22 - Teacher/Decolonizer

Summary

When people ask:

How long have you been an educator?

I say:

All my life

Because as an Aboriginal person

educating others

is something I was born into

an attempt

to stem the tide of ignorance

before I drown in it

before we all do

When Aboriginal people

are hired to teach

the work we’re paid for

is a tiny part

of the educating we do

We are called on to educate

not only our students

but our colleagues

our bosses

passing visitors

basically anybody

associated with the university

who wants to know something

about being Aboriginal

All this ignorance

comes at a cost

but there is no space

in workload allocation models

for worry

fear

grief

pain

anger

exhaustion

No space at all

Barely any room

even to breathe

even to exist

I believe

decolonization will come

when the pathways of settler- colonialism

are replaced

by pathways grown from

and answerable to

respect

for Indigenous peoples

and our belongings to our Countries

But this cannot be done

without conversations

yarnings

with local Indigenous peoples

nations

I cannot speak

for all the many nations

but I can help these yarnings along

through building understanding

of Indigenous peoples

Indigenous worlds

I think this begins

with recognizing

challenging

the artificial context

of settler- colonialism

which comes from the founding lie

of settler- colonial states

that Indigenous peoples are ‘less than’ and that only knowledge- ways

law- ways

landholding- ways

of the West

have value This context has become normalized

naturalized

embedded into structures and behaviours

including at unconscious levels

forming a filter

which distorts knowledge about Indigenous peoples

such that even those who want to understand

struggle to truly hear our voices

or engage with our worlds

Understanding this context

requires understanding the threads of thought

that shaped it

Racism

is one of these threads

but it does not stand alone

because in a settler- colonial context

racism served dispossession

and present day manifestations of bias

against Indigenous peoples

cannot be understood

without understanding

it was always about the land

As a teacher

it is important to me

to articulate how and why

I teach as I do

to demonstrate the standards

I hold myself to

expressed below

in the form of some of the questions

I ask myself about curriculum