Our annotated bibliographies took shape through the unique lenses of each contributor. The project allowed a unique fissuring of knowledge—suturing each of our lived experience to the shared class readings. We settled on the idea of “epistemic justice” as a means to understand how it is we can recognize or begin to recognize our own relation to these texts. We looked at many texts and works to incorporate a broad means of negotiating this complex term. 

We centered and held indigenous voices in our reading of Coleman’s text, looking to the unique voice of Marie Clements, the Metis playright as a means to explore the physicality of a politics of respect—how can audience be implicated in these politics while viewing these sorts of conversations, especially in relation to say the murdered and missing women that they have been exposed to on the news before they went to the play?

We continued this unique opportunity to look at different explorations of epistemic justice and the ways it relates to the people interacting with Marie Battiste’s work formulated after the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations conference. We drew parallels between this conference and knowledge production in terms of indigenous recognition and respectability and our current conference, pushing its ideas up and out to form a creative and collaborative re-imaging of epistemic justice. 

Finally, we concluded with Skeena Reece’s FUSE piece “Welcome Performance” (2009). This brilliant concludes our brief foray into epistemic justice by painting an image of an “unrespectable” Native woman. While Coleman pushes for a mutual respectability and recognizability, Skeena tries to find the critical threshold where performance art makes her body unrecognizable—a stark negation to our initial understanding of the epistemic justice Coleman speaks of. From this unrecognizability, Reece confronts the audience with their own prejudice and expectations of a Native “welcome ceremony” wielding humour much the way King does, both as a means to gain the audiences attention, but also as a means to criticize and speak back to histories of oppression. 

One finding of which seemed to be commonplace throughout the our group and amongst other groups’ discussions was that the lack of Aboriginal perspective present, whether it was in education, literature, or consequently, Canadian culture, as one of the biggest impediments to the exposure and representation of First Nations culture. 

Coleman argues this stems from an unwillingness to escape the colonial constructs of our perspectives, and endeavor to “transform the way we see, to broaden the field of vision,” as Maracle suggests we do. 

LaRocque believes it is these colonial constructs of judgment present in the literature that we must now become aware of, and seek to eliminate. Moreover, those voices and perspectives wherein North Atlantic biases do not lie, those of the First Nations people, must be given greater representation in all aspects of Canadian culture. 

As Maracle suggests, it is these perspectives that must be observed from a distance, in order to maintain their significance and avoid the distortion of pre-established systems of judgment. 

Some common threads of concern that connected our research initiative with others in the class:

• Education/school system is instrumental in developing or perpetuating a distance between founding Canadian minority populations (Indigenous and Quebecois) and European cultures

• Negative stereotypes and racial prejudice can arise from this cultural distance, hand in hand with systems of division which create inequality among racial/cultural boundaries

• One way to address a lack of cultural understanding is to alter the curriculum taught to children and adolescents in schools to establish astrong foundation for more sophisticated academic study later in life

• History curriculum in many Canadian schools identifies colonialism as something that happened in the past, not an ongoing process with effects on the present

• Changing school curriculum may not be enough to combat the culture gulf. The education system itself has to be reevaluated and redesigned with more equal contributions from English, Quebecois, and First Nations culture

• Harmful and intolerant views can often be disguised as progressive or liberal

Some excerpts from our dialogue contributions to other research teams in light of what we learned within our own research project:

“I hope you find it agreeable that throwing ‘Aboriginal Culture’ into a curriculum is almost meaningless, when the process is not delivered with a sense of purpose and strategy. Additionally so if the students are taught about the ‘glories’ of colonialism, or ideas that suggest a ‘taming’ of a different culture. I wholeheartedly agree that it is ‘not sufficient to teach about Indigenous culture within a European educational system.’ We do need to ‘re-evaluate and redesign our educational system itself’, so that our forms of education do not adhere so rigidly to ‘Western ways of knowing.'” (Calvin’s response to Stepan’s comment on “Bridging the Gap”)

What Calvin and Stepan were discussing here relates to Coleman’s Intervention directly. Respect for Indigenous (or other) cultures cannot be achieved from within an exclusive Eurocentric framework. Our educational system has a long tradition of promoting European values. In order to fully appreciate alternative voices, these voices have to be understood as valid outside of a European, or “post-enlightenment” system of worth or classification. This means that in order to teach children to respect a diversity of cultures, this teaching has to take place outside of our established methods of education. 

