On March 7, 2017, Canadian Senator Lynn Beyak stood up in the Red Chamber and delivered a lengthy speech urging Canadians to recognise the positive aspects of the Indian Residential Schooling system that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had failed to acknowledge. In their positions as settler teacher educators, the authors examine how…

In 2015, Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) described Canada's residential school policy, established in the 1880's and active through most of the 20th century, as 'cultural genocide'. Earlier that same year, Maclean's magazine described Winnipeg as Canada's most racist Winnipeg. Winnipeg, situated on Treaty One…

This panel presentation focuses on the complex relationship between Asian/Asian Canadians and Canada's Indigenous peoples (First Nation, Meti, Innuit). In spite of many commonalities the two sets of communities share while being racialized as "visible minorities" with histories of oppression and exclusion, the former are still settlers…

In 1867, Canada's federal government became responsible for the education of Indigenous peoples: Status Indians and some Métis would attend schools on reserves; non-Status Indians and some Métis would attend provincial schools. The system set the stage for decades of broken promises and misguided experiments that are only now being rectified in…

The impact of Residential Schools on Indigenous People has left a long-lasting crippling effect on the subsequent generations of Indigenous youth. The resultant intergenerational loss of identity and self-value has cost the Indigenous People and their communities immensely. Aboriginal People based their education system on the real world around…

British Columbia (BC) charted its own course in 1949 when it passed legislation permitting Indigenous children to be schooled in provincial public schools. That is, BC's law predated federal legislation allowing integrated schooling by two years. This paper examines how and why BC followed its own policy path with respect to the schooling of…

Social work is being challenged to situate its theories and practice within the lands it finds itself on in North America. This article considers the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls for change from the perspective of how social workers are educated in relation to land, from Indigenous views on its colonial conversions to the…

The residential school system is one of the darkest examples of Canada's colonial policy. Education about the residential schools is believed to be the path to reconciliation; that is, the restoration of equality between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in Canada. While the acquisition of the long-ignored history of residential schools has…

Historians of education wanting to develop culturally responsive historiographies of Indigenous communities should move beyond a reliance on government and church policy documents--with some variegations of testimony from residential school survivors. The unique circumstances of colonisation that were forged by national/settler policies should be…

In this article, I contextualize and outline my use of testimonial literature, including orature, by residential school survivors in a preservice course focused on building practices of witness-­as-study (Simon & Eppert, 2005). My theorization of the course curriculum and pedagogy draws on key texts by Roger Simon as a means of proposing…

The Indigenous people of Canada have endured great hardships and injustices in the past that have greatly affected them as a people and as individuals. For about a century, the young and innocent were taken from their homes and communities and placed in residential schools. The formal educational system of the past failed many students, harmed…

This article is based on our Memoir Pedagogy Reading Circles research. Using an interpretative sociological case study methodology, we facilitated two groups that read and discussed women's memoirs as living texts of society, culture, and history; we read the self and the social through the personal narratives of violence, survival, and…

Education is stated as the number one priority of the Government of Nunavut's "Sivumiut Abluqta" mandate. The Nunavut education system is seen by many as failing to provide Inuit with the promise of supporting Inuit economic and social well-being. Today in Nunavut, there is a growing awareness of the effects of past colonialist polices…

This paper provides a historical review of the education system in Canada and its impact on Indigenous women. By doing so, I hope to address the inequities that surround current educational policies and practices. Also in this paper, I critically investigate the salient aspects of the educational experiences of the women in a contemporary context,…

In this article we interrogate neoliberal assemblages within the context of eating and feeding practices in early childhood education. We consider how neoliberal assemblages are enacted and created through multiple linkages between micro and macro regulations and policies, and everyday food routines. We attend to the embodied intensities, desires…