“I’m not a math person.”

“I’m just not good at math.”

“I’ll never teach math because I don’t understand it well enough to lead students.”

The beginning of my ethnomathematics journey was influenced by the challenges I had faced learning mathematics throughout my life. I held harmful beliefs about my own mathematical abilities that were the result of years of low mathematical self-esteem, consistent experiences with mathematics anxiety and negative perceptions of the role that mathematics played in my life. Mathematics felt unknown to me, and therefore I felt unknown and unseen by mathematics. These experiences opened a lot of wounds throughout my academic journey, none of which would heal with time. I came into the program feeling apprehensive yet motivated to heal the relationship I had developed with mathematics learning. My hope was that the theoretical foundations and practical applications of ethnomathematics may offer security in my identity as an educator and a sense of worthiness and belonging within mathematics learning and teaching that I hadn’t found before. Even deeper than that, my hope was to unearth the medicine my younger self needed–the medicine our youth today need in order to cultivate healthy, strong relationships with mathematics learning.

Since joining the program, I have seen incredible intersections between ethnomathematics, Lakota traditions and teachings, and the purpose of education as defined by members of my community. It is important for me to note that seeing and interacting with these intersections has been a healing process in and of itself. It has confirmed deeply-held beliefs about the power of Indigenous and/or non-Western learning practices, and how those practices can offer the healing our young people need and deserve. Below you will see the intersections between our region’s community-determined purpose of education and ethnomathematics.

• Unspeic’iciyapi: the Lakota term for learning, specifically learning by doing. This term guides how we come to knowledge and the meaning of that knowledge in our lived Ethnomathematics calls for educators to be sensitive yet critical and creative about the way people learn and use mathematics in their daily lives.
• Wotakuye: the Lakota term for kinship, or sacred kinship. The grounding beliefs of wotakuye–that we are all related, that we have a responsibility to care for one another, that care for one another includes care for land and non-human relatives, are championed through the key components of ethnomathematics. Members of my community–students, families, Elders, community leaders–have named that wotakuye is of most importance for students to experience while they’re in school.
• Woksape Kuwapi: the Lakota term for the pursuit of wisdom and self-determination. Ethnomathematics concerns itself with the recovery and restoration of one’s dignity, one’s sense of self, and one’s relationship with mathematics learning. It also concerns itself with community change and the ability to use mathematical skills to solve real-world problems. Woksape kuwapi reminds us to stay focused on the primary goal of protecting and championing ethnomathematics in the classroom.

Given these intersections, the way my educational practice has evolved and improved to include an ethnomathematics approach has been through applying ethnomathematics-based research to my work within Indigenous education in South Dakota. An example of this considers Gutierrez’s (2018) mission to “rehumanize” mathematics. Understanding the need for re-humanization and the conditions in which it exists for mathematics education have supported my ability to see opportunities and conditions for rehumanization in other subjects and contexts.

Ethnomathematics has taught me to see and create opportunity in spaces and moments of indifference. I (including the beliefs and values I’ve developed through this program) am an example of what happens when you unleash ethnomathematics on reading teachers! I now see ethnomathematics in everything I do, including the student leadership space I facilitate at one of our local high schools. I specifically used one of the lesson plans I developed for the ethnomathematics class to kick off a unit that was primarily focused on understanding the land rights of Indigenous people. The students loved the lesson and named the connections between historical American Indian policy and the mathematics used to support it. The lesson supported their ability to see how mathematics, specifically ethnomathematics, exists in every facet of their lives, and can be a powerful tool as they pursue justice for their people and the return of their lands.