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Article Excerpt
This article addresses the question of whether a white academic can act as an ally to Native students and faculty in their struggle to "Indigenize" the Canadian university system. Through an analysis of two personal experiences teaching in an Indigenous context, the author argues that university classrooms can become spaces of liberation and decolonization. This transformation is possible when the traditional power dynamic between teacher and student is destabilized, the role of the teacher is decentred, and priority is given to the reading strategies that Indigenous students bring to the texts and to the Indigenous texts themselves.
Cet article pose la question a savoir si un universitaire blanc peut se proposer comme allie d'etudiants et de professeurs indigenes dans leur lutte pour l' > du systeme universitaire canadien. A travers l'analyse de deux experiences personnelles de I'enseignement dans un contexte indigene, l'auteure avance l'argument que les salles de classe universitaires peuvent devenir des espaces de liberation et de decolonisation. Cette transformation est possible Iorsque le rapport traditionnel au pouvoir entre enseignant et etudiant est destabilise; le role du professeur et decentre; et la priorite est accordee aux strategies de lecture apportees par les etudiants indigenes et aux textes indigenes eux-memes.
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Native writing, publishing, performing, reviewing, teaching, and reading necessarily take place ... in contexts shaped and controlled by the discursive and institutional power of the dominant white culture in Canada. Editorial boards, granting agencies, publishing companies ... enact policies of inclusion and exclusion, and produce meanings based on norms extrinsic to, even inimical to Native values and interests.... So, what's a white girl like me doing in a place like this? (Hoy, p. 14)
Introduction
Helen Hoy's question above, a self-reflexive acknowledgment of her complicity as a white academic in the unequal relationship of power between Aboriginal (1) peoples and mainstream cultural institutions in Canada, acts as a framing device for her book, How Should I Read These?: Native Women Writers in Canada. By appropriating Hoy's question as the title of this paper, I acknowledge with her the problematic ground on which I stand. For I too am a white academic writing and teaching on Indigenous cultural production in Canada. According to Cherokee scholar and University of Toronto English professor, Daniel Heath Justice, however, the often repeated imperative that "non-Natives stay out of Native Studies" (2) is an inadequate solution to my dilemma. As he writes: "It has never been as simplistic as 'only Indians should teach/write about/talk about Indian issues.' Considerate non-Indians have a place in our communities and we hold enormous respect for those who are sincere and responsible, regardless of their ethnicity ..." (2001, p. 266).
That I have a role to play as a white ally of Indigenous peoples is emphasized by Renre Hulan, an English Professor at St. Mary's University. In her reading of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), published in 1996, she highlights the ethical imperative it places on Canadians of all ethnicities and races to become more rather than less involved in learning about the histories and cultures of Canada's First Peoples. "The authors of [RCAP]," she writes, "repeatedly stress ... the importance of educating the 'public mind.' Drawing attention to the general lack of information about First Nations issues on curricula in particular, they 'urge Canadians to become involved in a broad and creative campaign of public education'" (RCAP, qtd. in Hulan, 1998, p. 220). For Hulan, the participation of "those who teach Canadian Literature," whether they be Native or not, is key to the success of "this public education" (Hulan, p. 211). As such, she emphatically underlines the importance of RCAP's position that for non-Natives, "remaining passive and silent is not neutrality--it is support for the status quo" (RCAP, qtd. in Hulan, 1998, p. 220). As a result, non-Native academics like Hulan who retreated from Native Studies in the early 1990s now find themselves rethinking the issue. As she writes:
When I began studying Native literature, the critical climate crackled with charges that such an undertaking, whatever the intention, was an instance of cultural appropriation. As a non-Native person, I avoided Native literature written in English, but in the end the embarrassment of knowing that, after almost ten years at university studying Canadian Literature, I knew almost nothing about First Nations literature caused me to reconsider my initial wariness. (p. 220)
RCAP's position also resonates with Indigenous cultural workers and activists such as Metis scholar and poet, Emma LaRoque, a Professor in the Native Studies Department (3) at the University of Manitoba. From her perspective, it is high time that non-Natives take up the burden of learning and teaching about Indigenous peoples in Canada. As LaRoque puts it, Native artists and writers are becoming increasingly fed-up "with the weary task of having to educate our audiences before even dialoguing with them!" (Preface, p. xxii).
According to scholars such as LaRoque and Hulan and for RCAP's authors, then, leaving the field of Native Studies is now no longer a responsible option for non-Aboriginal students and teachers like me; however, staying in it holds no guarantees that our work will be either ethically appropriate or appreciated by Aboriginal academics and communities in Canada. Hoy sums up the ambivalence of her position nicely: "Deciding not to speak ... beyond one's own experience ... can be a self-indulgent evasion of political effort or a principled effort at non-imperialist engagement" (p. 17).
Despite accepting the political and ethical imperative to engage in this project of "public education," I am still left wondering how I might do so. In what way can I act as a respectful and responsible white ally to Indigenous students and faculty in their fight for justice in the academy? How do I avoid the trap of complicity finding myself working to reproduce rather than resist the university system's colonial hierarchies of power and oppression? How can I support my students' struggle to "Indigenize the academy?" (4) Do I have a place alongside Indigenous scholars in radically transforming the university from an alien "enemy territory" (Justice, 2001, p. 257) to one of liberation and freedom? According to Justice, that transformation is not just a pipedream. The university could indeed, he argues, become not only "a place of intellectual engagement where the world of ideas can meet action and become a lived reality" but also "a site of significant cultural recovery work ... where all people who are disconnected from their histories can begin their journeys homeward" (2004, p. 102)? This is where I would want to be.
The academic space where I too frequently find myself, however, is far removed from Justice's vision. Here "whiteness" is considered the norm, "the unspoken standard against which," Justice...
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