Time: Tuesdays 1:00 -4:00 pm, January 12 - April 6, 2021
Location: online via Zoom and OWL
Course facilitators:
Danica Pawlick-Potts: dpawlic@uwo.ca
Marni Harrington: marni.harrington@uwo.ca
Heather Hill: hhill6@uwo.ca
Paulette Rothbauer: prothba2@uwo.ca
Teaching Assistant (W2021)
Danica Pawlick-Potts: dpawlic@uwo.ca
Learning Event Instructors:
Camille Callison, Stacy Allison-Cassin, Nancy Cooper, Deborah Lee, Loriene Roy
Other guests throughout the term:
Sara Mai Chitty, Mary-anne Kechego, Jessie Loyer, Jenna Rose Sands, Kayla Lar-Son, Tanya Ball, David A. Robertson, Lisc Daley, Myrna Kicknosway
An introduction to Indigenous contexts for library and information knowledges, practices, and experiences, informed by reconciliation principles, and focused on decolonizing practices within Canadian contexts.
To explore with students an understanding of colonialism and its effects on Indigenous peoples and relationships within library and information contexts;
To increase cultural competency when working with or engaging with Indigenous peoples and cultures;
To engage in dialogue with students and with Indigenous partners on Indigenous perspectives on library and information studies surfacing historical and contemporary contexts of Indigeneity;
To recognize and support culturally appropriate pedagogies and methodologies to critique and destabilize prevailing settler-colonialist discourses and practices in LIS.
All modules are designed in collaboration with Indigenous LIS experts, and 5 distinct learning events will be presented by Indigenous colleagues. Weeks in between will be times for questions, discussions, debriefing, continuing conversations. Attendance at all sessions in mandatory.
Opening Session: Ceremonial opening, KAIROS blanket exercise, negotiating personal and community expectations, understanding accountability and responsibility, situating our learning into a reconciliation framework
Perspectives on decolonization and Indigenization in LIS, data sovereignty, truth & reconciliation in the archives
Indigenous knowledge organization; decolonizing classification, metadata schemes, linked data
Creating access to Indigenous knowledge; decolonizing library services; access to Indigenous reading materials; First Nations Reads, and other Indigenous-led library & information programming; First Nations public libraries
Decolonizing methodologies for LIS; impact of Indigenous research on LIS
Decolonizing LIS, and Indigenizing the LIS professions: progress, failures, futures
Closing session: Class debriefing session; Ceremonial closing
For details on each Learning Event, for readings, and for information about our guests and guest instructors, please use the drop down menu, or the module buttons at the top of the page.
This iteration of the course was made possible by the Teaching Innovation Award granted by Western's Centre for Teaching and Learning. We also gratefully acknowledge the continuing support from FIMS.
We acknowledge that Western University, FIMS, and the FIMS Graduate Library are on the traditional lands of the Anishnabek, Haudenosaunee, Lunaapeewak, and Attawandaran Peoples, on lands connected to the London and Sombra Treaties, and with the Dish with One Spoon Covenant Wampum. With this acknowledgement, we express our respect for the longstanding relationships that Indigenous Nations have to this land and we acknowledge the historical and ongoing injustices that First Nations, Metis, and Inuit Peoples endure across Canada. We, in our work together here this term, exercise our responsibility to contribute towards revealing and correcting miseducation, as well as to renewing and building respectful relationships with Indigenous communities.