An Indigenous Renaissance - A Conversation with Dr Marie Battiste

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Indigigoji is a system of knowing that involves living and learning in place about an ecology in which the focus is on personal and collective responsibilities in and through the covenants that we have about who we are and what our purpose here.

Hi everyone, thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is brought to you in partnership with Notalk. As we think about the future of education, it's an important question to consider what it means to those of us in culturally Eurocentric school systems around the world to learn from and with Indigenous peoples about the role of education in community and connected with place, and even to ask, should we, after the horrors inflicted upon Indigenous communities by settlers? These are delicate but important questions, and it was a huge privilege to be able to sit down with Dr. Marie Battiste to discuss them. Dr. Battiste is a Mi'kmaq educator from Botlod'ek First Nations in Nova Scotia, in what is now Canada, and Senior Mi'kmaq Professor Emeritus at the University of Saskatchewan, where she continues her research on decolonization, reconciliation strategies, and indigenizing the academy. She is also a prolific author and writes widely about the Indigenous Renaissance and decolonizing education. Her latest book, Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Canadian Obligation, is coming out in October, co-written with James Zakhej Youngblood Henderson. You can find links to all of her books and some of the sources that Dr. Baptiste talks about in the show notes. Thank you, Mary. Firstly, it's an absolute pleasure and privilege to meet you and be able to have this conversation, and so thank you for joining. And I'd love to invite you firstly, if you may, just to introduce yourself briefly and, and say any opening words before we start the conversation.

Thank you very much, Tim. I'd like to begin by letting you know where I am, and where I'm located now is on Mi'kma'ki, which is made up of 5 provinces in Eastern Canada, on which we have our Mi'kmaq people's lands and territories comprise that territory and land. It is called to us Mi'kma'ki, and there are 7 districts in that particular land base that covers a large portion of of the Atlantic provinces. I'm in a section or a territory called Unama'ki, which today is known as Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. And these are the ancestral and unpurchased lands of Mi'kmaq people that are protected under the treaties that began in 1725, a particular one in 1761 in this territory, but that Mi'kmaq people are protected under treaties that are now under and are part of the Constitution of Canada under Section 35, where Canada affirmed its decolonization, or it's coming home with its own constitution, has declared its affirmation for Aboriginal and treaty rights in this particular area. So I'm— this is the homeland people on which we have lived and flourished from time immemorial on which our stories and our Indigenous knowledges are built upon. It is also a land that now is being understood under the UN Declaration for the Rights of Indigenous People, and hopefully we will have a chance to talk more about that.

I hope so. Thank you. Yeah, no, it's a great pleasure to be able to have this conversation and just to reflect. I've been having, thankfully, more conversations on the podcast, for example, with Vanessa Andriotti recently, about the, the learning, the mutual learning that can happen between and around some of the Indigenous ideas around learning and what education might mean in its widest sense. As people really start to think about and question, I think, the Eurocentric schooling, and that has now kind of become this often violently exported around the world, now a kind of a global education system. There's a lot of challenges there and questioning what that means and how do we do something differently. I think there's some there's definitely a lot of people looking towards Indigenous communities to understand how things might be different. So I think personally, I think it's a very interesting conversation and a lot of learning to be had. And perhaps one of the things, I mean, so your work was put onto me by a wonderful colleague who does a lot of work in this area and particularly the concept of cognitive imperialism. So I'd love to, if we can, to get onto that, but perhaps we could start by, I know personally your experience with the education system has had many dimensions, both in Indigenous, in your, your own Indigenous communities, and then also in more, let's say, Eurocentric contexts like Harvard and Stanford, but also your sister's experience. So perhaps if we could start, if you don't mind, we could talk just a little bit about what was that kind of early experience of the way that this more Eurocentric Western education system arrived, and how did it intersect and interact with your communities?

