Photo: The Author, Margaret Talia White, M.Ed., Indigenous Educator and Higher Education Professional
Education is often discussed in terms of achievement, credentials, and outcomes. Far less often do we name the role healing plays in the learning process, yet for many learners, healing is not separate from education. It is foundational to it.
For countless individuals, especially those from Indigenous and historically marginalized communities, entering educational spaces means carrying far more than academic goals.
Learners arrive holding questions of identity and belonging, navigating cultural reclamation, and living with the realities of poverty, addiction, family instability, violence, grief, and intergenerational trauma. These experiences do not pause at the classroom door. They shape how students learn, persist, and envision their futures.
What Healing Can Look Like in Education
Healing in education does not look one way. It is not linear, and it does not follow a prescribed timeline. Sometimes healing looks like showing up when motivation feels depleted. Sometimes it looks like asking for help, finding community, reconnecting with culture or spirituality, or choosing to stay engaged one more semester. Other times, healing happens quietly and unseen, alongside assignments, responsibilities, and daily survival. In all forms, healing requires courage.
Taking the time to face what has been avoided, whether grief, trauma, addiction, self-doubt, or fear, is not a detour from education. It is often what strengthens the path forward. Healing creates space for clarity, presence, and growth. When individuals choose to confront what weighs on them, they are better able to engage with their goals and move forward with intention rather than exhaustion.
Releasing Imagined Timelines
Many people carry imagined timelines of success shaped by societal expectations. These timelines often define when certain milestones should happen and what fulfillment is supposed to look like, such as completing school by a certain age, establishing a career quickly, forming long term partnerships, becoming parents, owning a home or achieving financial stability within a specific timeframe. When life does not unfold according to that script, it can leave people feeling stuck, unworthy, or left behind. Over time, these beliefs can quietly convince individuals that their goals are no longer attainable or that they have somehow failed.
Yet imagined timelines do not define worth or success. Growth is not measured by how closely someone follows a prescribed path, but by how individuals move through their own journeys with honesty, resilience, and care. Some paths include pauses, restarts, changes in direction, or longer timelines. Others involve balancing education with caregiving, healing, work, or survival.
Each person is uniquely gifted, carrying different responsibilities and struggles, and no two paths are meant to look the same.
Strength From Lineage and Lived Experience
Across many faiths and cultural teachings, there is an understanding that challenges are not placed before us without the capacity to endure them. Reflecting on what has already been overcome can offer strength when the path forward feels unclear. When we look to our ancestors and the hardships they endured, including forced removal and displacement, boarding schools, the fight for religious freedom, and countless other injustices, we are reminded that resilience lives in our lineage. At the same time, reflecting on our own personal triumphs, no matter how small, reinforces that we too carry the strength to continue moving forward.
Expanding What Educational Success Looks Like
In relation to education and to learners, this means that progress does not follow a single timeline or take only one form. Goals can be reached through formal degrees, vocational pathways, cultural knowledge, lived experience, and community leadership. Education is not diminished when it takes a different shape. Learning, healing, and growth develop in ways that reflect each person’s unique journey and timing.
For anyone who feels stuck, unworthy, or left behind, it is important to know this. Your path is not invalid. Taking time to heal does not mean giving up on your goals. Often, it means preparing yourself to pursue them with greater strength and clarity. Whether through a classroom, a community space, or lived experience, there are many ways to learn, grow, and contribute meaningfully.
Returning With Knowledge and Becoming Along the Way
Within education, there is often an expectation placed on learners, particularly Indigenous learners, to return to their communities carrying knowledge, credentials, and expertise. This call to bring back what has been learned is meaningful and rooted in collective responsibility. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge the reality of that journey.
Pursuing education often leads to deep self-discovery. Along the way, individuals are asked to confront parts of themselves they may not have had the space or safety to face before. Growth can require unlearning, healing, and reckoning with personal histories, internalized doubt, and the impacts of systems that were never designed with Indigenous peoples in mind. Education was not historically built for us, and navigating these spaces can be both empowering and demanding.
