Urban Native Youth Engagement with Western-Oriented Outdoor and Environmental Education

• In Event: Youth Resistance Across Neoliberal Contexts

Abstract

This paper offers an analysis of the effects of Western-oriented outdoor, environmental education programming for urban Indigenous youth in Canada. While it was presumed by various educators that the program’s focus on nature would be a significant attraction, youth regularly displayed minimal interest in this learning. In a context of recurrent colonialism and Indigenous resurgence (Alfred & Corntassel, 2005), I offer a nuanced reading of youths’ engagement through the lens of Cree orality (Weber-Pillwax, 2001).

Few studies focus on the engagement of urban Native youth with Western-oriented outdoor and environmental education or and fewer yet consider this through the lens of resistance. Resistance is often theorized in terms of youth subcultures and/or youth deviance yet Dimitriadis (2008) takes issue with associated terms such as, “the urban”, which he argues is “a kind of racial code word for pathology” (p.11). For so-called culture-less Indigenous youth in Canadian cities, an anti-urban sentiment can be thought of as closely tied to a discourse concerning Native peoples’ dispersion from nature, displacement from Indigeneity, and disconnection with an authentic being. These challenges to Indigenous identity were motivated the development of the program upon which this study is based.

This interpretive study employs ethnographic methods (participant observation, interviewing) to focus on the experience of ten youth, four males and six females, aged 14 to 16 years, who claim ancestry with one or more of the following Indigenous groups: Cree (Nêhiyawak); Cree (Nêhiyawak)-Métis; Métis-Cree (Nêhiyawak); Dene (Dehcho); Blackfoot (Piikáni); and Assiniboine (Nakota). Cree is the Indigenous language for all except one individual.

To make sense of observational and interview data, I analyzed for themes, relationships and patterns and then verified this through member checks (with youth) and peer debriefing (conversations with program aides, educators, Elders and others).

The engagement of Native youth with Western-oriented place-based learning does not mesh neatly with well known models of resistance. I make the case that rather than the future’s reach into the present, which Willis (1997) argues, it the past’s integration with today (and by extension, the future) that is of paramount importance for thinking about how Native youth respond to Western forms of place-based learning. It is the prevalence of oral features of Cree societies that engenders the distinct place-making ways of urban Native youth, practices connected to a long history of resistance to colonialism by Cree-speaking peoples.

Urban Native youth are active in recovering their responsibilities to their ancestral places. In so doing, they help us see beyond a stringent focus on standardized test scores (now dominating the formal learning landscape) and colonial dichotomies (present in myriad forms in the non-formal learning realm), vastly broadening our understanding of the way ahead in Indigenous education.

Author

• Tracy L. Friedel, The University of British Columbia