Disrupting Molded Images: Identities, responsibilities and relationships—teachers and indigenous subject material

Abstract

This paper explores the complexities of teachers’ understanding of their relationship with Aboriginal people. Drawing on her current work with teachers, the author offers a method for initiating a critical pedagogy of remembrance that allows teachers to attend to and learn from the biography of their relationship with Aboriginal people. The author argues that teachers position themselves as “perfect stranger” to Aboriginal people and explores forms of “ethical learning” which use the act of remembrance to raise awareness of the ways in which the identities of both Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in Canada have been shaped by the colonial encounter. The construction of this ethical awareness among teachers is a promising way to transform relationships between Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal people in Canada.

Notes

1. I am grateful to Carl James, Debbie Samson, Jennifer‐Rose Parente, Saira Salman, and Catherine Wright for their helpful comments, suggestions and various contributions to this paper.

2. The concept of the “perfect stranger” and the process of investigating the “biography of relationship” can be usefully applied to other relationships of difference. There are ways in which we all deny our relationship to equity areas. For example “I’m heterosexual so don’t have to be concerned about sexual and gender diversity”, “I’m financially secure so have no relationship to poverty/class issues”, etc. I argue that the first step in disrupting relationships of oppression is acknowledging that we all have a history of relationship to all of these areas, even if we are not always conscious of particularities of the relationship.

3. The majority but not all of the students who take this course are practicing teachers.

4. I asked students for permission to use their work the year following their participation in the class and well after grades were submitted. I provided students with a copy of what I wrote in response to their work and asked for their response. None of the students requested any changes.

5. Students’ names are pseudonyms.

6. In addition to Thomas King’s text The truth about stories other course texts address questions of presence and erasure including Jonathan Bodeau in his 1993 article “Jack Pine—wilderness sublime or the erasure of the aboriginal presence from the landscape?” and Lenore Keeshig Tobias in her 1992 article “After Oka—how has Canada changed?”

7. I do not have a record of what happened during the actual class and am unable to speak specifically about what was said, however it is useful to think about how in the act of “speaking” about her collection of artifacts Britt encountered a moment in which she saw herself differently.

8. In casual conversations with students, who have completed the course, they tell me that the course and the assignment significantly impact how they teach Aboriginal subject material. Specifically teachers talk about the inclusion of texts written by Aboriginal artists across the curriculum, the recognition of storytelling as a means of knowledge production and exchange, and the introduction of questions regarding relationship with Aboriginal peoples and responsibility to land.