Thank you. Yes, I guess where I should go back to is the period of time before I was born. And that was a period of time in which my parents were living in their homeland in Bodhla-dek, had once been already removed from an area in the Galloway's Barrow area where their whole community were taken away from that land and then sent in all different directions. And I always thought my mother was a very friendly person going from reserve to reserve meeting with people, but as it turns out these were the relatives that were all connected together mother in the time earlier when they were removed, and that she remembered and kept those relationships ongoing throughout our life, in her lifetime, and then shared with us who all of our relatives were in those areas. In the period of time when my— before my parents left the reserve, it was a period called centralization, in which the federal government decided to remove all Mi'kmaq people again from their lands and remove them to what they thought were centralized locations called reservations or reserves where they would then provide them with centralized services, schools and doctors or, you know, various kinds of economic development kind of things. But that would take them away from where they were, where they were sustaining themselves on their lands and in gardens and sharing and a reciprocal relational kind of life in which they lived with the land and had always done that. In so doing, my parents as others had to move, and when they moved, they burned down the schools, they burned down the churches, and they burned down their homes, and they would not be able to return to those places. And so my parents joined others and, and went to Eskasoni, but in so doing, their children were then sent to these residential schools, and my parents ended up leaving there after a few years where they were having to live in multiple families in a home until a proper house was built, which which often was a shell of a house rather than everything in it. So people were end up moving into these shells of houses and living in impoverished situations. My parents left and they went to Maine where I was born, and it was in my growing up that I began to understand what they had gone through as well as what my sister had gone through, having gone to residential school, and it became kind of like a life passion of understanding my own Indigenous language, the how the languages had— were lost, what the education had done, and so on. And that was the study of which I did. But part of that study was my work in Stanford University when I took a course from Martin Carnoy on cultural imperialism and education. And in that course, I began to understand that the experience that Indigenous people had with imperialism at large around the world was an experience that we had all shared, part of oppression and racism and colonialism and all of that kind of thing began to resonate with the experience I had, which I thought was localized and particular and not general and universal to all Indigenous oppression. And that kind of thing led me to many aha moments in which I then in my first paper called what the experience we had not cultural imperialism, but cognitive imperialism. And after that, it became the foundation of many papers and books that I've I have written since.

Amazing. No, I mean, it's such a powerful concept, so I'd love to speak to you a bit more about that. But perhaps if you don't mind, because I'm— the audience for the podcast is all around the world, and so some people may not be aware of the context of Canada and the residential schools. And it seems, from my limited understanding of it, it seems to be— have been such a kind of clear mechanism of violence and cultural oppression and cognitive imperialism. Would you mind just sharing a little bit more about your sister's experience in the residential school and what that actually meant?

Well, it is— my sister and all of my aunts attended the Indian residential school, and my father's sisters and his brother attended during a time when his mother died at childbirth, and all the children were then thought to be what they called at the time, they said it was for orphaned or neglected children. And so at the time my father had to work in the woods and so on, and so the two oldest were left home, and that was my dad and his sister, but all the others went to residential school. But at residential school, which was in Shubenacadie, was a place where priests and nuns were given the monies and the authority to create the curriculum and otherwise teach children, but it was as a way to take away their Indianness, to take the Indian out of the child. Child, and all of them meant a great deal of punishment and terror. It was traumatic. It was witnessing abuse as well as being abused. It was the loss of the language. It was the experiments that were done on them in terms of their nutrition, taking away food. They, they starved most of the time that they were— their memories of the residential schools. Their hair was cut they were treated badly, you know, doused in kerosene and various kinds of things that all led to layers of continuous abuse on their mind, on their body, and on their spirit. And while some people stayed, you know, the full 8 years in school, some spent only the, this part of the year, the September to June, and others spent many years. And it wasn't— it was with my own I think was 3 years at the residential school before my, you know, she was being abused and my mother was to learn about this because she had now moved into Houlton, Maine and was living in shacks behind the potato house where my father worked. And it just, it just didn't, wasn't a place where they could have her to go to school from.

Yeah.

And so it, it was a horrific experience that she is still recovering from. And it did, while she's still alive, it is still a part of an embodied experience that she feels still in her hands and her feet, because those are the places where she was abused, and there was always these bones that later she would come to know that were cracked and hadn't been healed properly. So, there's a lot of things around that abuse that continues to reverberate in the minds and spirits of Mi'kmaq people, as well as Indigenous people across Canada. There were over 100 schools.

I mean, I'm sorry to bring it up in a way that, you know, because it's such a horrendous and horrific experience, and thank you for sharing about it, and I'm so sorry for that experience. But, and as I understand it, if I'm correct, in— I mean, it's a widely understood, you know, violent abuse in Canada as a context, and, and it has been acknowledged that this was a horrendous abuse, right? It's not, it's not a secret anymore.

