Embracing Indigenous ethics as collective voices and participation: New beginnings for educational leadership

This conceptual article proposes an Indigenous ethics-driven framework for educational leadership grounded in relationality, decolonial critique, and mutual engagement. It argues that Indigenous ethics can reimagine dominant epistemologies and leadership practices and critiques Western philosophies of individualism, standardization, and managerialism that reproduce systemic injustices. The purpose is to shift the field from managerialism to a relational paradigm centered on reciprocity, community welfare, and moral obligation. Guiding questions: whose knowledge and voices are amplified, and how might relational ethics disrupt epistemic harm? Drawing on Indigenous ways of knowing, authors reconceptualize leadership as a dynamic practice that fuses theory, methodology, and praxis, and affirm leaders’ ethical duty to contest hegemonic structures and create reciprocal spaces for well-being. The article calls for an “ethics turn” privileging relationality, epistemic justice, and participatory practice, and advocates dialogic, culturally aligned, community-centered methodologies to confront systemic racism, colonial legacies, and environmental crises while reimagining the field.