Events following a display of archival photographs depicting a Navajo Civil Rights march that was sponsored by One Book/One Community of San Juan College illuminated racial tensions and competing injustices in the community of Farmington, New Mexico.These events are analyzed through a paradigm, indigenous-sustaining literacy, which could benefit common reading programs that conduct literacy work in communities with populations of indigenous people or border Native American reservations and are seeking to decolonize community literacy practices O ne late November afternoon, five members of the One Book/One Community (OBOC) committee hung archival photos of the 1974 Civil Rights Protests in Farmington, New Mexico, in a gallery space on the campus of San Juan College, located in Farmington.Several students stopped to look the 26 poster-sized photos selected by the committee from the Bob Fitch Photography Archive Movements of Change.The display was part of the OBOC programming associated with the committee's selection of the graphic memoir March (Lewis et al.), a retelling of Congressman John Lewis's civil rights activism.The committee recognized that March could provide an interesting connection to the 1974 Civil Rights protests in Farmington that resulted from the minimal sentencing of three white teenagers who had murdered three Navajo men and provide an opportunity for students and community members to explore this legacy and their situatedness in the community.The photos were compelling.One photo showed protestors marching down Farmington's main street.Another depicted a Navajo man holding a cardboard sign that read "veteran WWII.Holder Purple Heart.My son was kill [sic] by a white boy on the reservation." Three of the photos depicted protestors holding upside down American flags.Other photos showed groups of Native Americans facing off with law enforcement.Onlookers identified relatives in the photos and expressed their gratitude for showcasing an important moment in local history.Others stated they had no idea that there had been civil rights protests in Farmington and were glad to learn about them through the display.One onlooker, though, was not supportive.He said that the committee should not hang any photos near the glass display located in the gallery that is dedicated to veterans.Committee members agreed with the man, citing the need to be respectful.Still, displeased, he asked why the committee was displaying the photos.(Danielle), the director of the OBOC committee, explained the historical nature of the photos and the connection to the OBOC selection.She also explained

This article highlights how contemporary structural forces-the intertwined systems of racism, xenophobia, gentrification, and capitalism-have material consequences for the nature of community literacy education.As a case study, I interrogate the rhetoric and infrastructure of a San Francisco K-12 literacy nonprofit in the context of tech-boom gentrification, triggering the mass displacement of Latinx residents.I locate the nonprofit in longer histories of settler colonialism and migration in the Bay Area to analyze how the organization's rhetoric-the founder's TED talk, its website, the mural on the building's façade-are structured by racist logics that devalue and homogenize the literacy and agency of the local community, perpetuating white "possessive investments" (Lipsitz) in land, literacy, and education.Drawing on abolitionist and decolonial education theory, I prose a praxis encouraging literacy scholar-practitioners to question and ultimately divest from institutional rhetorics and funding sources that continue to forward racism, xenophobia, imperialism, and raciolinguistic supremacy built upon them.

This article foregrounds stories told by Kiowa Elder Dorothy Whitehorse DeLaune in order to distinguish “community listening” from “rhetorical listening” and decolonize community writing. Dorothy’s stories demonstrate “transrhetoricity” as rhetorical practices that move across time and space to activate relationships between peoples and places through collaborative meaning making. Story moves historic legacies into the present despite suppression enacted by settler colonialism, and story yields adaptive meanings and cultural renewal. When communities listen across difference, stories enact resistance by building a larger community of storytellers, defying divisive settler colonialist inscriptions, and reinscribing Indigenous peoples and their epistemologies across the landscapes they historically inhabit.

Literacy “sponsorship” in refugee communities is not without its risks and limitations. For potential sponsors, risks include the commodification of refugee voices, while limits include inaccurate generalizations of those being sponsored. This essay draws from a case study of refugee student discourse to discuss how a more explicit decolonial approach to sponsorship can help sponsors rethink a giver-receiver paradigm. This approach would first deconstruct imperialist discourses of power and then replace them with new, alternatives to meaning-making. While contingent on local contexts, this study aims to set an agenda for continued debate within refugee community literacy support projects.