Decolonizing Education

So our internet has taken a turn for the extremely slow tonight, so I'm going to spare you any photographs of mountains and the neat-o picture I took of a caribou pelt and the snapshot I got of the snowmobile that I flipped yesterday and the wooden platform I splintered.

Instead, reader, you have me. Just me and my words.

And I'm afraid I don't even have a great deal to say! Today we headed on up the hill to have brunch with Abbas and Sherry, Dave and Pat's son and daughter-in-law. We came back. I wandered over to look at the leavings of that hunter's work on the ice (this time, having learned from how smelly I made my glove when I poked the seal fat last time and having just gotten said smell out, I used my toe to push it around). I headed back in, watched the weather go by, and thought about what I'm going to do with myself over the next few days.

Tomorrow, it's my continuing self-directed professional improvement programming and some fun events for students who are now on spring break (whether any show up is really the question at hand!). I've been reading Thomas King's The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America. I was fortunate enough to hear Thomas King speak while at St. Thomas University and have been a fan of his work since. And, after happening on an excellent article about decolonizing the education system (thanks, Emily!), I've been on a little personal and professional quest to really do my homework on colonization, education, hegemony, and First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples in Canada.

I've been fortunate enough, in my own education, to have been exposed to the parts of history that often get skipped in public school classrooms (the horrors of the residential schools, the way First Nations soldiers were treated during wartime in Canada, blatantly racist and systemically oppressive government policies, the High Arctic Exiles, among other events that characterize the government of Canada's historically problematic relationship with Aboriginal peoples) and later, in university, post-colonial theory and its place in Canada, Eurocentrism and hegemony, and the politics of social justice and how that framework can play out in the classroom.

And so I've launched my own little study program, building on the foundation I have cultivated throughout my own education. Teaching in Nunavut has helped cement my commitment to examining the politics that are implicit in the education system and that, of course, involves making sure that I've done my research and have solicited and listened to Indigenous voices and perspectives.

In saying that, I'll give today's final word to "Decolonizing Education: Not an Indian Problem" (ie., an summary of a talk given by Dr. Battiste, whose book I will be picking up very shortly):

Dr. Battiste outlined how her work focuses on helping Canadian citizens and pre-service teachers to understand the social context into which Indigenous peoples have been forced, and how this Eurocentric framework found within our educational institutions has created inequities and disparities amongst students and communities, even though out educational system prides itself on being an equitable one. The context within which Aboriginal people endure the educational system is an example of how the Eurocentric framework ensure the myth of superiority of one race at the expense of the well-being of another by creating false concepts of differences, deficiencies, and dependency in comparison to the 'white' defined 'norm.' 

... 

Decolonizing education, significantly not "decolonizing Aboriginal education," points to the fact that we need to reframe our current education system as a whole. It also implies that there is a significant problem with the education system, and it isn't an Indian problem. The Eurocentric framework of education will continue to be problematic: we will not solve inequities, nor injustices, by those means that are currently in practice in our institutions and educational systems.