Well, no, and it was a very well-kept Canadian dark history, uh, secret to them that they kept hidden, and it wasn't until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that committed to its testimonies and reports from Indigenous people that came out with the report in 2015 that actually demonstrated all the abuse that Indigenous people had experienced in the, in the Indian residential schools across Canada and put forward a list of recommendations that were called calls to action to both the governments and Canadians at large to understand what reconciliation then must mean in terms of their becoming aware of their complicities with and their benefits from the oppression of Indigenous children and peoples through time.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and I mean, the thing that I find so profoundly disturbing but also significant about it is this idea of separation. And it felt, from what I've heard other people speaking about it, they were residential schools partly because of the strength of the ties to local place and community that the young people were physically removed from in order to, and then another one of your amazing phrases, marinade them in Eurocentrism, right? But they couldn't marinade them in Eurocentrism from while they were embedded in community and place with their kin and in the connection to the land. So they were literally physically taken to a boarding school, residential school away from that. And it just, that idea of separation is so strong. It's something that, it's an idea that keeps coming up. It came up in my conversation with Vanessa about almost ontologies of separation. We separate mind and body and we separate, there's a lot of this kind of, yes, physical separation, but then also kind the way that we start then thinking about separately about different aspects of who, who we are, or our connection with nature and place. And so this idea of separation, I think, is a really— it feels like a really significant one.

Well, it's, it's important to note that Canadians, or even before the Confederation, that there were many experiments that were made, particularly in the eastern part of, of Canada, where We had not yet gone to the big huge Canada, but we had colonialism beginning in this place, and Indigenous youth were invited at different times to attend the schools of colonialists in the region. And there are reports of that happening, as what I was to find out as part of my own doctoral research on that, and in so doing, they did not spend long times at it because the Mi'kmaq life was one of movement, and it was always moving with the seasons, moving with the, with the food, moving with where they could live, you know, as they did traditionally in different places, knowing what kinds of foods that they might need for the winter and how to get those things. And so they didn't attend to school you know, as a consistent kind of thing. And in those reports they speak about that, but that also that in their experiments they continue to diminish and create narratives of Mi'kmaq people and Indigenous people in this particular area that cultivated a sense of inferiority for them and superiority for themselves. So it was a constant disparagement of Indigenous people's lives, calling them primitive and ignorant and uncivilized and needing civilization and so on. And in so doing, it was about early 1800s, about 1815, that they began a planting out system in which they took Mi'kmaq people from their homes and put them in farms, and the government paid the farmer a year's salary to have Migma children living in their homes doing their farm work, their domestic work. It was called planting out, and this planting out system was a kind of a first abuse. It was like a slavery, if you will, of Indigenous children in homes, and it was to say we'll take them out of their having to live in the forest, you know, under these conditions, and we'll feed them and take care of them. But it was also a place of abuse and slavery and other kinds of abuses. So that kind of thing was a kind of an experiment that led to other experiments until the churches said there is no way you can have children go back to their parents because they will just go back to living and speaking their language and no longer carrying the fruits of civilization. And so then And this development of a residential school system in which they would go all year and many years was then contrived and developed at different places. It thrived on children having to be there all year round and not allowed, or actually imprisoning parents who didn't allow their children to go to that school or to be taken. And so many children ran away in the forest and/or were hidden, and those children are the ones that survived and continued to live in the family, nourished by the family, live the life with the family, have the language, have the culture, have the teachings, and so on.

Wow. I mean, it's just— it's the levels of violence being perpetrated. I mean, obviously physical, as you've said, and kind of political and social violence, but also, and this takes us to your concept of cognitive imperialism, the cognitive violence of the imposition of another way of thinking and knowing and being in the world and another language as well, of course, the violent imposition of that. I just think it's such a profound example of your concept of cognitive imperialism. And yeah, it's, can I ask you just from your own then perspective, because you mentioned that you, by choice, you chose to go to Harvard and Stanford for your own education. How did you feel your relationship with those kinds of institutions as kind of, you know, bastions of the Western kind of Eurocentric education system, right?

Well, I guess that how opportunity and choice become connected is an interesting place because I would never have chosen these. I think that my only choice was to become a teacher. And my opportunity to become a teacher was made through the availability of a university near my home, the University of Maine. Then I moved to then another University of Maine in another place and got my degree. In those places, I lived by scholarships and other kinds I, I helped myself get through, and it wasn't until the latter part of my education that the state of Maine in the United States developed a free tuition for Maine Indians, and it was then that I got my tuition and I got some books and allowances. So having had then that first degree, and among the very few with that first degree, Harvard University was offering fellowships for Indigenous people that came from the Ford Foundation grant that had been given to them to educate Indigenous people. And because Harvard was one of the first places which took in Native Americans in the States and had an actual mission in its early years to educate the sons of chiefs and so on, that kind of connection made it possible for me to get one of these 15 fellowships that were offered, which made it possible for me to then complete a year of my master's at Harvard University in the College of Education. And then to take that later, as I finished my education, I then went with my partner, my husband then, to California. And while I was working with the American Institutes for Research in Palo Alto, I was doing my research at Stanford University and saw all of this activity going on. And I applied. They said, "Oh, you've got a Harvard degree. Well, sure, you're one of us," kind of thing. And so it began. And for the first time, I was in the second year of my doctoral studies that I then was accepted by Indian Affairs in Canada to be funded under their education funds. And since that time, then they funded a bit of my upper education.

