James Youngblood Henderson

Thinking Place: Animating the Indigenous Humanities in Education

Illustrating contexts for and voices of the Indigenous humanities, this essay aims to clarify what the Indigenous humanities can mean for reclaiming education as Indigenous knowledges and pedagogies. After interrogating the visual representation of education and place in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, the essay turns to media constructions of that same place as an exemplary site for understanding Aboriginal relations to the Canadian justice system, before sharing more general reflections on thinking place. The task of animating education is then resituated in the Indigenous humanities developed at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada, as a set of intercultural and interdisciplinary theoretical and practical interventions designed to counter prevailing notions of colonial place. The essay concludes by placing education as promise and practice within the non-coercive normative orders offered by the United Nations. In multiple framings and locations of the Indigenous humanities, the essay aims to help readers to meet the challenges they themselves face as educators, learners, scholars, activists.

Compulsory Schooling and Cognitive Imperialism: A Case for Cognitive Justice and Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples

Compulsory education laws for Indigenous children in Canada based on Eurocentric knowledge systems have interrupted their normative holistic education, generated cognitive imperialism, induced cultural genocide and intergenerational trauma, and negatively affected their overall success outcomes for themselves and their self-determining communities. Contemporary educators, especially Indigenous educators, are now faced with ameliorative challenges for reconciling the traumatic, nihilistic effects of compulsory education, decolonizing the assimilation model, generating ethical space for Indigenizing the compulsory curricula, and creating a balanced compulsory curricula reform based on respect for constitutional rights of Aboriginal peoples and the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous peoples. Accomplishing these challenges, the authors assert, a critical examination of public schooling and the Indigenizing of the academy are set to generate innovative, better educational systems for Indigenous children in Canada based on the hard lessons learned from the past.

Insights on First Nations Humanities

The question of what is humanity and how it is expressed has endless and dynamic answers. My paper is an attempt to construct and explain the answer based on the insights Indigenous humanity expressed in the continent called North America. The four fundamental insights are organised around the concept of creation as ecology, the insights of embodied spirits, the implicate order, and transformation. These complementary insights inform the depth of Indigenous worldview. These insights are replicated and revealed in structure and meaning of Indigenous languages, ceremonies and stories. These cognitive insights suggest a starting point for reflecting about whatever is most significant in Indigenous humanities in curriculum.