“The pedagogical challenge of Canadian education is not just reducing the distance between Eurocentric thinking and Aboriginal ways of knowing but engaging decolonized minds and heart.”
(Battiste, 2002, p. 22)
The call to indigenize and decolonize curriculum Part 2 of call to action 62 of the TRC’s Calls to Action (2015b) says that “We call upon the federal, provincial, and territorial governments, in consultation and collaboration with Survivors, Aboriginal peoples, and educators, to: […] provide the necessary funding to post-secondary institutions to educate teachers on how to integrate Indigenous knowledge and teaching methods into classrooms.” This call, however, is not new. Since at least the early 2000s there has been a recognition that
The choice to include both decolonizing and indigenizing is deliberate. While both terms refer to deconstructing the systematic oppression of colonial/Eurocentric worldviews in epistemology and pedagogy. Decolonizing has more of a focus on understanding and disrupting continuing colonial power (Battiste, 2002) while indigenizing focuses more on the element of meaningfully integrating Indigenous epistemology into our pedagogy (Pete, 2017). Considering both pedagogical approaches allows us to more holistically approach the project of creating a course that seeks to privilege Indigenous epistemologies through Indigenous pedagogical practices.
Another concept that is useful to consider is “Indigenous education.” Iseke-Barnes (2008) provides a robust, yet succinct, definition of Indigenous education:
“Indigenous education is self-determined; engages distinctive Indigenous methods, structures, and content; and encourages respect for Indigenous knowledges and self-reliance and self-respect of Indigenous peoples (Hampton 1995). It addresses the social, cultural, pedagogic, and epistemological needs of Indigenous communities and explores Indigenous collective heritage and contributions to global education (Cajete, 1994). It enables an understanding of Indigenous ancestors’ mimetic consciousness as well as examination and critique of colonization (Graveline, 1998). Our pedagogies, like our epistemologies, are in relation to the worlds we know and experience.” (p. 123)
If we are too build a course centred on Indigenous pedagogy we must strive to incorporate all of these elements. By researching, but more importantly consulting with Indigenous peoples and communities we strive to engage distinctive Indigenous method, structures and content. The nature of the course is to provide a foundation for MLIS students to engage in indigenizing and decolonizing work in their own practices—to this end the goal is to cultivate respect, explore, and begin to understand the cultural, pedagogic, and epistemological needs and practices of Indigenous communities. This will require us to critique colonization and our own Eurocentric views in ourselves and our practice. The course will have a focus on respectful relationship building and collaboration between LIS practitioners and Indigenous communities and peoples, both in its development and in the course itself.
Before delving more deeply into the different key components of our course development, there is an important question: “What is Indigenous Knowledge?” Battiste (2002) offers a rich discussion of what Indigenous knowledge is, and the work it does. However, you will not find a straight forward definition, Battiste highlights the difficulty that scholars have faced in determining a generally acceptable definition of Indigenous knowledge. Instead, it is useful to consider Indigenous knowledge as “an adaptable, dynamic system based on skills, abilities, and problem-solving techniques that change over time depending on environmental conditions.” (p. 11) Indigenous knowledge is not stagnant or ancient, as terms such as “traditional knowledge” may suggest, it is dynamic, evolving, and localized. Battiste suggests that its definition may be that which shows the limitations and fills in gaps of Eurocentric knowledge. Our greatest challenge, then, is to be able to answer this question is finding “a respectful way to compare Eurocentric and Indigenous ways of knowing.” (Battiste, 2002) We must also bear in mind that even focusing in Indigenous knowledge in Canada, Canada is a large country with many Indigenous peoples, each with their own distinct communities and cultures, and distinct localized knowledge. Our work is to grapple with how best to learn and incorporate Canada’s diverse Indigenous knowledge landscape into a one term course.
There are 4 key elements that should be considered in course development in the MLIS curriculum:
· The development of respectful relationships;
· Decolonizing and indigenizing curriculum as critical and transformative;
· The necessity of diverse perspectives;
· And the importance of the oral tradition.
