Mapping and Complicating Conversations about Indigenous Education

ABSTRACT

In this article I offer a series of critical reflections about existing efforts and achievements in Indigenous Education, with particular emphasis on the risks, tensions, and paradoxes that arise where different knowledge systems meet, and when Indigenous peoples ourselves hold contradictory educational desires. I focus on the idea of the land as first teacher and on the difficulties of enabling institutional educational processes that conceptualize it as a living entity, rather than an object, a resource a property. I seek to complicate our conversations to take account of the ways that colonial interests, competing investments, and structures of schooling shape the education that Indigenous youth today receive, and how this circumscribes the kinds of education it is possible for us to imagine. I conclude by offering a cartography that enables us to map how Indigenous youth encounter different ideologies of education and schooling, I also offer some thoughts about pedagogical possibilities that emerged from a course in which students were invited by Elders to witness a Sun Dance ceremony in Turtle Island.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for funding the research project, “Reimagining Aboriginal Education for a Shared Future: Examining Aboriginal Education Enhancement Agreements,” from which this paper emerged. I would also like to acknowledge the people who have supported me in the development of this paper though this project, including Keith and Karen Chiefmoon, Vanessa Andreotti, Michael Marker, Gregory Cajete, and Sharon Stein.

Notes

¹ “Indigenous education” is overlapping with but irreducible to other fields of inquiry, such as Indigenous studies (or related fields like First Nations, Native American, or Māori studies) or environmental education.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cash Richard Ahenakew

Cash Richard Ahenakew, PhD, is a First Nations scholar and an assistant professor in the Department of Education at the University of British Columbia whose research experience and interest focus on the areas of international Indigenous studies in education, curriculum, pedagogy, critical theory, mixed methodology and health, spirituality & wellbeing. Cash is Plains Cree and member of Ahtahkakoop Cree Nation.