Decolonizing History: Indigenous Perspectives on History Education

• In Event: Race and Nation in Canadian History Education

Abstract

Decolonizing History: Indigenous Perspectives on History Education
Michael Marker

The objective of this work is to illuminate some considerations in teaching Canadian history from an indigenous perspective. The work has methodological aspects of historiography that are both ethnographic and reflective of conventional historical documentary analysis.

The problems for educators and academics in presenting indigenous knowledge and historiography are related to four themes that are explored in the work. These are: 1) the circular nature of time and the ways oral tradition is integrated with recurring events – notions of “progress” are problematic in this way of understanding history; 2) the often central theme of relationships with landscapes and non-humans; 3) an emphasis on the local landscape as containing the meaning of both time and place rather than on analysis 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. These themes contain fundamental conflicts in assumptions about epistemology, time, and space between indigenous and western views of reality. This work pushes the conversation about whose history is being taught in schools. It also considers the challenges of decolonizing history education in Canada.

Author

• Michael Marker, The University of British Columbia