They had organically created what the Brazilian educator and philosopher Paulo Freire described as a culture circle—where adults who were learning to read and write came together in an informal learning space and used their unique ways of speaking to become literate by sharing their understandings of the world and their place within it. The similarities between the hip-hop cypher and the culture circle speak to the universality of indigeneity and the ways that indigenous traditions have deep meaning for all marginalized groups.1 After seeing my students engage in the beautiful space they had
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