Includes bibliographical references and index.

Osiyo: Welcome in Cherokee --   / Christine Ballengee Morris -- Foreword --   / Luke Eric Lassiter -- Acknowledgements -- List of Figures -- Pedro Rafael González Chavajay – A Biography -- Paula Nicho Cúmez – A Biography -- Salvador Cúmez Curruchich – A Biography --   / Joseph Johnston -- Introduction -- PART 1: The Artist as Mentor: The Mentoring Relationship as a Teaching Method and Paintings as Didactic Tools -- Introduction to Part 1: Painting as a Didactic Tool and Site for Teaching -- 1 Personal and Cultural Narrative as Inspiration: A Painting and Pedagogical Collaboration with Two Maya Artists --  A Problem of Perspective --  A Problem of Practice --  Perspective and Practice in Context --  Decolonizing Methodologies --  Results --  Life as Text --  Discussion --  Applications --  Conclusion -- 2 Where Lived Experience Resides in Art Education: A Painting and Pedagogical Collaboration with Paula Nicho Cúmez --  Introduction --  Reflections on Feminist Pedagogy --  Female Kaqchikel Maya Painting and Teaching Processes --  Owning One’s Narrative in Collaboratively Produced Paintings --  Weaving Women’s Iconography in Paintings --  Fusion: One Imagines the Painting into Being --  Kaqchikel Women Painters’ Iconography: Personal in Cultural --  Maya Women Painters as Role Models --  Asserting Female Ways of Connected Knowing and Teacher/Student Role Reversals --  A Feminist Teacher’s Strategy: To Elicit --  Conclusion -- PART 2: The Artist as Historian: Paintings as Historical Documents, Sites for Cultural Transmission, and Platforms of Protest and Resistance -- Introduction to Part 2: The Artist as Historian, Massacre en Atitlan (Massacre in Atitlan) --  Painting as a Site for Claiming Maya History -- 3 Maya Paintings as Teachers of Justice: Art Making the Impossible Possible --  The Maya Painting Movement in Context --  Our Values Must Be Salvaged and Presented to Our Children -- 4 Crossing Borders -- 5 Advocating for Justice: A Maya Painter’s Journey --  A Story of Courage --  The Anthropology of Genocide: Annihilating Difference (Hinton, 2002) --  A Brief Overview of Guatemalan History --  A Tragic Moment in History: Massacre in Santiago Atitlán December 3, 1990 --  Pedro Rafael González Chavajay’s Story -- PART 3: The Artist as Ethnographer: Collaborative Ethnography, Decolonizing Research Practice, and the Ethics of Representation -- Introduction to Part 3 -- 6 “Coming of Age in Methodology”: Two Collaborative Inquiries with Shinnecock and Maya Peoples --  Diane’s Research Story --  Shinnecock Museum --  Kryssi’s Research Story --  Conclusion: Closing the Distance -- section 1: Ethical Changes in Representation -- Phase One – Participants and Research Process -- 7 Visual Privileging: Subjectivity in Collaborative Ethnography -- 8 Decolonizing Development through Indigenous Artist-Led Inquiry --  Speaking with, Not for or about Others --  The Recounting of Tales, Myths and Readings --  Approaching Arts-Based Inquiry with Eyes Wide-Open.

To expand the possibilities of “doing arts thinking” from a non-Eurocentric view, Artistic Mentoring as a Decolonizing Methodology: A Collaborative Painting Ethnography with Maya Artists Pedro Rafael González Chavajay and Paula Nicho Cúmez is grounded in Indigenous perspectives on arts practice, arts research, and art education. Mentored in painting for eighteen years by two Guatemalan Maya artists, Kryssi Staikidis, a North American painter and art education professor, uses both Indigenous and decolonizing methodologies, which involve respectful collaboration, and continuously reexamines her positions as student, artist, and ethnographer searching to redefine and transform the roles of the artist as mentor, historian/activist, ethnographer, and teacher. The primary purpose of the book is to illuminate the Maya artists as mentors, the collaborative and holistic processes underlying their painting, and the teaching and insights from their studios. These include Imagined Realism, a process excluding rendering from observation, and the fusion of pedagogy and curriculum into a holistic paradigm of decentralized teaching, negotiated curriculum, personal and cultural narrative as thematic content, and the surrounding visual culture and community as text. The Maya artist as cultural historian creates paintings as platforms of protest and vehicles of cultural transmission, for example, genocide witnessed in paintings as historical evidence. The mentored artist as ethnographer cedes the traditional ethnographic authority of the colonizing stance to the Indigenous expert as partner and mentor, and under this mentorship analyzes its possibilities as decolonizing arts-based qualitative inquiry. For the teacher, Maya world views broaden and integrate arts practice and arts research, inaugurating possibilities to transform arts education.