Decolonizing Ourselves: A Northern Compass for Educational Leadership Free

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) spent 5 years traveling across Canada listening to survivors’ and their families’ testimonies about Indian Industrial Residential Schools, more commonly referred to as Indian Residential Schools (IRS) which existed from the 1870s until 1996 when the last school closed. The horrific sexual abuses that Indigenous children who were stolen from their families and communities suffered at the hands of some of the priests and nuns who managed the state-based “schools,” together with the loss of languages, spirituality, knowledge systems and ways of being represent the dark legacy of the IRS that continues to traumatize many Indigenous individuals, families, communities, and nations. That legacy is further compounded by the ongoing pervasive structural violence that continues, described in the following quotation:

Since the June 2015 final report of the TRC, which covers hundreds of years of colonialism and reflects thousands of hours of survivors’ testimony, Canadian public officials have addressed the country’s moral and social responsibility to both recognize and ensure that the wrongs of the past are acknowledged and that necessary actions are taken by public officials and citizens alike. Eva Jewell and Ian Mosby (2019) have been undertaking an annual analysis of whether the 94 specific “calls to action” of the TRC have been addressed in Canada; significantly, they reported that by 2019 fewer than 10 were completed. While their analysis is discouraging, it is not surprising given that the 3,537 page, five volume 1996 final report of the of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP)—one of the longest, most voluminous, and costliest national inquiries in Canada (CBC News, 2007)—was shelved by the federal government along with the RCAP’s more than 440 recommendations. A myriad of reasons help explain why curtailing the human rights abuses and advancing social justice is so difficult even when a clear path forward is provided (such as the 20-year plan for change proposed by the RCAP), from the lack of political will to organizational sclerosis, or hardening of the institutional arteries of political, legal, medical, health, education and other systems that perpetuate systemic racism.

After initiating its work on June 1, 2008, the TRC issued an interim report in May 2018 and released a final report in December 2015—including a summary statement, six distinct volumes, and the 94 calls to action—which is available on the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation website (https://www.trc.ca) created in 2015, the archival repository for the Commission. It is in this context that we share our applied theoretical framework—the “default to deliberative mode of engagement framework,” or D2 framework—designed for educational leaders who seek to support students who choose to decolonize themselves by providing learners with opportunities to grow their curiosity about Indigenous knowledges, languages, values, cultures, legal systems, and governance processes that have evolved over millennia.¹ Chris Hiller eloquently articulates the kinds of questions that we were addressing when we created the D2 framework:

We designed the D2 framework to help users, particularly non-Indigenous students and educators, escape what we call the “default mode” of the persistent colonialism that is embedded throughout health, legal, education and other institutions, as well as in mainstream media systems and other agents of political socialization. The D2 framework represents an upwards journey, or what some students have called a “ladder” that they can climb to move away from the sticky familiarity of the dominant narratives, stereotypes, and structural racism embedded throughout society whether in Australia, Canada, the United States, or other contemporary nation-states with deep colonial roots. The goal is for students to journey up the D2 framework in a deliberative and self-reflective way, supported by opportunities to apply what they learn in the classroom through individual and collaborative community-based service-learning projects.

The D2 framework is a compass for individual self-reflection and agency based on a spectrum of cultural competence and cultural safety that moves one up and away from the default mode of colonialism. In this article we share narratives and questions that illustrate the journey up each of the four stages of the upward continuum of the D2 framework, with insights and illustrations drawn from our research and teaching experiences as well as from our public and private sector senior administrative work. The D2 framework is a civic engagement endeavor that responds to the challenge of how one can sustain and support the resilience of virtuous citizens who are on a reconciliation journey away from the embedded colonial relations that Hiller (2016) describes as “so deeply woven into the fabric of settler societies and cultures” (p.4).

On February 22, 2020, one Indigenous observer, @EricaLeeViolet, tweeted: “My tweets, face book, and inboxes are inundated with … White supremacists/fascists right now. We’ve been called ‘stupid,’ ‘lazy,’ and ‘brainwashed’ by White Canadians more times than I can count. Wreckonciliation, right.” The tensions inherent in hierarchical unequal power relations are daily realities for Indigenous peoples across Canada. For example, settler allies and accomplices have been rising up across Canada in early 9. Elliott in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who have been peacefully resisting the construction of a new multi-billion-dollar gas pipeline on their traditional unceded lands in the northwestern interior region in British Columbia. Indigenous grandmothers and aunties who peacefully defend the land have faced intimidation and arrests by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In February 2020, CN Railway service was shut down by blockades across southern Canada, and observers have commented that while many Canadians are sensitive to the sovereignty and ecojustice issues Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs are advancing, particularly given the climate crisis, they will not tolerate being “inconvenienced” by the blockades; however, “injustice” is not a synonym for “inconvenience.” On February 21, 2020 the Ontario Regional Chief Roseanne Archibald of the Taykwa Tagamou Nation stated:

