Indigenizing education
Scholar talks about importance of “decolonizing” teaching practices
Canada’s learning institutions need to rethink what it means to Indigenize and decolonize their teaching methods and curriculums, a leading scholar on the subject told a crowd at UPEI last night.
That re-examination also requires the involvement of Indigenous individuals and communities, which University of Saskatchewan professor Marie Battiste described as “nothing about us without us.”
“We need to, as Indigenous scholars, refuse Eurocentrism, their disciplinary methodologies and teaching and learning practices and develop our own, as we’ve been doing,” said Battiste, who has done award-winning work in Mi’kmaq cultural revitalization.
“We need to assert the right to teach Indigenous knowledge and practices and to use our own ethics. Not the ethics of the university, not the research ethics of Ottawa. We need to identify what our ethics are.”
Battiste and award-winning legal scholar James Youngblood Henderson both presented keynote talks in front of a crowded auditorium at UPEI’s Don and Marion McDougall Hall. The talks were a component of UPEI’s new Indigenous philosophies course.
Battiste, who is from Potlotek First Nation in Nova Scotia, largely spoke of the importance of decolonizing teaching practices and curriculums.
She pointed to the lack of Indigenous studies texts that are actually written by Indigenous authors, while also pointing to the low graduate rates among First Nations students.
“Really, seriously, this is progress? This is 40 years of indigenization or more? When are we going to change these statistics,” she said, adding that if the Aboriginal population could reach the same level of education as their non-aboriginal counterparts, Canada’s GDP could be expected to rise by $401 billion while also saving $115 billion on government expenditures by 2026. “There is a cost to not educating Indigenous people.”
Battiste called for the creation of new Indigenous journals and venues, while also utilizing the “core tools of Indigenous renaissance,” such as First Nations elders and languages.
Henderson’s talk explored what was involved, and compromised, in the drafting and passage of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People.
Henderson, who is from the Chickasaw Nation, Oklahoma, said creating better societies will require a better understanding of humanity.
“It’s going to be a wild, new unchartered ride of reinventing Indigenous humanities and re-examining Eurocentric humanity,” said Henderson, who served as a constitutional advisor for the Mi’kmaq Nation and the Assembly of First Nations.
“Right now, we have one monolithic idea of what humanity should be that denies most of the Indigenous people’s theories of humanities… we have to really come to a better understanding of what humans are and human natures are before we can construct good governments and legal systems.”