__________

“The lack of framework for students trying to learn in a francophone literature class is similar to the lacking framework that Canada’s Indigenous (and non-Indigenous) students encounter. Additionally, Abrate’s outline for a successful educational structure parallels the goals and practices within Indigenous study today. This is probably because the move towards understanding the cultural context of the literature represents an openness to respecting the culture from which the literature is produced and aids in the diffusion of negative stereotypes.” (Jessica’s comment on “Intervention Strategy”)

Jessica’s comment summarizes the problematic lack of respect amongst cultural groups that Coleman calls out in his Canlit intervention. The root of the educational issue that we are facing is the fact that Eurocentric English Canada, Quebecois Canada, nor First Nations Canada are willing to forget the “wrongs” they have been served in the process of colonial formation. This defensiveness creates division, fosters negative stereotypes, and a tense learning environment when topics concerning “the other” (and “the other” goes all three ways) and all comes down to a lack of respect that Coleman says we need to move on from. 

__________

“The steps taken by the Alberta government serve to satisfy two essential problems with current institutions in place that were identified by your group. The first of which is the exclusion of Aboriginal perspectives, or as was referred to previously as the vanishing Indian theory. The program serves not only to establish that Aboriginal perspectives are important, but that they are an essential element of our society as Canadians, and an enhanced knowledge of their history will provide greater background and understanding of these perspectives.

The second problem identified by your group is the need for intervention at the elementary level. This measure targets the problem at its roots, introducing the subject at an early age and instilling a constant awareness and understanding throughout the childhood education of Albertan children.” (Alex’s comment on Gillian, Jenny, Lauren, and Sam’s blog)

The dialogue that accompanied the synthesis of our findings revealed several observations as to what steps had already been taken in order to achieve our combined intervention goals, and what the future held with regards to opportunities for improvement. As Jessica observed in this dialogue, despite the fact that a young First Nations population allows for fewer opportunities of exposure to First Nations history, this young generation has demonstrated “empowerment with regards to their own heritage and publicly executing it through the arts… this sector of the population is thriving when it comes to taking a stance on their existence and firmly refuting the vanishing Indian theory”. Furthermore, as noted by Alex, recent steps by the Government of Alberta to include mandatory content on residential schools and First Nations treaties from kindergarten through Grade 12 show a significant step forward with regards to enhancing the knowledge and perspectives of our youths.

In conclusion…

In lieu of reviewing commentary on our annotated entries, our research team turned to other research teams’ projects looking for our own connections. After all, the intent behind this class project is to hyperlink different sources to form a coherent and enriched understanding of the state of literature in Canada. With regards to our own research team, the strategy of looking to find valuable connections within our online classroom proved demonstrative of Coleman’s “politics of respect” call for action. What we discovered is that by-and-large our class shares a feeling of discontent (to some degree) with our pre-university educational experiences of what constitutes important Canadian literary history.

Sources

Battiste, Marie Ann. “Unfolding the Lessons of Colonization.” Introduction. Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision. Vancouver: UBC, 2000. Xvi-xx. Print.

Bernoe, Jessica. “Annotated Bibliography – Comments.” Intervention Strategy, WordPress, 17 April 2014. Web. 17 April 2014.

Brand, Dionne. Thirsty. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2002. Print.

Cairns, Alan. Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State. Vancouver: UBC, 2000. Print.

Coleman, Daniel. “Epistemic Justice, CanLit, and the Politics of Respect.” (2010): 124-126.

Clements, Marie. The Unnatural and Accidental Women. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2005.

LaRocque, Emma. When the Other Is Me: Native Resistance Discourse, 1850-1990. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 2010. Print.

Maracle, Lee. “Oratory on Oratory.” Trans.Can.Lit.: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature. Ed. Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2007. 55-70. Print.

Neuhaus, Mareike. “Contemporary Indigenous Literatures, Textualized Orality.” That’s Raven Talk: Holophrastic Readings of Contemporary Indigenous Literatures. Regina: CPRC, 2011. 216-225. UBC Library. Web. 9 Apr. 2014. <http://site.ebrary.com/lib/ubc/docDetail.action>.

Razack, Sherene “Gendered racial violence and spatialized justice: The murder of Pamela George”  in Race, Space and the law: Unmapping a white settler society, edited by Sherene Razack, pp. 123-146, 278-283. 2002 Between the Lines.

Shepherd, Alex. “Annotated Bibliography – Comments.” Gillian, Jenny, Lauren, and Sam, WordPress, 17 April 2014. Web. 17 April 2014.

Soroka, Stepan. “Annotated Bibliography – Comments.” Bridging the Gap: Awareness with a Purpose, WordPress, 16 April 2014. Web. 16 April 2014.

“Welcome Performance”. Cond. Skeena Reece. Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver. Mar. 2009. Performance.