Indigenous Education Scholarship

 When I started my doctoral program, I tried to catch up on reading Indigenous education books that had been recently published. In this post, I am going to talk about some of the books that I read on the topic of Indigenous education. These are not summaries or readings notes or reviews. These are just a few comments on each book. I'm writing this post because I want to keep my memory of these books alive and I also want to return to the books again in the future. As I go through books that I read in the early stages of my degree, I am becoming aware of the narrow frame that I had while reading them. Rather than just sort of absorbing what they presented in an open ended and organic manner, I really just went through them trying to see whether or not they could help me with my dissertation topic. Surely reading them broadened my horizons. But I also read them during a period of time when I put pressure on myself to read a lot in a short window of time, so I probably did not really retain a lot of what I read. I look forward to rereading some of these books in the future at a leisurely pace and with no end in mind. 

So, one of the first books that I read was Indian Education for All: Decolonizing Indigenous Education in Public Schools by John P. Hopkins. It is published by the Teachers College Press, and it focuses on legislation in Montana which mandated that every Montanan learn about Native Americans, and that educators work with Montana tribes to pursue this goal. The legislation is called Indian Education for All, and if you would like to know more about it, the state has a website which contains information for teachers in order to support the initiative, including offering weekly pro-d by zoom. Montana's Indigenous population is about 9%, which overall is higher than BC's. But BC's Indigenous student population is over 11%. BC also recently implemented mandatory Indigenous content across the board through curriculum reform, so it was interesting to see something similar happening elsewhere, and specifically, to see how the government was investing resources in order to support teachers in implementing the initiative. Conceptually, another interesting thing about the book was the concept of reconciliation. In Canada, reconciliation first surfaced in land claims court decisions. And then the TRC was created as a result of a class action lawsuit launched by residential school survivors. So there is a very specific legal history attached to the word. It's interesting to see the word used in a context without that very specific history. The book also introduces new concepts, like desettling. It's kind of a dense read, but it's a great primer on concepts like culturally sustaining/revitalizing pedagogy, tribal critical race theory, and survivance. 

The next book is Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education: Philosophies of the Iethi'nihstenha Ohwentsia'kekha (Land) by Sandra D. Styres. The book is structured in five parts, in accordance with the author's own cultural framework. Vision - (Re)centering outlines some foundations knowledge including the seven grandfather teachings, wampum, terminology, rationale for the project, and decolonization. Relationships - (Re)membering talks about seven generation thinking and also the politics around who is and is not Indigenous. Knowledge - (Re)cognizing remembers ancient knowledges, and then goes into some theory around privilege and power, panopticism, and the tension between dominant western approaches and Indigenous approaches. Action - (Re)generating provides some thoughts around how education might look different if it were based on land centered approaches. And finally, Iethi'nihstenha Ohwentsia'kekha - (Re)actualizing talks about concepts such as "word warriors", doctrine of discovery, and critical intimacy. I found the anecdote in critical intimacy to be particularly poignant. The book ends with a call to go beyond responsive pedagogies and beyond place-based pedagogies. The book pulls together a lot of thinkers in Indigenous education. But it also uses non-Indigenous thinkers such as Foucault, Descartes, and Freire. It's not an easy book to read, as it is very philosophical (as one would hope it would be, based on the title) and covers a lot of ground. It is well written and well organized. I recommend eating this book in small bites. 

The next book is Indigenous Education: New Directions in Theory and Practice, edited by Huia Tomlins-Jahnke, Sandra Styres, Spencer Lilley, and Dawn Zinga. I found that it was an interesting read, and overall I think it approached Indigenous identity from a place of strength. It featured chapters by some authors who were already well known to me and led me to some authors who I had not heard of before. I'm unapologetically BC focused, but it's good for me to look and see what's happening in other places now and then. I did not read every single chapter, though. The chapter that I liked the most was Dawn Zinga's chapter on ethical space. As an educator, I like it when people talk about their practice, that is, about what actually happens in their classrooms with their students and what they actually do in order to bring the theories that they advocate for to life. Also, many of us have ideal conceptualizations of things like decolonization or indigenization, but many of us grapple with the chasm between the ideal in our heads and hearts and the reality of the daily grind. So I loved her teaching anecdotes. I've also heard the phrase "ethical space" in passing, but I never took the time to find out what it means. She did a good job explaining it. I also liked Dwayne Donald's chapter on Homo Economicus. 