Across Canada there are stand-offs between police and Indigenous land defenders and water protectors. The COVID-19 global pandemic has not stopped the crises, but the conflicts tend not to make mainstream news headlines. One of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs, Chief No’Maks, explained in July 2020 that “Wet’suwet’en are the land and the land is Wet’suwet’en, so if the land is threatened, so are the very lives, spirits and futures of the people whose ancestors walked this land thousands of years before them” (Morin, 2020). Chief No’Maks stated that he would do whatever it takes to save the land from being destroyed. Human rights abuses and conflicts over ecojustice are occurring across Canada during an era that is promoted by politicians as being defined by “reconciliation” following the submission of the TRC’s final report. Prime Minister Trudeau responded to the ongoing crisis in northern British Columbia:

While the crisis in British Columbia continues well into 2020, on the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (August 9 each year) Prime Minister Trudeau reaffirmed his government’s commitment: “Reconciliation calls on all of us to confront our past, our biases and actions, and commit to an equitable future. To do this, we must work with Indigenous leaders and communities, amplify their voices, and work to dismantle racism and the barriers to equality Indigenous peoples experience” (Berthiaume, 2020). Importantly, the TRC report states that moving toward reconciliation requires “establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in this country. In order for that to happen, there has to be awareness of the past, acknowledgment of the harm that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behavior” (2015b, p. 113). After so many national inquiries, the path to reconciliation is clear. What is needed by governments and citizens alike is the will to work and to act in ways that fulfill long-standing promises and commitments. Educators have civic responsibilities and intellectual obligations on the journey to reconciliation.

One of the TRC’s reports, What We Have Learned: Principles of Truth and Reconciliation (2015a), articulates 10 principles including the following:

• First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples, as the original peoples of this country and as self-determining peoples, have Treaty, constitutional, and human rights that must be recognized and respected.

• Reconciliation requires sustained public education and dialogue, including youth engagement, about the history and legacy of residential schools, Treaties, Aboriginal rights, as well as the historical and contemporary contributions of Aboriginal peoples to Canadian society (p. 3).

The report also shares Elder Stephen Augustine’s wisdom that “there is both a place for talking about reconciliation and a need for reconciliation. Reconciliation cannot occur without listening, contemplation, meditation, and deeper internal deliberation” (p. 122). Furthermore, reconciliation is not only between humans, but vis-à-vis the planet, a position reiterated by the TRC commissioners given what they repeatedly heard during their hearings: “that reconciliation will never occur unless we are also reconciled with the earth … that humans must journey through life in conversation and negotiation with all creation. Reciprocity and mutual respect help sustain our survival” (p. 123). Given that reconciliation involves recognizing and respecting a plurality of epistemological and ontological foundations, the challenge for university educators lies in rethinking what we ourselves were taught (or not taught), what and how we research, and with whom, let alone what and how we teach and engage with students. For example, almost 5 years after the release of TRC’s final report, in December 2019, the Law Society of British Columbia moved to require Indigenous cultural competency training (beginning in 2021) for all practicing lawyers in the province, with the President of the Law Society, Nancy Merrill, stating: “Lawyers and the law created a justice system that discriminates against Indigenous people.… That’s still recent history. … We need to move forward” (Owen, 2019). John Borrows is the Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Law at The University of Victoria in British Columbia. He envisions that the “law society’s cultural competency training might one day delve into Indigenous communities’ own law and legal traditions” (Owen, 2019). Institutional responses to the TRC’s calls to action are not obligatory across Canada and hence, perhaps not surprisingly, responsiveness to the recommendations may continue to be frustratingly slow, as reflected in the following quotation:

