It’s still going on today…

Module 4, Post 5

Thankfully people recognize appropriation and objectification for what it is. This came up in my paper, and I was really surprised that even today this goes on in photography:

http://jezebel.com/5989947/why-is-michelle-williams-in-redface

http://jezebel.com/5959312/victorias-secrets-racist-bullshit-is-just-asking-for-a-boycott

Back in 1998 an entire Aboriginal nation was villified and demonized by an ingnorant editor who used a historical photograph and painted it red:

http://www.secrets-and-lies.co.uk/2012/the-sunday-times-magazine-devils-island/

That red “demon” is actually an aboriginal who was forced from his land and then forced to perform in travelling shows. After his death he eventually ended up in the basement of a funeral home in Cleveland, OH. His name was Tambo, and he was eventually returned home to Australia. But even so his photograph was used to demonize some islanders.

Another interesting thing I came across was this:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/fetishizing-native-americans-in-germany-wild-for-winnetou-a-505494.html

I honestly at this point in time don’t know what to think of 40,000 Germans dressing up and playing Native Americans. I would love to know what Native Americans think of this.

Self-representation is not an easy thing.

ANCHORING EDUCATION FOR INDIGENOUS YOUTH IN CONTEXT OF TIME-TESTED CUSTOMS BETTER THAN ASSIMILATING THEM INTO MAINSTREAM SYSTEM, PERMANENT FORUM TOLD

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I came across this proposal made to establish world cultural heritage hay to give indigenous people chance to ‘showcase their culture’ at the UN Department of Public Information News and Media Division New York branch web site. I thought it was a fitting way to end these post since it is the voice of the people themselves. The link is at http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2013/hr5132.doc.htm it summarizes the presentation made by representatives for indigenous people from all over the world.

Module 4 – Posts 1~5

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It was almost two weeks after I read “the Axe Handle Academy” curriculum proposal

http://ankn.uaf.edu/curriculum/AxeHandle/

when I realized the potential of Bioregionalism, or Localism in my online craft learning venture. It is not an obvious connection but one that worked so well for me and proved an incredible synthesis of the theory and indigenous writing I have been reading this term. My blog research had led to Bioregionalism without me knowing the terminology. As I wrung the pages of Google for traces of Borneo indigenous culture and knowledge on the internet, I found that issues dedicated to the land were binding communities and alliances online.

Here’s a great short description of Bioregionalism by William Hipwell

http://knowledge.sagepub.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/view/geography/n101.xml

Or, if you want the long version, this ebook by Robert Thayer explains how Bioregionalism is a lifestyle, and applies it to education and the economy.

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/docDetail.action?docID=10062335

This 293 page 1988 dissertation (I do not pretend to have read it all) explains how the Iban shift their cultivation between bioregions, which is more sustainable for the land and cultures in Borneo. The paper details some of the indigenous knowledge and cultural perspectives and their connection with the land. The dissertation refers to traditional craft production, which involves the cultivation of different land areas for material.

http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/303693547

Indigenous peoples as “guardians of the land”, it sounds fantastical but their traditional knowledge of the environment is of urgent importance to economical growth. The Bioneer group promotes TEK (Traditional Educational Knowledge), an alliance of indigenous representatives, elders and ecologists with the aim of spreading indigenous knowledge.

http://www.bioneers.org/programs/indigeneity-program/

This video has incredible production quality and only 67 votes. It explains TEK according to a variety of individuals from different regions and their experience with the land traditions of indigenous peoples. One woman touches on the role of technology, and explains how TEK is a technology in itself, as well as how the harvesting of materials for traditional crafts was ecologically and sustainably-minded. She adds that the biogregional process of basketry has helped her sense of personal identity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2LsHHSDiWg

In 2 weeks and after 3 years of living in Asia, I am going home to the West Coast. It has been an incredible experience to apply the concepts from this term to my local surroundings in a developing country. This new interest in indigenous knowledge has highlighted areas of education that I had not considered before. I was very happy to find this website which provides a free alternative schooling online program to elementary school students in BC for sustainable and ecological living.

http://oakandorca.ca/

It is based on bioregional and global educationm. Activities apply traditional subjects like Math or Science into real-world activities. It would be amazing to work with a group like this as I finish the rest of my MET next term.

http://oakandorca.ca/bundles/samples/math_a.html

In my final project I compare online sites to virtual biospheres, with community and communication building cultural ties between actual biospheres. The activity afforded by the tools and features of the environment will determine the site’s unique nature. We can see though examples such as Facebook, Twitter and Reddit that it is possible to create online communities that are a very real part of our daily existence. What does it take for an online platform to cultivate active participation? The social networks I listed are all platforms for blending aspects of the actual world with virtual society. The bioregional perspective that permeates even the most virtual of concepts; everything is traced back to the land.

