For instructors and students who are seeking to understand more about the terms indigenous, decolonization, and reconciliation.
This chapter focuses on the politics of identity surrounding Indigenousness. Alfred and Corntassel (2005) explain why using Indigenous peoples is a more appropriate term to classify Indigenous communities, clans, nations, and tribes. The authors provide historical context to why the term aboriginalism is a legal, political, and cultural discourse designed to serve an agenda of silent surrender to the root of the colonial state, particularly Canada. This article is a good starting point for instructors to assign to students to understand how each Indigenous nation has its own way of articulating and asserting self determination and identity instead of umbrellaing the complexities and uniqueness of each Indigenous communities.
This article focuses on the importance of understanding what the term decolonization means in relation to Indigenous peoples. The authors argues that decolonization brings about repatriation of Indigenous land and life and the term decolonization should not be used as a metaphor for other social justice agenda to improve societies and schools. This article will be useful for instructors who are trying to clarify the term decolonization and for students to understand the role of decolonization to the Indigenous peoples and should not be held accountable to settler futurity.
This article explores Indigenous pathways to decolonization and resurgence with emphasis on everyday practices of renewal and responsibility within native communities. This article provides contemporary decolonization movements and offers understanding for regenerating Indigenous nationhood and restoring sustainable relationships with indigenous homelands. This article is a good example on the shift of focus from victimization to understanding how Indigenous youths are implementing meaningful and substantive community decolonization practices.
Deconstructing and Challenging Reconciliation: Restitution
Alfred differentiates between reconciliation and restitution in moving towards justice that will result in meaningful changes in the lives of Indigenous peoples and in the return or their land. Alfred defines restitution “the ritual of disclosure and confession in which there is an acknowledgement and acceptance of one’s harmful actions and a demonstration of sorrow and regret, constituted in reality by putting forward a promise to never again do harm and by redirecting one’s actions to benefit the one who has been wronged” (p. 166). This reading problematizes the concept of reconciliation between the settlers and Indigenous peoples. This reading may provide students to critically examine the concept of reconciliation and understand the power inequality that may be entrenched within this concept.
Reconciliation in the University
This book is intended to contribute to both the theoretical debate and classroom practice in the field of education. It explores the legitimacy of Aboriginal, holistic paradigms within some of the diverse frameworks available to educators: experiential learning, feminist and anti-racist pedagogies are emphasized. It documents an effort to interrupt current Aboriginal/European power relations by evolving an alternative Aboriginal teaching model and enacting it within university classrooms. This work reflects an understanding that all sites must be engaged as potentially emancipatory (Fernwood Publishing Abstract).
What are the role and responsibility of the professor of European ancestry, who has also battled for legitimizing Indigenous epistemologies and educational considerations in academe, in working with students who take up the challenges involved in this scholarship? This article focuses on an analysis of some of the articulated responses to a panel presented at a graduate conference in a faculty and university committed to equity and social justice. It creates space to address such questions as What does it mean to take Indigenous thought seriously in an educational institution? How can the relational and traditional/historic aspects of these knowledges, with their commitment to spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and physical dimensions, move beyond acceptance to being seen as normal? How to ensure that intellectual space is open to this turn to the re-creation of such knowledges in the context of the post/colonial university? The article interrogates the roles, limits, and possibilities of education in addressing persistent epistemological inequities as certain knowledges are valued in the university whereas others are relegated to secondary status when they are acknowledged at all. Guswentha and Homi Bhabha's notion of third space provide analytic moments to investigate the tensions and contestations as knowledges collide, interact, and reform in confined discursive spaces (Publication Abstract).
This book addresses the ethics of encounter in the age of neoliberalism in Canada. The chapters scrutinize what Sara Ahmed has called the modes, rather than the participants, of encounter in an effort to avoid creating a fetish of others' differences as if these differences were identities that pre-existed the encounter. For it is in the scene of encounter itself that perceptions of selves and others, the familiar and the strange, are formed. Following Ahmed, the chapters of this book therefore turn attention to the context of each encounter itself- its history, its ratios of power and legitimization, its capacity to establish who is a citizen-insider and who is a stranger-other. A striking feature of these engagements with a range of specific modes of encounter is how often the figure of Indigeneity appears. Repeatedly, whether these chapters address encounters in the university, the bathhouse, the public school system, environmentalist discourse in the field of social work, or the tendency among workers in that field to use the language of mourning, these encounters produce the stranger-other as Indigenous (Coleman, 2015).
Reconciliation and Ways of Knowing
In writing about `whiteness' we are trying to enact a `way of talking' that draws in part on Aboriginal ideas about how to conduct a conversation or tell a story. We also use Homi Bhabha's ideas of `third space' (an `interruptive, interrogative, and enunciative' space) and hybridity as a related way to think through the problems of essentializing binaries and rigid identities. In Aboriginal cultures in Australia and Canada, rather than adopting the `neutral' or `objective' stance common in the academy, it is customary to introduce oneself to one's audience, providing a context to assist in interpretation and exchange. Without such an introduction, real stories cannot be told and productive conversations cannot happen. We thus begin our conversation with each other and with you by examining our personal relationship to the idea of whiteness in order to reveal some of its complexity in Canada and Australia. `Whiteness' as an abstraction has proved useful in moving the invisible norm to visibility, but we show how an awareness of `whiteness' in the two locations can be recuperated to re-privilege the already privileged. Aboriginal speakers and writers have theorized `whiteness', in many cases from outside the academy, in the process `hybridizing' traditional genres. For many of them, Aboriginality, like whiteness, is a construct that often stands in the way of thinking clearly about where to go next in the fight against racism (Publication Abstract).
Reconciliation in Family Policy
The authors examine the politics of caregiving for identity to enrich scholarship about power. They report on a qualitative study with Aboriginal mothers who parent in the wake of the Canadian Indian residential schools (IRS). Just as this system disrupted familial caregiving to assimilate Aboriginal Peoples, data show some mothers now strive to organize their caregiving in ways that serve decolonization and community empowerment. Building on their expertise, the authors argue that counter-colonial family policy investments to support such caregiving should factor in any just compensation for the IRS system if its population, and not just individual, costs are to be redressed (Publication abstract).
iPortal is a full-text database of free & licensed articles, books etc for scholar, student & community focused primarily on Aboriginals & First Nations of Canada.
Evaluating information sources is a critical part of academic research. When evaluating Indigenous sources (documents, articles, books, films, images, etc.) consider the following questions presented in the resources below:
References:
Chong, R. (2020). Evaluating Indigenous sources for credibility. In R. Chong, Indigenous information literacy. Kwantlen Polytechnic University Press Books. https://kpu.pressbooks.pub/indigenousinformationliteracy/part/chapter-2/
Government of Alberta. (n.d.). Indigenous pedagogy evaluating resources about Aboriginal Peoples: Excerpts from our words, our ways. Walking Together: First Nations, Métis, Inuit Perspectives in Curriculum. https://www.learnalberta.ca/content/aswt/indigenous_pedagogy/documents/evaluating_resources.pdf
Library Archives Canada. (n.d.). Assessing and validating resources: Aboriginal heritage. Indigenous Heritage. https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/aboriginal-heritage/Documents/Assessing%20and%20Validating%20Sources.pdf