Right out in front of the Nation2Nation Speaker Series @ CBU

This week our panel discussion on Indigenizing CBU happened. It astounds me to be able to say that, but it’s true; 80 people packed into a room at CBU on Wednesday afternoon and discussed how CBU might “embed indigenous practices, principles and ideas into our academic pursuits.” This event had been giving me stress-headaches for weeks.

My anxiety was based on two things, mostly: one, that I’d been away for 2 weeks on a family trip leading up to the day before the event, and, two, I was selected to be the one on the spot – as the facilitator/host of the discussion. The idea of hosting the event gave me the same worry that (sometimes) writing in this blog does; I have an increased sense of self-concious anxiety when it comes to speaking on issues that I have no cultural background in in a public form. But there I was, introducing the panel, smiling awkwardly when one of them went on too long, and redirecting questions from audience member to appropriate panelist.

I felt like an extremely conspicuous, white, male game show host. It was hard for me to feel like I belonged up there, next to Stephen Augustine and Albert Marshall, and even the far younger but inspirational Janice Basque. (You can google any one of these three and be impressed by what you’ll find.)

I did, at least, get the opportunity to write the opening remarks, which despite the paralyzing awkwardness, I ended up feeling good about.

Here’s an excerpt, in which I tried to sum up how we’re all feeling about taking this course:

Through the course content, ranging from traditional ways of knowing to community health, and through the wisdom of weekly visits from vital guest speakers, we have broadened our understanding, and in so doing have become deeply committed to indigenizing our University experience.

I also had to try and put some context to the question of indigenization, as it’s a process that even I don’t fully understand. I’d been interested that the University of Regina, recently, adopted the policy of a mandatory Indigenous Studies course to graduate, but limited it to its Arts faculty. This strange notion is one that I keep turning over in my head. It’s part of why I and we, the group, ended up harvesting this definition from U of R:

… it is the transforming of academic programs with an aim of both recentering indigenous content, epistemology and pedagogy and through academic program decolonization.

Once this was done, we framed the discussion with 3 questions, which we’d provided to our panelists ahead of time:

• Why is it important to indigenize CBU?
• What are the top priorities in indigenization?
• What are the barriers to indigenization?

There are an entire galaxy of possibilities, options, and examples of indigenization that we came across in our research leading up to this event. But we felt it was best to keep it simple, and leave it open to the interpretation of the panelists (three scholars, community organizers and leaders). They all spoke honestly, readily, and eloquently, providing common sense to skeptics and impassioned insights to the committed.

One of the moments of greatest excitement for me, however, I will confess, is when a member of the audience asked a question regarding Indigenous ways of knowing within the framework of Western, positivist, “evidence-based” epistemology. He asked, if I can paraphrase roughly: “If we are to introduce Indigenous ways of knowing and beliefs into the curriculum, can I subject them, too, to criticism?”

The answer came from Elder Marshall, who asked the questioner to “look at it another way”, and then opined that language was everything, and that to look at the Mi’kmaq belief system (in this case) without the context of the Mi’kmaq language would not be a complete picture.

What a fascinating notion. I’m not sure I can agree or disagree. We often acknowledge that nuances of culture are “lost in translation” But is he suggesting that the Mi’kmaq/Aboriginal culture cannot be understood without fluency in the language? Or maybe we’re way off, and the question inside a cultural context that priviledges the Western, scientific worldview over the Indigenous one?

It’s more than a question I can answer here, but it’s the one that fascinates me the most (as I’ve probably written about before) about the study of Indigenous culture, history, and contemporary issues.