Resisting symbolic violence: Métis community engagement in lifelong learning

ABSTRACT

Speaking to the need for decolonising the oppressed, Métis scholar and activist Howard Adams once questioned why many Métis became confused, puzzled, and lived in constant denial of their unique history and culture. His reflection speaks to the ways in which a colonial form of education strategically and effectively erased, subsumed, and demonised Métis realities and peoples through acts of symbolic violence so effective that even the oppressed were misled. This article explores how Métis community members have demonstrated agency in rectifying this situation via a historic review of community experiences, initiatives, and recommendations in education that reflect recent conceptions of lifelong learning as adaptations to significant life events. Across the Métis homeland, political leaders, activists, educators, and community members have collectively worked to respond to educational needs through a variety of initiatives with the restoration of cultural knowledge and pride as a primary undertaking. Reflecting social literacy aims, the Métis are sustaining a tradition of lifelong learning activities that seek decolonising and self-determining goals that help make sense of their lived experiences through a collective approach. Still, the ability to educate others on Métis topics is contingent on powerholders who privilege the current status quo.

KEYWORDS:

• Indigenous
• social literacy
• symbolic violence
• decolonising
• metis lifelong learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Drawing on the influential works of Pierre Bourdieu (1991), scholars Mills et al. (2012) define ‘symbolic violence [as] the advantage that persons and groups exert against others because of their higher status in the social structure of society. Symbolic violence does not necessarily require physical violence to be upheld, and those deemed inferior accept this as though it were natural. As a result of their advantage, individuals in higher positions of stature within society are able to dominate others lower down and keep them from having access to the same opportunities and privileges’ (pp. 916–918).

2. The term Aboriginal is used here to reflect the terminology used within the 1982 Canadian Constitution. The three groups of Aboriginal people named in the Constitution are First Nations [Indian], Inuit, and Métis; these groups are not inclusive of all Aboriginal, or Indigenous peoples, in Canada but instead reflect only those formally recognised by the federal and provincial/territorial governments of the time.

3. In an online interview titled “What’s Métis scrip? North America’s ‘largest land swindle,”’ Métis rights lawyer Jason Madden details how the Métis were stripped of their land rights through an unscrupulous scrip process. Implemented in the late 1800s after their defeat by incoming colonial powers, many Métis were impoverished making them easy targets for unethical land speculators who were more than eager to profit from their vulnerable state by offering them a fraction of the land’s value or by asking others to impersonate the rightful land owners. In 2013, the Supreme Court found the ‘federal government failed to follow through on a promise it made to the Métis people over 140 years ago’ (Muzyka, 2019, para. 16).

4. American historian Francis Parkman was once hailed as the ‘the best historian of early North America’ (as cited in Maclean’s, 19 September 1964 archival edition) and his historical works recommended as necessary reading for all students of history by former Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King.

5. A 1947 newspaper clipping details how the members of the Fishing Lake Métis Settlement turned out en masse to cut down trees, plane them into lumber, and then went on to build their own schoolhouse.

6. See Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) article by Kyle Muzyka, 25 April 2019: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/unreserved/from-scrip-to-road-allowances-canada-s-complicated-history-with-the-m%C3%A9tis-1.5100375/what-s-m%C3%A9tis-scrip-north-america-s-largest-land-swindle-says-indigenous-lawyer-1.5100507.

7. Joe Sawchuk (1998) credits the origins of the Métis Nation of Alberta to the pre-provincial formation of the Half-Breed Association of St. Albert in 1897. A more direct connection is found in the 1932 formation of the L’Association des Metisses d’Alberta et les Territoires du Nord-Ouest (The Métis Association of Alberta).

8. The story of these digital stories and what the sharing of these stories in the educational realm means for Métis people across Alberta is shared in the 2020 publication Digital storytelling in Indigenous education: A decolonising journey for a Métis community by the author. You may also view a selection of these stories at: www.metisvoices.ca.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Werklund School of Education, Research Services Office at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada [Grant Number 20026460].

Notes on contributors

Yvonne Poitras Pratt

Yvonne Poitras Pratt (Métis, lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada) and is an Associate Professor at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary, in Alberta, Canada. Dr. Poitras Pratt traces her ancestral roots to the historic Red River settlement, and more recently to Fishing Lake Métis Settlement in northeastern Alberta where both her parents’ families settled in the early 1900’s. Yvonne worked with members of the Fishing Lake community to create a series of 19 intergenerational digital stories as part of her doctoral research project in 2009-11, and this decolonizing journey is detailed in the 2020 Routledge publication ofDigital Storytelling in Indigenous Education: A Decolonizing Journey for a Metis Community. Yvonne has published in the realm of social justice, media studies, Métis studies, reconciliatory pedagogy, service-learning, and the integration of arts in education. Dr. Poitras Pratt earned the Confederation of Alberta Faculty Associations (CAFA) Distinguished Academic Early Career Award in 2018, the Alan Blizzard Award for Collaborative Teaching in 2021, and continues to support the educational aspirations of the Métis Nation of Alberta.

Yvonne teaches at the graduate and undergraduate level and is the recipient of a 2016 Werklund Teaching Excellence Award and a 2017 Students Union Teaching Excellence Award.