Fascinating. So you really, I mean, you've really kind of inhabited both systems of epistemology and, and ways of thinking and ways of knowing. And, and that's actually, I mean, in order to kind of unpack this idea of cognitive imperialism, I'd love to ask you about that if I can, just how would you describe some of the kind of quite specific maybe differences between between this kind of more Eurocentric way of knowing, way of learning, way of doing education, and then a more indigenous knowledge system. So I think there's, again, there's this dance happening between and how, as I said at the beginning, how can we kind of mutually learn some things there? And perhaps for people who aren't aware, how would you describe the difference?

Well, I think it begins by understanding what Eurocentrism is. And Eurocentrism is a European-centered of knowledge characterized by themselves as superior, suggesting progress, that it is hierarchical, and thus it has layers of expertise, and then it creates a monopoly in which all educational knowledge systems then derive. And so that kind of singularity and notions of, of universal and diffuse to the periphery puts European civilization at the center and all other peoples in the periphery with different kinds of characterizations of, you know, uncivilized and progressive, you know, and in so doing it creates the engine of cognitive imperialism in which whole nations and groups of people have been denied their knowledge systems and their culture, their their spiritual identities and their land and wealth are then confiscated in the process of assuming that they carry authority by their laws, their rules, their regulations, their systems of knowledge that continue to support that particular kind of education knowing. And so it really positions Indigenous people worldwide and outside of that knowledge system, and while we recognize our knowledge system as part of our cultural heritage, part of our language, part of our being in place. It wasn't until the late 1990s that actually Indigenous peoples' culture, language became understood as a knowledge system. Up until that time, it was described by anthropologists as the other way of being.. And that other way of being often was subjected to different kinds of appropriations of knowing and thinking and being, and described by these Eurocentric experts as in particular kinds of ways, and left us all with a lot of shame and also blame and a lot of pain. And so as we continued through education, many of us denied that there was anything of any value in a Eurocentric education and did not attend and didn't go through that system. And I, and, and few during my era in time, were ones who did go through that and began to use that in ways to help us to understand our own oppression. And it was a time when the critical race theorists and women feminists and other people through the civil rights movement, American Indian Movement, and other movements of the time were speaking of liberation and equality and equity and all these things, which resonated with how do we bring things together now? How are we going to mobilize and understand better what our own culture, language, and now knowledge systems as we've come to know them How do we reconcile them into ways that make sense to us, but also have since been as a form of resistance and reclamation in Canada and worldwide through the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, which went through almost 20 years of being a draft declaration that had to then be finally taken up by the nation states and then go through their own process. Where they did change very little of that, what Indigenous people had come up with, to now what we come to understand is the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, which now has been accepted across the world and now is in implementation in Canada through the UNDRIP Act.

Yeah, so I mean, it's taken, yeah, I hear you've taken a really long time for that reckoning to happen and that kind of the acknowledgement, because that's one of the other things I think I've heard you say and that I I think is also really insidious about the Eurocentric framing is that it also positions itself as, as values neutral, right? It's like, it's not saying we are a culturally situated knowledge system, but we get, we're deciding to have power over other people.

Mm-hmm.

It is that of course, but it's also, we are also going to kind of share the idea that this is actually a, a values neutral way of thinking and knowing., and therefore all these other ones which are somehow culturally rooted are lesser than. Yes. So there's something, there's something really, as I say, insidious about that approach because it's—

