My Child Will Have Two Brains, One Maasai, One Educated: Negotiating Traditional Maasai Culture in a Globalized World

Abstract

career has focused on cultural epistemology. Her interest in this area is borne out of her own mixed ancestry that is Mescalero Apache, Mexican and Pennsylvania Dutch. Her research and teaching commitments are focused on the meanings individuals and communities make of their cosmological understandings and cultural practices. She has completed over 13 years of work with U.S. Indigenous women and is especially interested in how culture is represented and practiced from original standpoints not merely in reflection or response to outside influences. Her interest in the Maasai project was to investigate these very concepts and issues e.g., culture, cosmology, and preservation within a transnational framework. Linda M. Waldron began her interest in studying school challenges during her graduate studies when the Columbine High School tragedy occurred in 1999. Her dissertation focused on how this event shaped national policies concerning school violence and what impact it had on the everyday lives of students, teachers and school officials. Her research on education broadened to include examination of how relations of race, class, ethnicity and gender intersect with these issues. This interest took her to Kenyan Maasailand during a time when national policies in that country were impacting the local, everyday lives of children in school. This ethnography tries to unfurl some of things that she and Dr. Doreen E. Martinez discovered there.

Storying Traditions, Lessons and Lives: Responsible and Grounded Indigenous Storying Ethics and Methods

“…"My child will have two brains instead of one. One for the Maasai and one for [formal Western] education" 17 offered a Maasai mother 18 (Martinez and Waldron 2006). We 19 were visiting with her and other Maasai parents and daughters in the homelands, which reside within present-day Kenya.…”

“…Rather than condemning or only offering Indigenous "food, fun and festival" 20 that repeats and perpetuates the romantic and exotic Indigenous peoples and ways, traditional [Indigenous] epistemologies that are knowledge, process and practice must be woven into curriculums. The Maasai ways, their [Indigenous] cosmology, must be brought into the educational and other sites of knowledge production, as part of a vital living history that may indeed question and challenge standards (Martinez and Waldron 2006).…”