Marie Battiste

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.

Thinking Places: Indigenous Humanities and Education

This special edition of The Australian Journal of Indigenous Education is guest edited by Marie Battiste (University of Saskatchewan, Canada) and Cathryn McConaghy (University of New England, Australia). The edition invited contributors to consider the development of Indigenous humanities within the field of education. Specifically, contributors were asked: How can we think within, through and about place to develop intellectual and imaginative ecologies, to reconnect with knowledges that are generous, creative, just and respectful? What does it mean to think about education creatively through place and space? Papers that made links between education and place and the fields of literature, philosophy, history, languages, the arts and theology were encouraged. The result was a diverse collection of papers from many nations, including the Sami of Finland, the Maya of Guatemala, the Maori of Aotearoa, the Cree, Oneida, Mikmaq, Anishnabeg and Chickasaw First Nations people of Canada and ‘the land of the turtle’, settler Canadians, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. From these diverse places, the notions of humanities and inhumanities - what makes us human and what constitutes ethical action for social justice - are explored, often in challenging ways.

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.