This journey is rarely linear or instantaneous. Taking the first step does not require having all the answers. Most people do not. Progress often comes from trying, adjusting, and sometimes venturing down unexpected paths that ultimately lead closer to purpose. Education, like healing, unfolds gradually and asks for patience, courage, and trust in the process.
Returning to community does not only mean bringing back knowledge. It also means returning with greater self-awareness, compassion, and understanding. In that way, the journey itself becomes part of what is offered back.
Achievement as a Call to Collective Action
Educational achievement is not only a personal milestone. It is also a collective call to action. As more Indigenous people pursue education, training, and professional development, there must be corresponding efforts to build infrastructures where this knowledge can be nurtured, applied, and preserved within our own communities.
Returning home with education and experience requires more than good intentions. It requires opportunity. Communities need meaningful employment pathways, safe and sustainable housing, and access to resources that allow people to live, work, and contribute without having to leave again in order to survive. Without these supports, the expectation to bring knowledge back can become burdensome and, at times, unrealistic.
Building this infrastructure is an investment in sovereignty, sustainability, and future generations. When communities create environments where learning is valued, innovation is supported, and cultural knowledge is protected, education becomes cyclical rather than extractive. Knowledge is not only gained but continuously strengthened and passed on.
Honoring the Whole Self and Continuing Forward
An essential part of healing within education is learning to honor the whole self, including the parts that feel uncomfortable, imperfect, or difficult to accept. Too often, people believe they must hide or discard the parts of themselves they consider bad or unworthy in order to succeed. In reality, those experiences often hold insight, strength, and wisdom.
Healing does not require erasing past struggles or pretending they did not happen. It asks for honesty, compassion, and the willingness to acknowledge every part of one’s story. Honoring the self means recognizing where growth is still needed, understanding patterns that no longer serve us, and offering grace to the versions of ourselves that did the best they could with what they had.
Along the educational journey, moments of doubt, self-judgment, and setbacks are inevitable. These moments do not disqualify anyone from success. They are part of becoming. Progress is built through persistence and the decision to keep going, even when confidence feels fragile or the next step feels unclear.
To anyone walking this path, it is important to hear this encouragement. Keep going. Take the next step, however small it may feel. You do not need to be perfect to move forward. Growth happens not by avoiding the hard parts of ourselves, but by carrying them with honesty and continuing with intention.
Closing Reflection
Education, at its best, is not only about what we learn, but about who we become. When healing is honored as part of the educational journey, learning becomes an act of resilience, self- determination, and resurgence. When individual growth is met with collective support, education has the power to transform not only lives, but communities and futures.
Author Note: Margaret Talia White, M.Ed., is a Diné higher education professional and recent graduate of Northern Arizona University, where she earned a Master of Education in Educational Leadership with a focus on Community College and Higher Education.
“As the inaugural Wampum Title Sponsor of the 2026 Indigenous Media Conference, CTUIR is proud to support this gathering of Indigenous voices and journalists from across Indian Country, and beyond. We hope your time here in our usual and accustomed areas is meaningful and memorable,” CTUIR Communications Director Kaeleen McGuire said. “The CTUIR is proud to serve as the inaugural Wampum Title Sponsor. Congratulations to this year's Indigenous Media Award winners, don't forget to vote for your IJA Board candidates, and most importantly, enjoy the conference. If you plan to explore while you're here, take time to visit the Columbia River Gorge, where you'll be traveling through more of our usual and accustomed areas and may see tribal fishers exercising treaty-reserved rights protected under the Treaty of 1855. We're honored you're here and hope you enjoy your time in our homelands.”
CTUIR has one of the most longstanding tribal media outlets in the monthly
Click highlighted links below for CTUIR media:
(CUJ) newspaper, established in 1975 by Native American Journalists Association founder Richard LaCourse, and a tribal radio station
104.1 FM, which has been on the air for more than 20 years.
The Umatilla Indian Reservation is about 172,000 acres, and is comprised of the three tribes: Cayuse, Walla Walla and Umatilla. CTUIR has approximately 3,200 tribal members, nearly half of whom live on the reservation, which is located about 3 hours east of Portland near Pendleton.
