20 minute presentation on the intersections of decolonization, indigenization and anti-racism in higher education.
Abstract: Adam Gaudry and Danielle Lorenz describe decolonial Indigenization as a process of fundamental transformation through deep engagement with Indigenous people, perspectives, and worldviews. Achieving this radical aspiration entails increasing Indigenous participation in academia while also embedding Indigenous practices, principals, and ideas into our research and teaching. Research in culturally responsive teaching methods suggests that incorporating such diverse ways of understanding and representing information is important for creating an inclusive and welcoming classroom for historically marginalized and underrepresented students more broadly. Uniting decolonial Indigenization and culturally responsive pedagogy is a shared recognition of the ways in which the dominant system seeks to produce “color blind” and “merit based” educational policies and practices which obscure differences in the worldviews and needs of black, Indigenous, and students of color. Drawing on these two bodies of pedagogy, this talk traces out some of the ways in which faculty can re-imagine and restructure their courses in ways that reveal and challenge normative systems of Whiteness, integrate alternative histories and ways of knowing, and foster critical self-reflection.
Bio: Lindsay Montgomery received her PhD in anthropological archaeology from Stanford University in 2015 and at the time of this presentation was Assistant Professor in the School of Anthropology at the University of Arizona. She is now based in the Department of Anthropology and the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto St. George campus. Her research investigates inter-ethnic interaction, Indigenous persistence, and the long term impacts of settler colonialism on Native communities in the North American West.