On a final note, here is a 1998 interview with Peter Berg, a lifelong environmental activist and attributed founder of the Bioregionalist movement of the 70s. He explains how he considers himself bioregionally connected to Japan because of the Salmon route that leads past Japan, through the Pacific and into Sacramento. Looking at boundaries from a different perspective is resonant of online culture.

http://foster.20megsfree.com/519.htm

Module 4 Post 5: Alaska Standards for Culturally Responsive Schools, Alaska Native Knowledge Network

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Alaska Native Knowledge Network. (1998). Alaska standards for culturally responsive schools. [web document] Retrieved from http://www.ankn.uaf.edu/publications/standards.html

Some may have come across this already, in week 10, but on the Alaska Native Knowledge Network’s website is this document listing the standards for students, educators, curriculum, schools, and communities developed by the Assembly of Alaska Native Educators. It’s a valuable tool in assessing if what is being done in our classes, schools and communities is heading in the right direction to be culturally responsive.

Module 4 Post 4: Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Alaska Native Ways of Knowing, Ray Barnhardt and Angayuquq Oscar Kawagley

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Barnhardt, R., and Kawagley, A., (2005). Indigensous knowledge systems and Alaska native ways of knowing. Anthropology & Education Quarterly. 36(1). 8-23

In this article, Barnhardt and Kawagley describe some of the programs arising from a gathering of Alaska Native elders and educators challenged with identifying ways in which traditional knowledge and epistemologies can enrich the school curriculum and learning experiences of their students. The article builds on the premises that contemporary Western education systems lack relevance for many aboriginal students and, for those raised with traditional stories and ways of knowing, it alienates their cultural sense of knowing and being through compartmentalization and decontextualization–approaches that are diametrically opposite to many holistic and integrated aboriginal world views. It also recognizes the benefit to all, native and non-native people alike, of the paradigm shift in recognizing the legitimacy and integrity of indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing. It is from this same perspective that I will be examining culturally responsive, place-based learning in contemporary education.

Facilitated at least in part by having a greater majority of Aboriginal students in more of their school districts than is common elsewhere such as BC, the University of Alaska fairbanks, under contract with the Alaska Federation of Natives and funded through the National Science Foundation, developed the Alaska Rural Systemic Initiative (AKRSI). This initiative has sought and developed numerous “educational reform strategies focussing on integrating local knowledge and pedagogical practices into all aspects of the education system… [that have] provided a fertile, real-world context in which to address the many issues associated with learning and Indigenous knowledge systems.” These strategies can serve as a model for similar reforms elsewhere.

Module 4 Post 3: Teaching History from an Indigenous Perspective: Four Winding Paths up the Mountain, Michael Marker

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Marker, M. (n.d.) Teaching history from an indigenous perspective: Four winding paths up the mountain. [Course Materials] Retrieved from http://connect.ubc.ca

This chapter by Marker gives key insight into the development of a culturally responsive curriculum from the context of teaching history, though its application is in many ways cross curricular. Marker identifies and elaborates on four themes of indigenous historical understanding that do not integrate well into Western world views and pedagogies. These are:

“the circular nature of time and the ways oral tradition is integrated with recurring events…
the central theme of relationships with landscape and non-humans
an emphasis on the local landscapes as containing the meaning of both time and place rather than on analyses of global social and political change; and
indigenous narratives and perspectives on the histories of colonization that have attempted to displace and replace indigenous knowledge.”

Frequent within these themes are colonial dichotomies that minimize and devalue indigenous world views and limit the opportunities for indigenous self-determination and decolonization. These appear to develop from the differing world view in which the dominant culture strives for “progress” in an objective materialistic sense –“bigger, higher, newer, faster being preferred over smaller, lower, older or slower” and the indigenous cultures’ world view of primarily seeking to live better in a holistic sense that honours relationships with place, people and non-humans alike. The resulting values and beliefs (of both the dominant culture and the indigenous) are thus cemented in childhood–long before formal First Nations Studies courses (BC Curriculum) in high school address them. This emphasizes the necessity for culturally responsive curricula much earlier in elementary, both to slow the (sometimes unintentional) colonization progress by the culturally ignorant dominant culture and provide legitimacy to aboriginal students making sense of their traditional world view within the Western hegemony, as colonization is not only a physical, social and economic occurrence, it is a cognitive one as well.

Whose truth to believe…

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Module 4, Post 4

Jolene Rickard, of Cornell University (and a Native American artist), asked a simple question: “The practice of looking at things to remember is our way. In the past it served the truth. Whose “truth” do we observe when we look at photographs?” She is not the first person to ask this phenomenological question, but in light of Native American representation it is a very poignant question to be asking.