The University of Winnipeg in Manitoba (2015) was one of the first universities in Canada to “mandate that all incoming undergraduate students learn about Indigenous peoples and be exposed to Indigenous perspectives and worldviews” (n.d.). There are challenges with requiring students to take a mandatory course specifically focused on Indigenous studies. For example, a professor who taught the required course at the University of Winnipeg, Jacqueline Romanow, ponders whether it is best to leave such a course open to those students with a genuine interest rather than requiring students to take it. She suggests: “I think that it loses some of the sincerity when it has to be taken” (MacIntosh, 2016). The need for educational leadership is pressing given the ongoing safety and security issues Indigenous peoples face. For example, the National Inquiry Into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) began its work in Canada on September 1, 2016, and on June 3, 2019, the MMIWG commissioners released their final report after listening to 1,484 family members’ and survivors’ testimony. The MMIWG “truth gathering process” revealed new manifestations of old racist responses which left Indigenous campus community members across Canada feeling even more vulnerable to the point that Canadian university presidents issued a press release in February 2019 stating:

Despite the deeply embedded racism within education systems, in our experience university students can be keen to do the kind of heavy lifting—intellectual, emotional, social and political—that decolonizing oneself often entails.

There is at least one prerequisite for educators who seek to gain an understanding about a human rights agenda that addresses centuries of colonialism in Canada and other developed countries. That is, it is critical that such an undertaking be carried out in a manner that does not support the promotion of social guilt in the classroom given that doing so can lead to complacency, social amnesia, or overwhelming feelings of helplessness that can develop into paralysis or anger which can be redirected into victim blaming. Further, the encouragement of individual and collective guilt may contribute to a disinclination to support positive social change and ultimately, may hinder the movement toward social justice and result in continued inequities. Emotional walls can and often do create new barriers to social justice. It was after witnessing some students experience overwhelming feelings upon learning about the human rights abuses that Indigenous peoples continue to face in Canada that we created the D2 framework. We did so to create a clear pathway that assists students to recognize that such emotional responses during the journey are human, but that they can also become barriers to individual and collective humane action. The D2 framework is a resource for cultural competency education that inspires, informs, and promotes individual and collective civic leadership among students to address the unequal power relations that impact Indigenous peoples.

The D2 framework, depicted in Figure 1 offers educators (and professionals in health, justice and other policy fields) a clearly articulated process with stages and steps that provides a guide for educators working to help students recognize and resist the epistemological and ontological prison of the default mode of colonialism that continues to impact Indigenous peoples and the planet. For example, in discussing the social determinants of health in Nunavut with undergraduate and graduate students in public policy courses we found that students can become overwhelmed when they begin to learn about the misinformation, disinformation, and outright lies perpetuated throughout society. We began by asking ourselves, together with students: What can we do to decolonize ourselves, individually and collectively? We broached this question by illustrating critically important and often overlooked micro-opportunities that exist to decolonize the classroom, from inviting Indigenous Elders and community members into the classroom as educators and experts, and importantly, as neighbors and fellow citizens. We included required readings by Indigenous scholars throughout the semester. We provided opportunities to draw insights from Indigenous novelists, poets and artists in the classroom and during special campus events that students helped organize. And we supported community-based service learning (sometimes referred to as engaged learning) opportunities, asking students to apply what they were learning in the service of community partners as part of their course work. Importantly, we continue to choose to enter learning spaces by identifying and acknowledging the fact that we too are working hard daily, as settler scholars, to decolonize ourselves.

We try to ensure that students see us do the work, starting with the recognition that the sticky default mode of the D2 framework is apparent in our everyday language usage. We invite students to self-correct, as we ourselves often do, sometimes stopping in midsentence to do so. For example, we take the time to be conscious in our use of prepositions, working to ensure that we refer to Indigenous peoples (with an “s” to avoid homogenizing Indigenous nations and their histories and philosophies, languages and cultures, governance and legal systems) in Canada, rather than, Indigenous peoples of Canada. Simple daily actions remind us that we do not have to wait for institutional strategies to decolonize ourselves. Examples of the micro-opportunities that we can identify to decolonize ourselves each day can begin with being vigilant in choosing which words we use and also, by becoming appropriately sensitive to the boldly symbolic grammatical flags of colonialism, such as the simple possessive apostrophe evident in phrases such as Canada’s Indigenous peoples. The tiny details of ear training and of reorienting our vision toward working to create a more mature democracy are part of the daily, moment by moment process involved in resisting the default mode of colonialism. Students have shown us that they are willing to invest themselves in the micro (and macro) choices they make every day, moment by moment. Before that can happen however, students need to be exposed to what they do not know. Even in fall 2019, the majority of Canadian students enrolled in Alexander’s Introduction to Law, Politics, and Government class had not heard of Indian Residential Schools (4 years after the TRC’s final report on the subject), while the international students in class were shocked by what they learned about Canada’s history and importantly, about the marginalization that Indigenous peoples continue to face across Canada, coast to coast to coast.