Cultivate meaningful and respectful relationships with Indigenous communities is a necessary condition towards reconciliation in our society and our educational institutions. Services and partnerships must be developed with indigenous peoples, “this growing acknowledgement of the racism and paternalism that informed policies of assimilation and segregation has created a pressing need for collaborative services with Aboriginal governments and communities, rather than to them” (Doerksen and Martin, 2015, p. 6) Policies that we develop must be based on treaty principles of mutual recognition, mutual respect, sharing, and mutual responsibility, “reconciliation requires that a new vision, based on commitment to mutual respect, be developed”. (TRC, 2015a, vi)
The biggest barrier to reconciliation is understanding the harmful impact done to aboriginal people and a lack of respect of non-aboriginal people to aboriginal people. To this end, we must remember that disempowerment was a key feature in the past. We need to ensure that we enter into partnerships and relationships with mutual respect. This may mean that non-aboriginal people will need to be extra cognizant and committed to empowering aboriginal peoples. (TRC, 2015a)
For our work this means developing our course in collaboration with Indigenous peoples and communities, as well as incorporating content that underscores the importance of cultivating respectful relationships in the course itself.
A course that claims to teach decolonizing principles must ask its learners to engage in critical self-reflection; indigenous pedagogy accepts student’ cognitive search for learning processes they can internalize.” (Battiste, 2002, p. 18) Freire (1994) argues the importance of dialogue and critical thinking to remove oppressive Western thought from both the oppressed and the oppressors, “Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, helpful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.” (p. 53) We need to move beyond mere inclusion of content, and non-Indigenous people must not presume to teach indigeneity; “people misunderstand that teaching about settler colonialism is about teaching indigeneity, “playing Indian,” instead of confronting the reach of “settler colonial erasure.” (Tuck and Yang, 2012, p. 8) Instructors who wish to create a postcolonial curriculum using critical ontology must ask the question: “how to we move beyond simply uncovering sources of consciousness construction in our larger attempt to reconstruct the self in a critical manner?” (Kincheloe, 2006, p. 194) In order to understand the framing of the “other” students must “deconstruct their own cultural situatedness,” (Kanu, 2011, p. 49) which can be a challenging process. However, this process is necessary when seeking to embed sustainable indigenous principles in our pedagogy and curriculum. (Lou et al., 2017) Madden et al. (2013) define “whiteness” as a location of structural privilege; a standpoint from which white people consider themselves, others, and society overall; and a set of cultural practices that usually go unmarked and unnamed. Our course must be facilitated such that students confront the reality, and their place, in settler-colonial relations, in order to transform their own perspective on settler-indigenous relationships in Canada. One way to do this is through the implementation of reflective assignments. (Aitken and Radford, 2018)
Literature that explores teaching decolonizing, indigenizing, and reconciliatory practices in teacher education shows that there are inevitable emotional issues and some related resistance from the teacher candidates. (Aitken and Radford, 2018; Doerksen and Martin, 2015; Pete, 2017) There can be a feeling of uncertainty and alienation that arises when students attempt to understand oneself in the context of indigenous-settler relations. One student in Aitken and Radford’s (2018) study wrote in a blog entry
“The message I’ve been sent for years as a “colonizer” is to shut up and listen, that no matter what I will always be ignorant and guilty in the eyes of Indigenous people. From what I’ve seen there is a fundamental frustration in the Indigenous community about the very presence of Europeans in Canada and I don’t know what to do with that. Yes, generations ago, my ancestors lived in Europe, but I am not a citizen of any of those countries. I am only and can only be a Canadian. That is the only country that has to accept me and let me live within its borders. I don’t know how that fact can fit with the frustrations that Indigenous peoples seem to feel with my presence.” (p. 45)
