University under scrutiny over residential schools course taught by white prof
A Halifax university is under fire for assigning a course about Canada’s residential schools to a non-Indigenous professor, something activists say undermines reconciliation efforts.
Mount Saint Vincent University is expected to offer the course, Selected Topics in North American History: Residential Schools, this fall.
The professor slated to teach the course has an expertise in Atlantic Canadian First Nations history, with a specialization in the historical experiences of 20th century Indigenous women, according to the school’s website.
Yet the decision to assign a “settler scholar” to teach the course has been slammed on social media as a kind of historical appropriation and reinforcement of the systemic oppression of First Nations.
Critics say only Indigenous people have the lived experience to understand the complex and cumulative ways they’ve been discriminated against, and that they should teach their own history.
“Part of reconciliation is making space for Indigenous faculty members at universities and Indigenous knowledge perspectives,” Patti Doyle-Bedwell, a Mi’kmaq woman and Dalhousie University professor, said on Friday.
“We’re talking about indigenizing the academy.”
The university has called for a meeting next week between Indigenous faculty and staff and the professor assigned to the course to determine a way forward.
“These are issues facing all universities in Canada,” said Elizabeth Church, the Mount’s vice-president academic.
“What we’ve tried to do is listen to the different perspectives and really try to understand how to move forward in a way that is respectful and thoughtful.”
The university has been actively recruiting Indigenous academics, she said, with a new faculty member recently hired and the search for another ongoing.
“It’s a very complex issue and we’re really looking at what it means to have expertise in the topic and bringing in the perspectives that need to be there,” Church said.
Martha Walls, the professor assigned to the course, said in an email that she takes the “important concerns aired over Facebook extremely seriously.”
But despite the outcry on social media, Sherry Pictou, a professor at the university who is Mi’kmaq, is speaking out in support of Walls.
Pictou said she has “full confidence” in her colleague both as a historian and an ally to the Indigenous community.
She said the work of decolonizing “cannot fall just on the backs and labour of other Indigenous academics.”
“I am proud to be working at the Mount and have had much support in ensuring that I am not overly tasked with all Indigenous related issues as so many Indigenous professors are,” Pictou said in an email.
“Though I bring an Indigenous feminist lens to the courses I teach, they are not all Indigenous specific and I would be very concerned if I were prevented from teaching those courses.”