and institutions, universities, funding research institutes, governments, educational acts, Royal Societies across Canada, and all kinds of associations that belong to these different— diverse Eurocentric knowledge systems all create a hierarchy and an expertise, peer-given kind of way of affirming their own knowledge system as the knowledge system, right? And never think about what another knowledge system is. So what they do is they create a cognitive imperialism around the world, and with the diversity of languages, of many, many people, not just Indigenous people, but other peoples around the world. Their knowledge system, their ways of thinking, knowing, and being, their contributions, their expertise, and other kinds of ways of knowing are all relegated to the periphery. And that we then, through Eurocentric knowledge system, become what we don't know as much as it is a little bit of what we do know, because in that knowledge system, it is all parceled out in fragments. So there's a linguist that thinks only about language. There's a sociologist who thinks only about systems, and there's an educator that thinks only about curriculum and teacher education and students and pedagogies. And then there's, you know, and so on, business and everything has its expertise areas. And so everybody is a little bit of fragmentation, and, you know, with a little bit of specialist knowledge in the area of their field, whereas Indigenous knowledge has always been understood as holistic, lifelong, experiential, communally activated learning in and through language and culture and community, through communally activated learning on the land, and is very much directed to a relational element with their land, with their ecology, with the more-than-human in place. And so all of that kind of knowledge has many different kinds of languages that represent that, and so it's very diverse. It also represents different kinds of knowledges that are held by those who are in particular communities or places, whether they're whether they're in the, in the tundra, or whether they're in the forest, or whether they're on the ocean, or whether they live inland on the sea, or in the desert, you know, in all those places. So they hold experiential knowledge and shared knowledge over time that keeps changing and evolving and growing, but yet at the same time that knowledge is only parceled out if it is only relevant to traditional ecological knowledge or scientists in the field who do biological or ecological research kind of thing, and it only becomes relevant or valid when it enters in that particular domain. And so what we're trying to do is to create a more transsystemic awareness of Indigenous knowledges. Now, I use the word transsystemic, which I know you're going to think about it as two-eyed seeing. But two-eyed seeing, ambidextrous epistemologies is what I called it in my early years. It was called other things. It's called ethical space by Willie Irvine, cultural interface by Martin Ducato. It's called double consciousness by Du Bois. And you know, there's many, many, many ways in which it is understood. Yeah, but it also involves multiple ways of thinking and methodology. So there's not a methodology, there is not a singularity of theory that goes with it. It really is talking about having diverse knowledge systems to which we then need to think about how can we develop a trans-systemic way of knowing. That helps us draw upon diverse knowledge systems while we also accept it as is and build new vocabularies to think about it, because one is in, in an Indigenous language, the other is in a colonial Western language. One is very much connected and rooted to the land and territory, the other one is very connected to cognitive dissemination through literature and other kinds of written text. So we've got different kinds of knowledge systems, and we can only benefit by having all of them accessible to us. The kinds of conflicts in the world today between and among people of different language origins, of different place origins, that need to speak to each other requires trans-systemic ways of being, thinking, and moving forward. Two-Eyed Seeing is only one way of thinking about it. There are many other ways to think about it, and you know, Jagged Worldviews of Lira Little Bear and all the kinds of other ways of thinking about it is where we are today. We have not arrived at that singular way of doing it. And we do have some hope present that since, you know, the 1980s when Indigenous scholars were beginning, like myself, to describe our own indigeneity and our own languages and our own cultures and our own communities and our knowledge systems and so on to Western knowledge systems, but also translating that into something that is empowering and useful and ways of encouraging the continuity of our indigeneity in a place. That's the kind of thing that our new Indigenous scholars are helping to arrive at, but they aren't doing it alone. They're doing it in cooperation with collaboration and in the ethical space with Indigenous elders, communities, and within their their own language systems. So that kind of thing is moving us more closely to a trans-systemic way of moving forward. But at the same time, we also have, since the equity movements and liberation movements of the '70s and '80s of the past century, we have other ways of looking at culturally responsive learning and culturally informed ways of thinking and so on. And so those things help us, but we still haven't arrived fully at a full understanding of how do we bring knowledge systems together to learn from one another without absorbing one or the other into who they are.

Amazing. I'm just smiling as you're speaking, and I'm struggling to keep track of all the different things that you've said that I want to kind of notice, because they're There's so much that you've just said there, which is so powerful in the conversations that I'm involved in around education and how does education transform. So if I can just a few things briefly, one is that what you were saying about all of those words that you were using in relation to holistic and place-based and experiential, and even the language that you were using there was, is so resonant with a lot of the language that is being used in formal education in formal schooling context to say, how do we move pedagogies? How do we shift some of the experiences for young people? So there's a lot of resonance in the language as well. Connected also to the language is what you were saying about the fragmentation and the parceling out. And I just wondered, perhaps you could say something just about the— how important there is the language piece, because I think even— I've been thinking about this and I was talking to other people about that idea of even the way that the language is structured creates creates more separation between things, for example, right? You know, in more noun-based languages like English, you've got a lot of thingifying in the language because, and then possessive nouns, mine. And, you know, some languages are very much more verb-based or they're not, they don't have those possessive nouns. And just, and so the role of, and then what you were saying about your sister's experience with, in the residential schools and the, you know, just trying to squash the, the indigenous languages. There seems to be a lot held in the way that the world is being described in those languages.