In most current Canadian introductory politics textbooks, scant attention is given to Indigenous peoples. Therefore, in addition to the textbook, Alexander’s students, who come from disciplines across the campus, begin the term by reading Ojibway writer Richard Wagamese’s short compelling novel, Indian Horse (2012), in the first week of the course. The novel offers a composite portrait of the experience of tens of thousands of Indigenous children who were stolen from their families and communities. The award-winning novel provides an immersive learning experience, and Alexander’s students are not alone in finding that reading it helps propel them out of the default mode of colonialism. A fan of hockey writes:

Alexander finds that the novel serves to open students’ hearts and minds, prepping them for the journey to learn more about Canadian politics without whitewashing history, sanitizing contemporary policy issues, or ignoring realities such as legal pluralism in Canada which includes Indigenous legal systems. To ensure that first-year students have every opportunity to delve into the uncomfortable subject in familiar ways, Alexander also provides an opportunity for students to watch the film based on the novel.

While a novel or film provides a valuable immersive learning opportunity in larger classes, in small senior seminar-type classes Alexander has taken her students out on the land. For example, for several years in a row, Alexander took her students out on the land in the company of a Mi’kmaq First Nation leader, Dr. Don Julien and a renowned Mi’kmaw artist, Gerald Gloade; students spent hours by the fireside listening and learning from the two elders after a day of visiting historic sacred Mi’kmaq sites at a national park. While an on-the-land learning retreat with an Indigenous Elder is ideal but may be difficult to fund sustainably, the D2 journey can begin by finding a short powerful novel that provides students with an immersive learning opportunity early in the course to establish a new learning compass, while still meeting the requirements of fulfilling what is expected within a half-term traditional course such as an introductory politics course. Providing such an initial immersive experience into Indigenous realities, including intergenerational trauma, opens hearts and minds and motivates students to spend the term engaging with their mainstream traditional textbook in a critically reflective way as they learn basics about law, politics, and government alongside discussion books that shed even more light on Indigenous rights and ancient ever-evolving knowledge systems. Failing to find alternative routes to decolonize the classroom would leave students without the new basics on law, politics, and government that they need to participate in the country’s reconciliation journey which may inform their future roles as lawyers, nurses, teachers, or whatever roles in life they may choose, and which may influence the kinds of citizen engagement opportunities, including allyship, that they might take up after the course.

Students who follow the D2 journey during the course quickly recognize that in an era in which colonialism persists, they are immersed in a society which often recycles dominant narratives that they need to “unlearn” before they can begin to advance their understanding about the world. That can be an overwhelming task. Indeed, it is the reason why we created the D2 framework. After the first weeks of a senior graduate/undergraduate public policy class a graduate student burst into tears and left the room. She returned quickly and expressed how overwhelming it was to discover how much she did not know about the discriminatory policies that Indigenous peoples continue to face. Together we began to sketch out the D2 framework in the public policy course over the course of the term. At first, we created a horizontal framework but we then realized that the journey required a concerted, consistent, and continuous struggle to decolonize oneself and so we turned the framework on its head, into the format that appears in Figure 1. The bottom of the ladder is a place defined by defensiveness, delusion, and denial and it is in the default mode that one can stay stuck quite unconsciously and contentedly. Yet failing to recognize and do the work to get out of the default mode positions one as complicit in the persistence of colonialism.

There have been increasingly bold expressions of and support for racism against Indigenous peoples across Canada, including the explicit denial of IRS survivors’ testimonies by some academics, political leaders and citizens alike. Blatant racism is apparent throughout society, at all levels. For example, in the spring of 2019 Canadian Parliamentarian Senator Lynn Beyak published correspondence on her senate website denying the atrocities committed in residential schools and arguing that Indigenous “people” are inferior. She was suspended from the Senate of Canada in spring 2019 after the letters, posted on her website, were condemned as racist by her colleagues in the Senate. On January 31, 2020, the Senate Standing Committee on Ethics and Conflict of Interest for Senators stated:

A February 2020 report of the senate committee concluded that “Beyak did not meet the conditions set out for her return, calling an apology she delivered insufficient and her participation in educational programs on racism toward Indigenous Peoples in Canada incomplete” and importantly, the Senate committee noted that “the training provider indicated that Sen. Beyak failed to exhibit any willingness to learn and because of this the training provider did not provide the agreed-upon instruction in its entirety” (The Canadian Press, 2020). The racism that persists among settler Canadians has serious implications for justice, for peace, and for democracy as articulated in the quotation below from Shree Paradkar who describes the response of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in February 2020 to peaceful Indigenous land defenders in the northwestern interior region in British Columbia:

In the process of unlearning the myth-information of Canada’s past and present human rights record, students in Alexander’s introductory politics as well as her introductory public policy class in fall 2019 were also asked to watch a documentary in the first weeks of class, called Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance (Koenig et al., 1993). Alexander has shown the film to students for over a decade because it provides behind the scenes coverage of an ongoing national crisis from the perspective of a Mohawk First Nation community. Award-winning Abenaki First Nation filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin created the documentary film of the so-called 1990 “Oka crisis” near Montreal, described in the passage below:

Film is such a powerful and immersive way to decolonize the classroom. Obomsawin’s documentary presents rare footage offering insights into Indigenous realities and perspectives during the crisis. Immersed in documentary films such as Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance or The Angry Inuk (a 2016 film written and directed by Inuk filmmaker, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, that Alexander’s students found deeply compelling), students’ field of view and depth of perception about the world around them is augmented, their interest is piqued, and they become empowered through the process of unlearning.

Thirty years after the so-called Oka crisis that Obamsawin recorded, social media have become a powerful resource that students can learn to navigate strategically. Students can learn to use Twitter effectively by discovering authoritative first-person accounts to counter the dominant narrative that tends to prevail in mainstream media. For example, in fall 2019 Alexander’s students discovered the efforts of the Tiny House Warriors who started a movement in British Columbia by reestablishing Indigenous village sites on their traditional land to reassert their collective Secwepemc stewardship for the lands and waters, facing racists as they protect their territory from the Trans Mountain Pipeline. Students learn how allies with Indigenous peoples also use social media to provide perspectives that may be missing from mainstream news stories. For example, Ross Hoffman, a First Nations professor at the University of Northern British Columbia (the campus in closest proximity to the current crisis in northern British Columbia), shared a public letter via social media on behalf of University of Northern British Columbia faculty and staff in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who evicted the company advancing the Coastal GasLink pipeline from their territories. The UNBC faculty and staff used social media to call upon the provincial and federal governments to respect the eviction given the Wet’suwet’en First Nation’s jurisdiction over unceded territory. Like University of Northern British Columbia faculty and staff, decolonizing ourselves means getting involved individual and collectively as we advance up the D2 framework. Students not only learn from a greater diversity of voices via social media, they also learn how to harness social media to advance social and ecojustice.

While Indigenous peoples continue to resist colonialism, we are also in the midst of an Indigenous renaissance with the arts playing a central role in the resurgence of Indigenous cultures, languages, values and philosophies and ways of being. This renaissance is critically important for settler academics to recognize and incorporate into our classrooms. It is imperative to privilege Indigenous voices on campuses. Sometimes it can take mere minutes to move students to resist the default mode for example, by playing a music video at the beginning of a class. Alexander often plays a music video in class called “Don’t Call Me Eskimo” (CBC, n.d.) created by Inuit youth in Nunavut, which helps open up the opportunity to discuss with students what reconciliation means vis-à-vis Indigenous peoples who live in a northern territory in Canada that is often given short shrift, if any attention, in textbooks and syllabi for courses on Canadian politics. Brief immersive experiences can offer powerful decolonizing messages. For example, sharing a music video like “The Highway,” produced in partnership with the nonprofit organization N’we Jinan, can jettison students out of the default mode given the deeply troubling subject matter, the compelling messages shared by young Indigenous voices and the polished artistry of the video. “The Highway” music video created by youth from the 'Na Aksa Gyilak'yoo School in Kitsumkalum, British Columbia speaks to the infamous ‘Highway of Tears,” a 720-kilometer stretch of Highway 16 in British Columbia where, since 1969, more than 40 women and girls have gone missing or been killed. After viewing the music video, Alexander’s students often echo the MMIWG inquiry commissioners’ statement to the young singers from the 'Na Aksa Gyilak'yoo School: “You’re hope. You're representing hope. And I don't know where you got that strength, but it's telling me that it’s possible, and it’s there and it's so alive” (Bellrichard, 2017). In different classrooms over the past decade we have found that keeping a balance between harsh realities and active hope is key in the process of decolonizing ourselves.

