Looking for learning in all the wrong places: urban Native youths’ cultured response to Western-oriented place-based learning

Abstract

For Indigenous youth growing up in today’s Canadian cities, summer, non-formal learning programs developed around outdoor and/or environmental education themes offer the chance for reconnecting with ancestral territories. While tenable, few interpretive studies focus on youths’ engagement with such learning. This paper offers an analysis of the effects of one such program, in the process examining how discourses of primitivism and authenticity in place-based learning practice (emphasizing Western-oriented outdoor and environmental education) serve to challenge rather than benefit urban Native youth. Instead of interpreting youths’ response as a direct affront to the hegemony of Western education, I make the case for seeing this in connection with a long history of resistance to assimilating practices and in keeping with Cree traditions of orality. Through their actions in the process of learning, these youth contribute something vital to contemporary place-making and a growing Indigenous resurgence on the Canadian prairies.

Keywords:

• Indigenous youth resistance
• place-based learning
• non-formal learning
• Cree orality
• urban Native experience

Acknowledgements

Funding support for this study was provided by Canadian Heritage’s Urban Multi-Purpose Aboriginal Youth Centres (UMAYC) Initiative and the Aboriginal Capacity and Development Research Environments (ACADRE) Program. Acknowledgment is also owed to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the National Aboriginal Health Organization for their support in the form of doctoral fellowships. Gratitude for helpful comments on earlier drafts goes out to Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (editors of this issue), Donna Deyhle, and two blind reviewers. Finally, the deepest debt is owed to the young people who participated in this research.

Notes

1. Ten youth in total, four males and six females, aged 14–16 years, who claim ancestry with one or more of the following Indigenous groups: Cree (Néhiyawak); Cree (Néhiyawak)-Métis; Métis-Cree (Néhiyawak); Dene (Dehcho); Blackfoot (Piikáni); and Assiniboine (Nakota). Cree is the language of the first two groups; the language of the third is Michif-Cree, a unique language incorporating complex elements of Cree and Métis French (Bakker 1997, 85). Only one youth (Assiniboine) in the study did not claim Cree ancestry; all youth referred to themselves at times as “Native” and all were enrolled in public schools at the time of this study.

2. The summer program involved three Aboriginal organizations and Cree, Cree-Métis and Métis-Cree Elders and cultural liaisons from the bio-region in which the study took place. A proportionately larger segment of the program focused on Western outdoor and environmental education, activities contracted out to non-Native groups.

3. See Coombs with Ahmed’s (1974) definition: “any organized educational activity outside the established formal system … intended to serve identifiable learning clienteles and learning objectives.”

4. Methods include participant observation and interviewing (focus group and semi-structured). Having engaged youth in learning digital landscape photography, I also used the method of photo elicitation interviewing. Less formally, I had many conversations with program aides, outdoor and environmental educators, Elders, and cultural liaison persons. Paired with thematic analysis, these conversations helped me to make sense of the data. I use pseudonyms throughout the paper.

5. See Carter (1999) for a historical perspective on Cree resistance.

6. In Cree, kisiskâciwani-sipiy, meaning “great, swift flowing waters”.

7. Youths’ familial connections extend, for instance, to Woodland Cree and Cree-Métis communities in Northern Alberta, Plains Cree and Métis-Cree communities in Central Alberta, Blackfoot communities in Southern Alberta and Assiniboine communities in Southern Saskatchewan.

8. Discussed by Li (2006) as neo-primitivism, indistinguishable from exoticism.

9. See Marker (2006) who analyzes this contrariness in depth.

10. See Kaomea (2003) and Marker (2006) for in-depth discussions of how the integration of Indigenous content into the curriculum risks recuperating historically and racially entrenched ideas and assumptions about Indigenous peoples.

11. From field notes. Youth were also described as “un-rooted” by a long time environmental educator that I spoke to as part of setting up the summer program.

12. Indigenous languages were a major target of residential schools whose aims were to civilize “the Indian” so as to encourage assimilation, generally speaking, at the lowest socio-economic level (Miller 1996).

13. See also Barnhardt and Kawagely (2005).

14. Eli is the only youth in this study who makes no claim to Cree or Cree-Métis heritage.

15. Wilson and Peters (2005) challenge the assumption that First Nation culture can only be tied to reserve land, arguing that Anishinabe individuals and families in urban areas maintain their connectedness to the land, a central component of Anishinabe culture, by carving out their own cultural space and maintaining ties to their home communities.

16. The idea of a Native person as an anomaly, or as people who had turned their backs on their culture (Newhouse and Peters 2003), is increasingly disrupted by the growing number of Indigenous peoples now living in Canadian cities (Statistics Canada 2006).

17. See also Deyhle’s (2009) reflections on Navajo agency.

18. A play on the lyrics of idealist George Berkeley (popularized by songwriter Bruce Cockburn in the song, If A Tree Falls).

19. Academic under-performance is often associated with the culture and identity of racialized students (St. Denis 2004). Somewhat ironically, the educational gap is in turn addressed through a focus on bringing more of Indigenous cultures into schools. Again, see Kaomea (2003) and Marker (2006) for discussions regarding the challenges inherent to doing so.

20. In the context of language revitalization, McCarty, Romero, and Zepeda (2006) describe the actions of Native youth as counter-narratives “because they are concerned with the social and political as well as the personal” (31).

21. The 2006 Census shows that more than one-quarter (28%) of all off-reserve Aboriginal children participated in, or attended, a cultural gathering, ceremony or activity and one-half (50%) of Aboriginal adults participated in at least one traditional activity (such as hunting, fishing or trapping) in 2006. Forty-one percent of off-reserve Aboriginal children reported having someone in the community to help them understand their culture and history (Canadian Council on Learning 2009, 5). We might think of these as a response to what Alfred and Corntassel (2005) describe as “decolonizing and regenerating communities” (600).

22. A prairie term; for a related discussion, see Cree scholar Michael Hart’s (2002) Seeking Mino-Pimâtisiwin.

23. We can see this also in arguments made by Hermes (2005) regarding Ojibwe culture added on to existing school structures: “Once institutionalized, the omnipresent power of culture is distorted and diminished into small bits of information, necessarily distracting from the ability to constantly co-create culture in the context of purposeful social activity”. (49–50).

24. Jeannette Armstrong (1999) explains of this process that youth are, “those who are like-minded in their tremendous creative energy as they yearn for change that will bring about a better future” (5).