In light of her question I leave you with two links:

http://www.aaronhuey.com/#/national-geographic-magazine—pine-ridge/Press_NG_cover

(wait for the pictures to load at the bottom)…

http://www.spiritwrestler.com/catalog/index.php?artists_id=58

Jane Ash Poitras uses photographs from Edwar Curtis’ massive volume (which has been criticized for being racist and objectifying Native Americans), some photographs (actually many) are from nations not her own.

Whose “truth” do we believe?

Module 4 Post 2: History, Representation, Globalisation and Indigenous Cultures: A Tasmanian Perspective, Julie Gough

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Gough, J. (2000). History, representation, globalization and indigenous cultures: A Tasmanian perspective in Indigenous cultures in an interconnected world. Smith, C. and Ward, G. (Eds.) Vancouver: UBC Press.

While this chapter is significant for the understanding of globalization as an agent of colonization, and the efforts of Aboriginal peoples to to work toward decolonization through self-representative and self-determinant efforts, it’s application to my research efforts lies in the depiction of the systematic displacement and renaming of the Aboriginal peoples of Tasmania. In renaming the lands taken after familiar and/or mythical places, the colonizers were at once removing thousands of years of history and from those places and inserting alternate ones. Rather than create a new history with new locally-significant names, the colonizers legitimized their actions–as any new name with local significance would necessarily include account of the displacement of the indigenous population. At the same time, this is evidence that there is also significance to place, though rarely acknowledged and arguably to a lesser degree, in dominant cultures. This process may not have occurred as dramatically in other places as in Tasmania but it has been a frequent global occurrence nonetheless. By recognizing the significance of place of all cultures, and building that significance together, it may be possible to leverage names as tools in the efforts toward decolonization. Local examples of this include the official creation of the Nunavut Territory, returning the Queen Charlotte Islands to Haida Gwaii (NB. according to Wikipedia this is not their traditional name), and the naming of the Salish Sea to include the Straight of Georgia, Juan de Fuca Straight, Puget Sound and all their interconnecting and adjoining waters (NB. the intent of the naming of the Salish Sea was ecologically motivated, not culturally or politically, though there are cultural and political ramifications). Significant to this discussion, but perhaps off topic from its intent is that with the exception of Nunavut, the other two name changes identified here did not accompany any transfer of actual power or increase in self-determinant ability.

Module 4 Post 1: Education and Place: A Review Essay, Jan Nespor

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Nespor, J. (2008) Education and place: A review essay. Educational Theory. 58(4). 475-489

This article is a review of books published by three prominent theorists in place-based education: Paul theobald’s Teaching the Commons, C.A. Bower’s Revitalizing the Commons, and David Gruenewald and Gregory Smith’s anthology Place-Based Education in the Global Age. It first examines the theorists’ definitions of “place and place-making,” how their theories address differences and dichotomies of gender, class, ethnicity, etc., and problems associated with implementation of place-based education as defined by these theorists and informed by a few others.

While Nespor’s article is informative of perceptions of place, place-based education and many of the difficulties associated with conceptualizing and theorizing such an educational praxis, it is approached from a Western, and presumptively dominant, culture and thus somewhat antithetical to my purpose of theorizing a culturally responsive and responsible place-based educational approach. Included in the article are considerations for shifting the for focus from place-based to “place-conscious” (p.480) in which the intent is to make learners conscious about the place(s) about which their education is based acknowledging that it is often not the place in which they live and learn, and is frequently a larger “commons” than would be considered from an aboriginal perspective; and having an ultimate goal of reducing that commons to a more localized scale.

Module 4: First Nations Pedagogy Online

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For my final Weblog post, I wanted to share a site that I have found powerful in my research for my final paper. There are many parts of this course that have resonated with me, but one of the ideas that has rung the loudest bell in my mind is how culturally important storytelling is to many indigenous cultures, but how, ironically, the cultures that rely on this practice are at odds, so to speak, with the technology that surrounds them. This quandary makes my final paper difficult, but fascinating. This site, First Nations Pedagogy Online, offers much in terms of knowledge, support and resource. Here is part of the site’s philosophy:

“This Community has been built to offer a secure collaborative space
for interactive sharing and collaboration between educators, Elders, leaders, and students interested in furthering the knowledge available related to teaching First Nations learners in the online environment.”

One of the parts of the site that I appreciate is the opportunity to just sit and listen to stories. You can do that here. The stories take different forms, but that is testament in part to how the medium itself is always changing, and through my research, I have seen storytelling experiment with different forms.

I like this site because it is clear, direct and packed with different kinds of resources and opportunities to share – I hope you enjoy it as well.

Many thanks to you all for your wonderful weblog posts this semester!