In October 2023, EDST began hosting a Doctoral Colloquium. Once a month doctoral students and candidates present their research to EDST students, staff and faculty.

In this blog post:

Doctoral Colloquium coordinator, Yotam Ronen, recaps Miranda Huron’s Colloquium.

What does the process of policy making look like when Indigenous people are involved? How do Indigenous actors perceive policy processes, and how much agency do they really have in developing policy that works for them?

These are the important questions that Miranda Huron grapples with in her study on the co-development of Canada’s Indigenous Languages Act. Huron became the Director of “Languages and Culture” for the Assembly of First Nations in 2017. Part of this role included co-leading the co-development of the Indigenous Languages Act. Her experience has led her to wonder about the co-development process and to ask questions regarding the agency of those involved in it.

In 2015, when the Trudeau government came to power it decided on the legislation of the Indigenous Languages Act. This declaration included wording on co-development and envisaged the process as one of nation to nation. Yet, it remains unclear what “co-development” means, or what the federal government defines as “nation to nation.”

The process of developing this legislation highlights these opaque definitions. When developing this legislation, actors—both representatives of the government and Indigenous communities—referred to recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Yet, the recommendations related to languages proved insufficient for comprehensive legislation, and actors wished to form a more nuanced document for the Act itself.

The need for a more comprehensive language legislation was revealed through a discovery process that was undertaken as part of the development of the Indigenous Languages Act. The National Engagement Sessions consisted of a discovery project whereby the Métis National Council (MNC), Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and the Canadian government each went into their own processes of engagement. Interviews with language keepers, elders, language warriors, youth, and others were conducted to explain what the legislation was, and to gain insights from those most affected by it. These conversations yielded 12 principles, that were then developed into a draft for the Act, which was then presented to government.

The next stages included presenting the draft to the cabinet, and after it was revised there, to the Department of Justice. In both processes, Indigenous people had no ability to know what the conversation was or how the act was being changed. This detail raises a question about the meaning of “co-development,” as it was in these crucial stages that Indigenous people were removed from the conversation.

Although officially not in the room, actors were able to participate somewhat by receiving information on the process as it was unfolding, and by gaining the opportunity from the Department of Justice to reflect on the revised Act to ensure that its intent was understood correctly. Although important, the informality of this part of the process meant that there was no official protocol for this consultation, and the only way for Indigenous people to refer to such practices in the future is by documenting the experience of those involved.

Thus, the need for understanding the agency of actors at the co-development table reveals itself. With vagueness around the meaning of the term “co-development,” and with limited willingness to include Indigenous people in legislation, it is vital to understand how this policy process was conducted. The first step in gaining this understanding goes through understanding how the actors involved in the process perceived the process they were engaged in.

To answer this question, Miranda Huron aims to employ grounded theory methodology, where interviews with participants in this legislation will start from a set of questions but will maintain openness for other topics to come up. Official documents such as the legislation itself will be employed as touch stones that solidify moments in the legislation development. Together, this work may clarify what co-development means for those most affected by the policy and will offer important critique for this and other legislation processes.

Now, five years after the Indigenous Languages Act was passed into legislation, it is vital to take stock of its development process as well as its results and ask questions about the Act’s ability to respond to the needs of Indigenous people across Canada. This study forces us to come to terms with how policy is made, and in what ways does the policy development process include the communities that stand to benefit from it.

Interested in more from EDST’s Doctoral Colloquium Series? 

Check out our Doctoral Colloquium page for more.

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Beginning this October…

EDST will host a Doctoral Colloquium. Once a month doctoral students and candidates will present their research to department students, staff and faculty. After their presentations, speakers will respond to audience questions. In this blog post, the Doctoral Colloquium coordinator, Yotam Ronen, summarizes the first of these presentations, given by EDST PhD Candidate, Jed Anderson.

What does it mean to live in a Northern peripheral region in both the global and Canadian context? What happens when settlers leave after colonizing a Northern area? In what ways is higher education implicated in these questions? These are the topics that Jed Anderson discussed in the first meeting of the EDST Doctoral Colloquium.

Anderson brought together Marxist theories on capitalism and colonization, works on Imperial communication and industrialization, as well as theoretical work on geographical space, to analyze Northern British Columbia and the development of higher education there. Using methods from political history and historical geography, Anderson conducted textual and document analysis, synthesizing his findings and positioning them in their spatial and temporal context.

This framework yielded an analysis that differentiated between three regions in Northern BC—Northcentral BC, Northeastern BC, and Northwestern BC—each with its own particular characteristics and its own unique trends of colonization.

Driven by resource extraction, the developing railway system in Northcentral BC brought with it the development of higher education institutions on the railway path.

In the Northeast, hopes for gold extraction were supplanted by an agricultural land-rush shaped by the formulation of scientific colonization. This Great Depression-era settlement effort was planned and closely monitored by researchers from both BC and Alberta. This colonization was accompanied by the establishment of higher education institutions alongside scientific colonization efforts, and soon after struggles over jurisdiction of these institutions ensued between Alberta and British Columbia. Here, a flourishing arts program was consistently defunded, and resources were transitioned towards resource extraction.

Finally, the Northwest saw the earliest violent contact between settlers and Indigenous people, where multiple imperial projects competed for the same space. Massive industrial projects in the region before and after World War Two brought in settlers, but when these projects winded down, a process of unsettlement occurred by which settlers left for economic reasons and Indigenous people asserted their right to self-determination. This opportunity for Indigenous capacity-building was reflected, among other things, in new higher education institutions that emphasized Indigenous perspectives and needs.

An examination of these three regions shows how, despite an expected level of homogeneity, there is considerable diversity in the development of higher education in Northern BC. Differing contexts and contingencies, coupled with the weakening of colonial institutions, allowed for considerable change in the three regions, that is reflected in the development of higher education and the sort of challenges and questions that each region grapples with. Furthermore, this examination highlights the significance of conversations on unsettlement, the place of the arts in higher education, and the close ties between industry, capital, colonialism, and higher education.

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