Other students in the study also attempted to deny their settler status, “it wasn’t me and I have nothing to do with it,” including a refusal to recognize and accept the power and privilege that their settler status affords them. It is a challenging process to recognize your position in a system of oppression, and to recognize that even though you did not instigate the harm, you still wield the power and privilege the system affords you. This emotional difficulty carried into their own views on pedagogy that when teaching about reconciliation they did not want to “lay blame” or elicit emotional responses in their students. The pre-service teachers want the emphasis to be on actions and not on understanding the ambivalences and difficulties of present day settler-indigenous relations. The reason that this challenging self-reflection is so critical is so that our students do not carry this passive reconciliatory view into their own professional practice, as these pre-service teachers were inclined to do. It is less personally intrusive, and easier to simply see reconciliation as a set of steps, practices, or skills, (Pete, 2017) but reconciliation is a critical practice that requires us to deconstruct ourselves, in order to understand another. Aitken and Radford (2018) found that despite agitation and uncertainty, students were still motivated to take action to work towards reconciliation; “the moments of resistance are only part of the process of future teachers efforts at reconciliation work and not the end to such attempts.” (p. 46)
An MLIS course that is focused on decolonization and indigenization will likely not face the same extreme disinterest and push back as some pre-service teachers, as students will choose to be in the class, but they may still be uncomfortable and resistant to intense self-reflection in the context of settler-indigenous relations. Some students may enter the class not recognizing that libraries have been constructed as Western institutions, “because privilege is often invisible and therefore taken for granted, non-Aboriginal librarians are often unaware of the ways in which libraries contribute to the dominant social narrative.” (Doerksen and Martin, 2015, p. 8)
The difficulty and vulnerability in this process, intellectually and emotionally, needs to be considered in the creation of the class. Ermine (2007) does this through the creation of ethical spaces. Ermine (2007) defines ethical spaces as those that allow for negotiations between collaborators that work to address positionality and power between collaborators—namely the power that may exist between instructor and student, or even between students. Ethical spaces seek to create space for engagement and open dialogue and are particularly useful when working to draw together epistemologies that are seemingly incongruent. The goal should be to create a relational space “in between” worldviews where students can be critical, reflective, and open to different ways of knowing. (Louie et al., 2017)
Ethical spaces can be created in different ways; the more obvious way being the careful cultivation of save classroom space where students feel comfortable discussing challenging topics. For our course that likely requires keeping enrollment numbers low to facilitate trust amongst the students and instructor(s). Louie et al. (2017) also provide an example of how integrating negotiation into their pedagogy contributes to an ethical space. Instead of instructors simply assigning grades one class implemented a collective decision-making process where students participated in the assigning of their grade. This practice extended participation through other ways of knowing and involved extensive formative feedback and allowing students to negotiate the merits of their work. This practice created an ethical space that worked to address the impact of positionality and the power students perceived in instructors. The process still modelled excellence and rigour, however, and the instructor even found that students were more receptive to lower grades when a thorough explanation was given in person.
Kanu (2011) asks why it is necessary to integrate Indigenous perspectives. His asserts that this idea is “rooted in emerging ideas about human learning and development as psychosocial and cultural processes, intimate and cultural citizenship, collective intelligence in a knowledge economy.” (p. 17) There is an inherent dissonance between Indigenous and Western ‘ways of knowing.’ The acquiring of cultural competencies requires the reorientation of curriculum “by engaging with alternative ways of knowing and the alternative skill sets.” (Williamson & Dalal, 2007, p. 52) This is an inherently difficult task that requires open engagement with a multiplicity of perspectives—an openness that must be cultivated and requires critical self evaluation.
An added difficulty is that there is no singular concept of indigenous knowledge; “No single indigenous experience dominates other perspectives, not one heritage informs it, and no two heritages produce the same knowledge.” (Battiste, 2002) The development of curriculum must find a way to accommodate this fundamental concept and to incorporate diverse perspectives.
