Identifying and working through settler ignorance

ABSTRACT

As Canadian education systems implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, various expressions of white settler resistance become amplified. This article examines the potential for settler-educators’ stories to teach about processes for working through settler ignorance. Insight into the question of how to transform settler subjectivities and relationships with Indigenous peoples cuts across theoretical terrain in three fields: decolonizing education, epistemic ignorance, and affect/felt theory. We engage with these currents to analyze settler resistance through nIshnabek de’bwe wIn, a project aimed at transforming relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and teachers through collaborative storytelling. We report on one project facet that brought Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers, educators, and students together to create digital/multimedia stories about experiences of schooling that could inform settler-educator learning by offering critical insight into unlearning ignorance as one strategy (among many) for decolonizing colonial structures of schools. Attention to settler stories reveals a triadic relationship between power/knowledge/affect wherein these forces are inextricably entangled in ways that create and reinforce the epistemological knot of settler ignorance and resistance. The emotional work storytellers undertook as part of their embodied learning offers insight into the promise of creative pedagogies for untying that knot.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic ignorance
• affect
• de-colonizing education
• embodied knowing
• digital/multimedia storytelling

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. To watch the stories presented in our article, go to https://revisioncentre.ca/identifying-and-working-through-settler-ignorance (password ‘unlearning_ignorance’). These videos are intended for classroom use, and are not for public screening.

Additional information

Funding

Our work was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Grant [435-2014-2124], S. Dion (PI) and the Canada Foundation for Innovation [PROJ 35254], C. Rice (PI).

Notes on contributors

Carla Rice

Dr. Carla Rice is a white settler scholar at the University of Guelph. A leader in the field of embodiment studies and arts-informed research in Canada, her research explores cultural representations and counter-stories of identity and difference. She founded the Re•Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice, a research center with a mandate to use arts-based methodologies to foster social well-being, equity, and justice. Notable books include The Aging – Disability Nexus (2020), Thickening Fat: Fat Bodies, Intersectionality and Social Justice (2019), and Gender and Women’s Studies: Critical Terrain (2018). She currently runs Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology and Access to Life, a 7-year, multi-stakeholder grant that cultivates disability and non-normative arts through a decolonizing lens.

Susan D. Dion

Dr. Susan D. Dion is a Potawatomi-Lenapé scholar who has been working in the field of education for more than thirty years. She is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, where she is responsible for leadership of Wulelham Courses, Cohorts and Programs in Indigenous Education. Her research focuses on Indigenizing, Decolonizing and Realizing Indigenous Education, Urban Indigenous Education and Indigenous student wellbeing. She is currently working on a manuscript titled Indigenous Presence: Learning from Art and Story in which she addresses questions erupting in these post-TRC times.

Hannah Fowlie

Hannah Fowlie is a settler student in the Social Practice and Transformational Change doctoral program at the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences, University of Guelph, who, previously as the social worker at the Toronto District School Board’s Urban Indigenous Education Centre, worked side-by-side with her First Nations, Métis, Inuit colleagues for nine years. Hannah has been involved with the Re•Vision: The Centre for Art and Social Justice since 2012 and has facilitated digital storytelling workshops with many different communities.

Andrea Breen

Dr. Andrea Breen is a White settler who lives in the place we call Toronto. She is an Associate Professor of Family Relations and Human Development at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on identity development, family relationships (including non-human family members), and well-being. Her most recent book project is Research and Reconciliation: Unsettling Ways of Knowing through Indigenous Relationships (2019), co-edited with Shawn Wilson and Lindsay DuPré.