It is crucial in the classroom to balance the harsh realities of Indigenous lives and struggles with a different set of 3 Rs: Indigenous resistance, resilience, and resurgence. In September 2015, we were among the campus-community organizers of an historic Mawio’mi, the word for gathering in the language of the Mi’kmaq First Nation. Held at the beginning of the academic year on campus, Indigenous artists and speakers were invited from across the Atlantic region to participate in the Mawio’mi, called Indigenous Renaissance: Healing and Reconciliation through the Arts (Acadia University, 2015). For the first time in Acadia University’s history, a sacred fire was lit and tended for four days and nights in the heart of the campus by an Indigenous Elder and spiritual advisor and retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Dr. Joe Michael, who taught students and other campus and local community members about how to be firekeepers. He shared teachings and answered questions around the fireside and offered a sunrise ceremony each morning. Indigenous poets, artists, and athletes filled the campus during the 4-day gathering, sharing insights, offering inspiration, and welcoming relationship-building with students, faculty and staff, and local community members.

Artistic sources are also critically important to ensure that a fuller diversity of Indigenous voices is shared with students. For example, a discussion in Alexander’s public policy course about the widening income gap in Canada provided an opportunity to ensure that the needs and interests of northern Canadians were not overlooked. So often, even in 2020, the political and administrative innovations in northern territorial governments are ignored in textbooks, with a focus solely on the highly populated regions in southern Canada. Further, the policy needs and interests of Inuit in Nunavik, Nunavut, and Nunatsiaq—collectively referred to as Inuit Nunangat—are often ignored by policy makers and academics alike. This lens of ignorance persists despite the highest rates of infant mortality, tuberculosis, unemployment and suicide that Inuit experience within Canada; furthermore, the ongoing refusal to address the social determinants of health reflects the challenge of moving from political platforms and policy promises to meaningful action. For example, Statistics Canada published data in 2006 that revealed that Inuit children were going hungry. Yet, evidence-based policy change was not forthcoming to address the basic needs of Inuit who form the majority of the population of Nunavut. This fact is illustrated in the following quotation from new data released in January 2020: “At 31.2%, Nunavut’s poverty rate is well above the Canadian average of 18.6% for children under the age of 18” (Tranter, 2020). There has been little to no federal action to address such human rights violations. Rather than lecturing students about such issues, in October 2019 Alexander required students in a federal party politics class to use Twitter, inviting them to follow a media savvy new member of parliament (MP) in Canada’s House of Commons, Mumilaaq Qaqqaq, who was 25 years old when she was elected to Parliament. Following her journey from Nunavut to the nation’s capital, students discovered Qaqqaq’s first visit to the House of Commons was in 2017 when she delivered an impassioned speech about the suicide crisis in Nunavut to Parliament while participating in the Daughters of the Vote program, which brings young women to Ottawa to speak in Parliament about their visions for Canada and for their community. Informed and inspired by the young Inuk member of parliament, students traveled up the D2 framework quickly. In a class the day after the country’s first federal election debate in October 2019, students critiqued the word choice for one of the debate themes, called “Indigenous Issues”; astutely, the students asserted that the debate theme for the federal political party leaders should have been titled “Indigenous Rights.” Creating connections with diverse communities using media technologies, including Twitter, is part of the toolkit to help students decolonize themselves.

Meeting with Indigenous Elders is an invaluable way to help students decolonize themselves. It is not uncommon for there to be resistance by some students to working toward “indigenizing the classroom.” Sometimes, a few students may drop the course when they learn about the new basics that will be included in a course. Sometimes, a student or two may be visibly and audibly angry about the time spent focused on Indigenous peoples and colonialism in Canada. And sometimes, a student or two may be outright disruptive in class. This happened in recent years in several of Alexander’s classes. On the first day of one class, two students were highly disruptive during the special welcome to the Mi’kmaq Nation’s unceded traditional territory that they received by three Mi’kmaw Elders. An Indigenous graduate student in class was troubled by the obvious disrespect shown to the Elders. She asked her classmates: “How are we going to ensure respect within this course?” Change is uncomfortable, unsettling, disquieting. It speaks volumes that students themselves spoke up in this instance, calling for respect of the Elders in the class and upholding the value of the Indigenous studies that they were set to explore together. Students can serve as leaders of democratic engagement and civil discourse in the classroom.