Right. Well, one of the words you used was pedagogies, and I'd like to just deconstruct a little bit of that.

Please. Yeah.

For a minute. So pedagogy in the sense of how we've come to know pedagogy. I remember asking people, what's that word pedagogy? Coming in and looking it up and sorting out over the years what pedagogy means. And pedagogy really is a word that's developed within a system of education in which children are the focus of education, and children and their layers of aging, you know, and how they learn become part of that. So it is focused on their learning and a hierarchy of what they can learn throughout their time, you know, growing up, and with the outcome being that they become responsible possible human beings to themselves and to their environment, or to their families, and develop their own natural talents and build on those to become, you know, whatever they choose to be. So it becomes very human-centered, it becomes very individual-centered, and it puts the burden on the individual child to solve problems in the future however they can. Can or should. It also involves teachers, and it involves classrooms, and it involves principals, and superintendents, and directors of education, and, you know, Deputy Ministers of Education, Ministers of Education, and an Education Act, and so on. All of that is embodied as well as in the climate of classroom and what's on the walls and so on as pedagogy.

Right.

Now, particular to a school, to an education, to the Education Act, a word that we use is Indigigoji. Indigigoji is the similar kind of thing to learning in a particular place. Indigigoji is then a system of knowing that involves then the living and learning in place about an ecology in which the focus is on personal and collective responsibilities, not just to the self, not to the family, not just to the community, it is also to our responsibilities to the ecology, to the land, to place, to the animals, in and through the covenants or the teachings that we have about who we are and what our purpose here. And so then it is a collective responsibility to pass on these to, to children so that they can become part of the collective to be responsible for all of these things. It is not an individual put-on-your-shoulder kind of thing to go solve the problems of the world. It's an awareness of how to be in the world so that the world continues to be as it should, as you want it to be, as you aspire to be, as you had made covenants with your ancestors and elders in terms of doing. So that land-based knowing, that land-based learning, that living and learning through the communally activated activities of communities in through their seasons and understanding their territories and all of those things is how we come to know Indigigoji. And Indigigoji then is about the cultivation and the continuation of the Indigenous ontologies, worldviews, and epistemologies of our peoples.

Amazing.

This other thing, pedagogy, and Indigigoji's are not the same.

Right.

And so until the pedagogy, I mean, and today pedagogies do pick up on, you know, bringing elders in the classroom, you know, they might even use their Indigenous language, or they might do some, you know, taking kids to the land and doing some experiments with the water and other kinds of things and bringing it back to the classroom and doing other these things. But pedagogy doesn't have the same purposes as Indigigo Jeez, and there are differences that need to be understood in terms of what they do for those people to maintain who they are, where they are, and how they can continue to flourish in that particular place. And that kind of knowledge is what all Indigenous people all across the world are trying to hold on to and trying to figure out how they can do that while also balancing and also holding some space for this Western knowledge system, because it means that when children have both, they flourish better. They know how to bring that knowledge system over to Western knowledge systems and to build upon that. Or they can have teachers who can actually live in our community and know how to be and speak and act and behave and learn in a particular place. You know, it's a shared kind of building, and so those things are very important to how we might begin to make some changes in these different kinds of indigigogis and pedagogies.

I love that. I mean, it's such a perfect example of the way in which even one word is embedded with so much kind of cultural and epistemic baggage, right? Because I didn't even use it as a, I used it almost in passing, right? It wasn't really the main thing I was saying, but I used it because it's just a word that I use in my world as pedagogy, right? And, and so it, it just is a perfect example of just how how the language is so wrapped up in this kind of process of cognitive imperialism that we just assume it's somehow values-free as a word. And actually, I was, I've been a while ago, I was reading Stan Wilson's book Indigigoji, right, with Barbara Schellhammer. And I've actually just pulled it up now and chapter 1, and it really resonates now with what you've just been saying. Chapter 1 is called Killing the Indian in the Child: Pedagogy as an Invisible Systemic transsystemic assault.

Yes.

I mean, that's so, so perfect.

I wanted to just say that Stan Wilson's Indigigoji and now other people like Kathy Absalon's work, you know, are resonating with that particular notion. And it's a placeholder word. It's a made-up word, but it is a placeholder until we understand how do we understand and fully bring together this knowledge of transsystemic like knowledge systems where we, you know, it's not just a picking and plucking, but really allowing different knowledge systems to exist, to be valid in their own rights, and also to be able to think about how do we move between them without necessarily having one be taken over by the other or to lose, but how do we gain from from these multiple knowledge systems around the world.

