Sandy Grande is a Quechua scholar and professor of education whose work brings Indigenous political thought into conversation with critical pedagogy, centering sovereignty and land as the primary political categories for Indigenous education.
Core ideas
- Red Pedagogy: in Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (2004/2015), Grande argued that Paulo Freire’s framework, while useful, is rooted in Western Marxist assumptions about labor, class, and the state that do not map onto Indigenous experiences of colonization, land dispossession, and sovereignty. Red Pedagogy centers sovereignty and land rather than class struggle as the primary political categories.
- Education as site of colonization and resistance: Grande recognized that schools have been instruments of assimilation — through boarding schools, language suppression, and cultural erasure — but argued they can also be reclaimed as spaces for cultural revitalization and political organizing.
- Indigenous intellectual independence: Grande insisted that Indigenous peoples have their own intellectual traditions — not as supplements to Western theory, but as independent frameworks with their own coherence and rigor.
Notable works
- Red Pedagogy: Native American Social and Political Thought (2004/2015)
Related
- Indigenous pedagogies — the tradition her work belongs to
- critical pedagogy — the tradition she engages with and challenges
- Paulo Freire — the thinker whose framework she both draws on and critiques
- Linda Tuhiwai Smith — a parallel project in decolonizing research methodologies