Thinking Place: Animating the Indigenous Humanities in Education

Abstract

Illustrating contexts for and voices of the Indigenous humanities, this essay aims to clarify what the Indigenous humanities can mean for reclaiming education as Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies. After interrogating the visual representation of education and place in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, the essay turns to media constructions of that same place as an exemplary site for understanding Aboriginal relations to the Canadian justice system, before sharing more general reflections on thinking place. The task of animating education is then resituated in the Indigenous humanities developed at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, as a set of intercultural and interdisciplinary theoretical and practical interventions designed to counter prevailing notions of colonial place. The essay concludes by placing education as promise and practice within the non-coercive normative orders offered by the United Nations. In multiple framings and locations of the Indigenous humanities, the essay aims to help readers to meet the challenges they themselves face as educators, learners, scholars, activists.

Aboriginal epistemologies and new teacher induction: The context of a bi-epistemic research endeavour

“…Indigenous epistemologies have "fared spectacularly badly" in university settings and as a consequence "resistance and refusal have been felt within school systems that take their cues and key features of their curricula from their educational 'betters' within mainstream knowledge hierarchies" (Battiste, Bell, Findlay, Findlay, & Henderson, 2005). Aboriginal knowledge orientations are not necessarily evident in mainstream research and scholarship that are more reflective of Eurocentric paradigms (Iseke-Barnes, 2002;see also, Cajete, 1994;Castellano, 1997;Die et al, 2000;Tedla, 1992).…”

Braiding Designs for Decolonizing Research Methodologies: Theory, Practice, Ethics

“…Interestingly, books are often regarded as enacting a series of colonial notions. For example, knowledge as a thing-unto-itself that is already made underscores permanence, granting written textuality superiority over orality and conveying the perception that written records are a criteria for achieving "civilization" (see Battiste et al, 2005). Libraries are thus places having many-times-over achieved the "clean" and privileged epistemic break of knowledge that does not require a knower.…”

The Homework of Response-Ability in Science Education

“…This earlier exploration began exposing and troubling the ways in which I attempted 4 to account for and be accountable to Indigeneity (e.g., IWLN) from within (naturalized and normalized) (neo-)colonial discourses (e.g., Eurocentrism, whiteness), even though I was actively working against this power differential (see also Higgins, Madden, & Korteweg, 2015). Stated otherwise, as the result of a (neo-)colonial curriculum that is hidden in plain sight (see Battiste, Bell, Findlay, Findlay, & Henderson, 2005), efforts to work against and beyond (neo-)colonial categories, concepts, and structures often come to reify that which is laboured against; decolonizing approaches may come to be de/colonizing. In a nutshell, De/colonizing underscores the complexity of the material-discursive structures, commitments, and practices of educational institutions and the Indigenizing initiatives they pursue.…”