It's, I mean, it's an incredibly powerful term that I've not heard before, but trans-systemic. And I mean, as you described all those different ways of kind of trying to say the same thing, gesturing towards the same thing. And I know people like Robin Wall Kimmerer and Braiding Sweetgrass is a kind of similar metaphor of how do we hold, and some are more popular, you know, popularizing than others. I can imagine But a lot of people are trying to kind of describe this thing. How do we honor the integrity of both? Because they hold immense value. And it's— I know this is some of the first—

Could I just say—

Sorry. Yeah, go ahead.

That it was in 2021 that the Engaged Scholar Journal for Community Engaged Research, Teaching and Learning is an open access Journal at the University of Saskatchewan. And volume 7, number 1 I think it is, is our co-edited journal, guest edited by myself and my partner Jay Gage Henderson, and it is on Indigenous and trans-systemic knowledges is the theme. So if you're interested in looking more at what the dimensions are of trans-systemic Systemic Knowledge Systems Involving Indigenous Knowledges. You might take a look at that particular journal. Yeah, and of course our book coming in the fall through UBC Press is called Protecting Indigenous Knowledge and Heritage: A Canadian Obligation, and that comes as a book that started off being an update of our Protecting Indigenous Knowledge Heritage The Global Challenge of 2000 has actually morphed into not just an update, but rather understanding where Canada has taken that challenge through the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the, the various ways in which UN institutions have taken up Indigenous knowledges since since that publication of that first book in 2000, and since it— we are now in 2024, there have been a lot of different areas of progress and change at legislative levels, at court case levels, at UN documents and reports that have been in the areas of science and biodiversity and all these other kinds of things. There's a lot of things happening, so what we wanted to do was to bring things up to date, but really to speak more clearly about what does it mean to have the UNDRIP and how it can be interpreted and translated into more protective requirements, and not just protective but recovery and restoration from the, the oppression that colonization has left on Indigenous people in Canada.

Yeah, amazing. And I mean, I know I really appreciate, because it's one thing to talk about these amazing words and these amazing concepts, but actually there's another— the other piece is, as you say, the obligation is to protect, and that, that requires legislation and the kind of political infrastructure to, to do that work of preserving as well. Yeah, very interesting. I'll definitely link to both of those things things as when I share the episode. Absolutely. And just if I can, one, just to pick up on, you mentioned Leroy Little Bear and there's an amazing talk that he gives in Banff about the connections and the rhyming between quantum physics and indigenous ways of knowing. And that's a fascinating book that I've listened to a few times. But so yeah, I think this, it's a very interesting piece. And the only other thing I just want I wanted to say, one of the things that I think people find challenging is when they have a curiosity and an interest, and so I'll definitely point them towards resources to continue learning, but they're also sitting often within the formal infrastructure of the cognitive imperialism that you described, right? They're talking about pedagogy, they're, they're sitting in formal institutions of schooling in the Eurocentric sense. They're marinating in Eurocentrism, as to use your phrase. So there's a, I think there's a, there's a really interesting tension about how to continue learning about Indigenous ways of knowing. And as you say, the trans-systemic and all these ways of holding those things, the integrity of those things together, while also situated very much in the politics and the kind of historic violence of the system itself. So I don't know if you had any reflections on that just to finish, but it's, yeah, it's an interesting problem, I think.

