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:

1. “the circular nature of time and the ways oral tradition is integrated with recurring events…
2. the central theme of relationships with landscape and non-humans
3. 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
4. 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.