The next book is Indigenous and Decolonizing Studies in Education: Mapping the Long View by Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang. This is a collection which contains a wide range of works, both in terms of topics covered and approach to the topics. I read most of the chapters and I think it's a great collection. There was a chapter on Indigenous content requirements, and as someone who has spent time advocating for minimum content requirements, I was surprised to read about how unenthusiastic academics were about the concept. No qualms about everyone having to take a minimum number of English credits, though? Based on the chapter's conclusion, I think they landed in a place where their criticism is largely around unsupported implementation, and their final statement is that minimum content requirements are "probably as good a first step as any." (p.173). Oof. Maybe they should give their upper admin a copy of the book on how Montana implemented minimum content requirements. The sections of this book that I have the most notes on are the series editors' introduction by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. Indigenous education is a topic that transcends boundaries, as it lives both within Indigenous/Decolonizing studies (which is usually in the faculty of arts) and the faculty of education (which is a discipline focused on practice/application, and often times the students in this faculty are oriented towards a professional life outside of the university). The introduction is laid out such a way that these two separate areas of the university are oriented to each other. The introduction is also a good read. The introduction features comments from the editors, and my favourite section is where Eve Tuck reflects on why so many Indigenous people are drawn to education even though education is an undeniably colonial space (p.8). I also really loved the afterward by Erin Marie Konsmo and Karyn Recollet. They talk about how ableism and purity narratives manifest themselves in shaming people who live in the city. They advocate for an ethic of caring for all (p.244) and talk about how we can love land even after it has been damaged. Erin has a particularly beautiful section where she says "What does it mean to shame those who pick medicines in cities or at bus stops? In a conversation with a friend about my experiences being shamed for picking medicines at a bus stop, she responded, 'What does that mean for our people who live in the cities? are they not medicine?" (p.239). 🧡

 The next book is Troubling Truth and Reconciliation in Canadian Education: Critical Perspectives, edited by Sandra D. Styres and Arlo Kempf. By the time that I read this, I was already moving in a really specific direction, so I only skimmed sections of it. But one sentence in it made a lasting impression on me. Jeannie Kerr and Amy Parent open their chapter by stating "we trouble the notion that postsecondary institutions are currently able to address the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's (TRC) calls to action for reconciliation in education, and offer what we see as pedagogical opportunities for instructors in higher education to gesture towards decolonial possibilities." (p.281). Later, they state "we have attempted to trouble the context of higher education in Canada as a colonial structure that takes up the words of reconciliation in the lineage of the TRC while simultaneously maintaining colonial logic and violences." (p.291). They talk about obstructions to reconciliation in post-secondary, and they open up the conversation but don't definitively close it. In response to this, I have a few thoughts. First, even if PSEs are currently unable to address the TRC Calls to Action, they ought to act as though they intend to address the Calls to Action, and ought to at least make as much progress as they can towards the Calls to Action. Second, standing outside of the university, and speaking from the standpoint of an Indigenous citizen, I conceptualize the university as an institute of the state, especially as universities function within and are accountable to a number of pieces of legislation including the Universities Act and property laws. While universities can make some strategic gains here and there, and while individual educators can help shape the minds of citizens, at the end of the day universities can only move as fast and as far as their legislative framework will allow them. So there is a bigger conversation at play in terms of governance and accountability. The opening of this chapter was very jarring (in a good way) and it really made me think, what conditions would have to be in place in order for universities to be able to fully implement the Calls to Action?

I have one more pile of books that I might blog about (Indigenous literature). And a bunch of random books I also want to talk about. But I might not do them right away or ever. I will only do them if I feel inspired to do so, because this blog is my place of joy, and so I have committed myself to the idea that I will only blog when I think to myself "it would be so fun to blog right now." So, no promises that I will blog those anytime soon... but I probably will blog them sooner or later. ✌️