Yeah. Well, it's certainly an interesting problem. It's a dilemma. There is movements in various ways to try to do something— I wouldn't say different, I would say they're trying to build inclusion. And inclusion unfortunately becomes more of the add and drop. And that kind of inclusion does not speak to the ability for Indigenous peoples' knowledge systems to survive or thrive. All it just means is that they will have kind of a tip of a hat to Indigenous knowledge. And that is inadequate. And it also is not the spirit and intent of affirmation of the inherent rights of Indigenous people that are part of the Constitution of Canada. Those inherent rights, as we call them inherent, meaning that they came with us before anybody came here, those inherent rights have now been spelled out by Indigenous people as the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as a minimum. Now, there might be other things that have not been included included in there, but at minimum it is those particular rights that are some 42 different sections to them. And so it is that we need to find ways to ensure that these particular elements of indigeneity continue to survive and thrive, and not just to be popped into the Western knowledge system you know, with some due deference to some research protocols, you know, and inclusion of some Indigenous elders, but really a commitment to it. And that when we make a real commitment to that, and to recognize as a reconciliation effort that, you know, cultural oppression and racism and the appropriation of our Indigenous lands benefited all settlers, whether they are past or whether they are newcomers into this place. And so we are trying to educate those peoples to what are treaty rights, what are Indigenous rights, what are their rights, and what are their responsibilities. And I think that it keeps an ongoing dialogue dialogue with educational systems, and this very podcast is one of the ways that we can say we're educating, we're opening up the ideas and the minds to what this means. But it is that we need a larger force to go with it. And I think that when consistency of laws are made as one of the things that the UNDRIP Act in Canada is now taken into its implementation phase, is an action phase of develop consistencies of laws and practices and education and legislation and pedagogies to support the affirmation of Aboriginal and Treaty rights and the affirmation of the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People. This is an ongoing discussion. At the moment, my own son is a member of Parliament, and he is the only First Nation Indigenous person living on reserve in Parliament today. And he, you know, is part of, and as a parliamentary secretary to Indigenous Crown Relations, you know, he is in the forefront of trying to help make these changes But it is a tremendously huge Eurocentric machinery that is mobilizing everything, and it's very difficult for them to see what they do and how they do it and what can be done differently.

No, I'm sure you've got to be able to see the marinating that's been happening in all the infrastructure. And as you said earlier, the very fact that the Eurocentric framing likes to parcel things up and fragment things, that's where the co-optation of the Indigenous indigenous ideas happens, I think, is because it, it was, oh, I like that piece, I'll just take that bit. That's interesting. We can fit that in. And I think that's one of the real challenges to people to think about, as you said, through this.

It's an individual responsibility. It's a family responsibility. So my individual responsibility and my husband and our writing and our research and our speaking and our, you you know, continuing to advocate and be an activist for this, is taken up by our children as well. My daughter is an assistant professor at CBU in O'noos studies, and her responsibilities are to take up the Indigenous knowledges and to learn from them and continue to develop her own language and learning in and through those kinds of things that that her own education did not give to her. And my other daughter is an entrepreneur artist that is taking up Indigenous talents and creativity and entrepreneurship through beadwork. And so her Sundelace Creations is a flourishing of Indigenous creativity and stylisms that are drawn from their Indigenous knowledge traditions for which they should benefit, through which they have access to and can benefit by their entrepreneurship, by their, their own creativity. So it is kind of like— and of course my grandson is a gojuwa dancer. He's a traditional Mi'kmaq dancer. He has been performing this particular dance. It's having its revival, and at the present he has has been the champion for whether it's adults or children.

That's amazing. Wow.

But he's got competition now.

He's incredible.

He's beginning to learn that he's got to keep this up or there's others who are going to learn it and pass him.

Wow. That's amazing. And I mean, that speaks to the one thing I haven't asked you about. We haven't got time now, but just you have spoken about this Indigenous Renaissance. And it sounds so— I mean, just as such practical examples of young people taking up this work, I think that's probably what you were referring to as this kind of idea of an Indigenous Renaissance, which I think is incredibly powerful. And yeah, I'd love to share.

And it is part of the resurgence of Indigenous people worldwide, you know, whether you call it resurgence or survivance, which was Gerald Bisner's word for, you both resistance and survival, you know, kind of thing, but it is survivance, it's a recovery, restoration, renewal of indigeneity, Indigenous cultures and languages, and we are taking that up as well as the decolonization elements to deconstruct the Eurocentric frameworks that have damaged us, oppressed us, created the racialization and and so on, and to actually deconstruct it, help us to understand what are the ways in which it's used. Ignorance is, you know, kind of thing. Agnotology is a word that has been used to understand ignorance as a way of being in the world. And if we look to some countries in the South that are drawn upon misinformation, disinformation, and ignorance, as an actual way of learning and knowing. And we need to absolutely understand what agnotology does to us, because that's the real foundation of oppression, is to be able to take away all of the truth and to be able to replace it with an ideology that supports one way of thinking, but also supports a certain kinds of economies and neighborhoods, countries control. Amazing.

Yeah, no, fascinating. Keeping, I suppose, yeah, keeping people in strategic ignorance based on particular dominant narratives. And I mean, no, thank you. I mean, it feels such a privilege to be able to have this conversation and to hear you speak about these things. I mean, there's so much there. I've learned multiple new words that I need to go and now look up. But, um, I'll definitely link to a are the things, you know, just to share if people are curious and want to know more for their own learning. But yeah, no, thank you, Marie. Such a pleasure to have the conversation.

Well, thank you for your curiosity and thank you for offering other people this inspiration.

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