Disciplining the Innut: Normalization, Characterization, and Schooling

ABSTRACT

This study represents an effort to understand the phenomenon of Native school dropouts in an Innu community. Toward this end it employs a research strategy that examines how the features of the wider society shape Native responses to schooling. More specifically the study investigates how the stratifying qualities of Euro-Canadian society, a phenomenon Foucault refers to as “discipline,” surface in the Innu past, the present day community, and in the community school, and how they prompt young Innut to stay away from school. The school, as well as other Euro-Canadian institutions in the community, employ components of this system of social organization—perpetual observation, evaluation, documentation, and punishment (and reward)—to “normalize” the Innut to ensure, or at least attempt to ensure, that they abide by non-Innu standards. This process, however, creates negative self-images among these young Innut and discourages them from coming to school. I conclude that changing the classroom environment to match the local cultural milieu, a strategy that a number of researchers and others associated with minority education recommend, will do little to alleviate difficulties in Native education, for such a tactic does not address those basic components of the problem that originate in the wider society.