The challenge is how to create a safe space to decolonize oneself and students in the classroom. Elders play a critical role in decolonizing education. The term “Elder” (which we choose to capitalize to show respect and the relative equivalency, plus much more, to an academic doctorate degree) is distinctive and differs from the term “senior citizen.” Indeed, one could be a young Elder. Inviting Elders into the classroom as experts and coeducators, or better yet, taking students out on the land in the company of Elders and other community members, are valuable ways to support efforts to decolonize oneself and “the classroom.” In a community-driven and partnered-research initiative, Alexander collaborated with Inuit of Nunavut to connect youth with Elders at a 3-day policy symposium she co-organized at Acadia University in spring 2004, called the Nunavut@5 Symposium. At the international symposium which she cohosted with the former commissioner of Nunavut, Inuk Elder Dr. Piita (Peter) Irniq, Inuit leaders reflected on the first 5 years of creating a made-in-Nunavut government (infused with Inuit knowledge and values) since the territory was created on April 1, 1999. Importantly, with academic researchers from across Canada and abroad listening, Inuit leaders stated that among all the policy research issues—from food insecurity to homelessness to the suicide epidemic—in Nunavut, the territorial homeland of Inuit in the Eastern Arctic in Canada, their highest priority was to reconnect youth with Elders. Upon learning this focus, Alexander redirected her research by helping to create a community-driven research team with and for Inuit. The team included settler students and faculty who traveled up to Nunavut on several different research trips. Students enjoyed the rare opportunity to listen to, learn from, and collaborate with Inuit from across Nunavut. For Alexander and her students, the experiences offered a glimpse into the value of land-based learning. On one trip to Nunavut Alexander’s students were pivotal collaborators in what became the first interactive film produced by Inuit that is shared on a multimedia website created by the team, called The Inuit Qaujima-jatuqangit Adventure Website (www.inuitq.ca) In our experience, land-based learning opportunities have been able to deepen students’ interest in and understanding of Indigeneity; further, such participatory engagement opportunities can accelerate students’ decolonizing journey.

Participating in special events on campus as co-organizers can inspire students to keep working to decolonize themselves. For example, a national day of vigils for missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls is held across Canada every October 4, and each year since 2009 Alexander has engaged students in her classes to help create the annual community-campus Sisters in Spirit vigil with the goals of honoring and celebrating Indigenous women and girls who are missing and murdered across Canada, and raising public awareness about the issue. Such collaborative opportunities have provided students with a way to apply what they are learning in the classroom as they interact as co-organizers with Indigenous authors, filmmakers, artists, and other special guests. Recently, Alexander has called this kind of community participation the ACE process: to amplify the voices of and connect with and engage alongside Indigenous peoples. In preparation for the 2017 Sisters in Spirit vigil, students in Alexander’s classes were inspired to help an Indigenous classmate and the lead Indigenous community organizer who had the idea to invite the campus and local community to participate in a flash mob. Over 200 hundred people showed up at the event wearing something red, a color chosen by organizers because hanging red dresses in public spaces has become a national symbol of MMIWG. Indigenous community organizers asked everyone to gather in one huge circle on the campus front lawn and participate in a round dance, moving around a small number of Mi’kmaw Elders and children and dancers and drummers who were at the very heart of the circle. No one knew what to expect. A few Mi’kmaw co-organizers tapped a couple of people at a time, randomly, and asked them quietly to leave the circle, as everyone continued in the round dance. None of the people who was tapped on the shoulder and asked to exit the circle knew why they were asked to leave. More and more people were asked to leave the circle and sit on the grass while the round dance continued although the circle got smaller and smaller, with the Elders, children and dancers in the middle of the ever-shrinking circle. The drum kept beating as the circle got smaller and people had to work hard to stretch their arms to hold on to each other as they tried to keep the circle complete, despite the fact that most of the people had been asked to leave the circle one by one as the drums kept beating softly. Afterwards, when the circle got too small to connect around the inner circle of Elders and children, everyone went to sit on the grass and debrief together. People talked about how confused they were when they were being asked to leave the circle with no explanation. One student talked about how she held on to her best friend’s hand so tightly as the circle got smaller. And of course, the experience raised awareness about the devastating loss that Indigenous families, communities, and nations feel every time an Indigenous woman or girl goes missing. Afterwards, everyone joined in a community-campus feast, talked informally, and got to know each other. Students felt an immense sense of accomplishment in cocreating such an event. Three students in Alexander’s introductory politics class chose to cocreate a high-quality video documentary as a course assignment. The video includes interviews the students did with participants, including a local chief, Elders, and fellow students, including international students (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45o0IEA9s6M). The video is an excellent example of students creating a documentary film with the goal of applying the ACE process. It also illustrates how in less than a month of class, students can choose to move up the D2 framework, working to get away from being uninformed and uninterested about issues that are central to questions about citizenship, democracy, and human rights. One of the three young student filmmakers in Alexander’s class went on to deliver a TEDx talk at Bishop’s University (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLQUJaYcuuQ) sharing her action list for university presidents to decolonize their campuses. Students are stepping up to decolonize themselves, and education systems.

