Honoring Story, Land, and Community: Rethinking Indigenous Literacy Education

Abstract

In a Western schooling context, literacy education is often narrowly framed through reading and writing, privileging text-based practices grounded in Eurocentric assumptions about knowledge, learning, and achievement. For many Indigenous children, such framings do not acknowledge the relational, embodied, and land-connected ways literacy is lived and learned within family, community, and culture. In this literature review, we engage scholarship on Indigenous literacy education to examine how storytelling, land, kinship, community, and creative expression open broader understandings of literacy. Rather than approaching these as separate themes or as culturally responsive additions to Western literacy instruction, we consider them as interdependent literacies that reshape how meaning-making, teaching, and learning can be understood. We argue that rethinking literacy in these ways invites educators, particularly non-Indigenous educators, to move beyond deficit and classroom-bound frameworks toward more relational, culturally grounded, and collaborative literacy practices with Indigenous students, families, and community.