This call for the inclusion of indigenous voices extends to the LIS professional practice that our course hopes to prepare students for; Roy and Hogan (2010) assert that “libraries cannot support indigenous peoples’ cultural rights without including indigenous librarians and library consultants in shaping the space and work of the library” (p. 137). However, as a result of the epistemic violence and cognitive imperialism present in education practices there are a disproportionately few number of Indigenous faculty in post-secondary institutions (as well as education institutions in general). Non-Indigenous instructors are tasked with integrating indigeneity into the curriculum which often results in decontextualizing and parceling of indigenous knowledge and colonial history into pieces that fit into a Eurocentric curriculum (Madden et al., 2013; Pirbhai-Illich et al., 2017)
There is also the fact that non-Indigenous instructors “often do not possess the “lived” or inherited knowledge, and/or relationships with, and permission from, Indigenous communities to carry out this task in a responsible and respectful manner.” (Madden et al., 2013, p. 230) Kincheloe (2006) argues that critical instructors “must search in as many locations as possible for alternative discourses, ways of thinking and being that expand the envelopes of possibility.” (p. 194) It is fundamental that a course whose goal is to expose students to indigenous epistemology and culture be developed in conjunction with Indigenous communities, and meaningfully integrate Indigenous knowledge holders in a way that goes beyond “special guests.” This requires disrupting the non-Indigenous instructors as “experts” and the Indigenous knowledge holders as “special guests.” Madden et al. (2013) note that the expert role involves the imparting of knowledge and the assessment of the students and so meaningful integration of Indigenous knowledge holders requires involving Indigenous knowledge holders in those responsibilities and giving them the title and role of instructor.
What we must also be careful to avoid in this endeavour is tokenism. The disproportionately low number of Aboriginal librarian professionals makes this risk so much higher. Individuals cannot be expected to represent an entire Indigenous population and their knowledge—particularly when Indigenous populations in Canada are many and diverse. We argue that one way to avoid tokenism is by including multiple Indigenous instructors in our course—each will have their own unique view and expertise. Avoiding the assumption that one Indigenous person can represent the “Indigenous perspective” on a multitude of areas in LIS and the narrative that “present Indigenous culture as a homogeneous, stagnant relic of a bygone era, rather than a relevant and dynamic way of life.” (Doerksen and Martins, 2015, p. 8)
Storytelling and the oral tradition are a key element in indigenous pedagogy. Aboriginal educator Cora Weber Pillwax (as cited by Battiste, 2002) explains the importance of storytelling as a pedagogical practice:
“Stories may be for and about teaching, entertainment, praying, personal expression, history and power. They are to be listened to, remembered, thought about, mediated on. Stories are not frivolous or meaningless; no one tells a story without intent or purpose. A person’s word is closely bound up with the story that she or he tells. A person’s word belongs to that person and in some instances can be viewed as being that person, so words—in particular some works in some contexts—are note carelessly spoken. These are the old ways, and they are still practiced and observed today by many people in many places.” (p. 25)
Piquemal (2003) describes western literature as structured, analytical, and rational. The intellect and not the emotions are paramount which is incompatible with the “inferior” non-western traditions. Politically and culturally orality is discredited. Piquemal (2003) explains with a citation from Frey (1995): “orality tends to reveal a world in terms of action, process, and becoming” whereas “literacy is directional and focused, allowing the viewer to select and dissect from the field of visual experience” (p.115). Drawing on Gunn Allen (1986), Piquemal (2003) goes further: “Traditional tribal narratives possess a circular structure incorporating event within event , piling meaning on meaning, until the accretion finally results in a story… is quite unlike that of Western fiction; it is not tied to any particular timeline, main character or event” (p.115). The meaning of a story is negotiated between the objective and subjective inner space of the audience and the storyteller. Storytellers often introduce unique elements to a story to fit the context, and the stories evolve with the evolution of the peoples. The story and meaning is shaped to empower relationship and action. Piquemal (2003) aptly recognizes that stories therefore arise from “collective authorship” and a “plethora of truths” (p.119). Teaching is storytelling; learning is storytelling.
What does this mean for teaching? For our pedagogical approach? It shows that even though we may be able to access a variety of perspectives via text and recordings, but this fails to engage the oral tradition on which so much Indigenous knowledge is based. By having a multiplicity of instructors, with different backgrounds, experiences, and expertise, students and instructors will be able to model the oral tradition.
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