Given the deep stubborn roots of colonialism that persist in countries such as Canada, we have observed four interrelated kinds of changes on campuses that help one assess the degree to which their intent, and their effect, are designed to address colonialism:

1. symbolic changes (e.g., raising an Indigenous nation’s flag above a school or university building or making Indigenous land claim acknowledgments at the start of campus meetings or/and on the first page of course syllabi);

2. structural (creating new learning environments, including physical infrastructures such as Indigenous gathering spaces and “on the land retreats”);

3. epistemological/ontological shifts (e.g., fundamentally rethinking curricula and learning environments to recenter Indigenous knowledges and ways of being in ways that are holistic, relational, experiential and nonuniversal); and

4. human and other resource allocations (e.g., prioritizing the full-time hiring of permanent Indigenous faculty, senior administrators, and staff and ensuring that scholarships, Indigenous counselors, Elders, and other supports are available for Indigenous students).

Wayne Warry observes: “The irony of our society is that the values of tolerance and multicultural diversity are accepted and heralded as part of a national ethic even as Aboriginal peoples are marginalized, and their cultures denigrated” (2007). Assessing the moment by moment work that we as settlers need to undertake to decolonize ourselves may be challenging but it is nowhere close to the fact that being “Indigenous requires a daily struggle to resist colonization” (Smith, 2013), a message shared by Jeff Corntassel, a member of the Cherokee Nation and a professor at the University of Victoria; that is, as Corntassel explains, “being Indigenous today means struggling to reclaim and regenerate one’s relational, place-based existence by challenging the ongoing, destructive forces of colonization” (Smith, 2013). The D2 framework assists educators’ and students’ decolonizing journeys as they recognize the human rights violations in their own backyards, fill in the blanks in their education, and engage as empathetic and empowered citizens rather than as colonial subjects stuck in denial, delusion and defensiveness. Our experience reveals the need for educators not to overlook the civic muscle students can engage to do the heavy lifting involved in decolonizing themselves and deconstructing colonial systems.

Colonial narratives justify the historic and contemporary power imbalances and human rights abuses that Indigenous peoples have been resisting for centuries. As a colonial society Canada has conceived of and implemented diverse systems of genocide and of assimilation, not unlike other colonial countries including the United States and Australia. The IRS were mandated by the government of Canada to “kill the Indian” in the child; indeed, the reservation system and the IRS have been called cornerstone policies of Canada’s apartheid system that contributed to “cultural genocide,” a description used by the former chief justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverly McLachlin (Fine, 2015). The following quotation succinctly describes not only the horrific legacy of intergenerational trauma but also, the ongoing violence that is infused throughout health, education, legal and other systems:

Through examples, narratives and questions we have illustrated how the D2 framework provides a map created to help settler educators and students navigate toward discursive democracy, away from the colonial foundation that many states, including Canada, are trying to buttress and reinforce (untenably, intellectually, ethically, and legally).

In the fall 2019 Alexander’s students in an introductory politics class read Alicia Elliott’s autobiography, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, as a discussion book to gain insight into the personal, intergenerational traumas that an Indigenous family experiences due to the persistence of systemic racism. In her February 13, 2020 opinion piece published in The Washington Post, Alicia Elliott concludes:

Beyond the land acknowledgments that open countless academic conferences, government meetings, and community special events there is a need to do the hard work of assessing long-standing Indigenous struggles over land, rights, and sovereignty. Democratic institutions including educational systems are not hardwired to breathe life into constitutional commitments, court decisions, national and international declarations of human rights. Fulfilling civic obligations starts with citizens’ microdecisions to decolonize ourselves. In the midst of a proliferation of decolonization statements, commitments, and strategies that are vulnerable to “fluid” leadership priorities, “realistic” agenda setting, short-term “delays,” additional “feasibility” studies and reports, and “efficient” allocation of resources, the D2 framework provides a compass to do the daily work to decolonize ourselves. The D2 framework asks educators and students to recognize Indigenous peoples’ individual and collective human rights, and their historic and contemporary achievements and contributions. It is not an undertaking that romanticizes ancient peoples and their descendants. Rather, it is an endeavor with the goal of amplifying voices that contemporary colonial systems continue to try to silence.