxies and storms, but can be approached as a lens to view connections in research. All efforts made in education, research and personal life needs to come back around to a question of how it connects me and my family to Quapaw. Recentering my spaces to connect with Indigenous ways means going back to the swirl, going back to revisit a space, and then taking the swirl to build connections. This is healing, this is ki ho ta. Not abandoning one thing for another but swirling them together to keep both. The impact on STEM is to broaden the perspective of traditional teaching methods to incorporate nonlinear and Indigenous perspectives. The Indigenous communities and the Western education models are not the same, but we can bring them together, swirl them into our understanding, but the parts are still different.