Leading from home and back again: A reflective journey of cultural conflict in leadership

This dissertation explores a third path of leadership as structured by the dual passageways of traditional Native leadership and Western leadership. Using autoethnography, the study conveys a Native American woman's experience of cultural conflict in leadership. Four theoretical frameworks consisting of identity, socialization, intersectionality, and leadership expose and contrast beliefs and values about education. Vignettes formed from life stories and interviews of family and colleagues were gathered, analyzed, and written as a dissertation to create perspective, share meaning, and encourage empathy. The presentation follows a traditional Native American storytelling format that threads together events from multiple points in time following the reflective flow of sense making. The narrative gives shape to multiple lessons: large and small, heart-felt and logical, explicit and veiled. What began as a process of searching for another way, a new beginning, is found as the path that was already being traveled, an ongoing journey. What searching yielded, however, was a renewal of strength, the commitment to cause, an enriched love for others.