Producing Marked Absences and Dominant Presences: How Settler Teachers Make Indigenous Worldviews Into "Knowable Subjects"

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Disrupting Whiteness and Settler Pedagogies

Abstract

For this paper, we discuss how settler teachers take up Indigenous perspectives in their classrooms and detail how they inadvertently utilize attitudes and practices that have adverse effects on relationships with Indigenous kin. We employed narrative approaches to data collection including dramatic storytelling, talking circles, guided writing and visual mapping. Our data illustrates the relationship between settler teachers and Indigenous ‘Others’ as one constituted of marked absences and pronounced dominant presences. We consider how Indigenous peoples have become simply subject matter to the dominant-centred settler teacher through the re/production of teaching relationships that establish Indigenous Others as ‘subjects’ (Said, 1979), not as relation. Thusly, Indigeneity becomes an object of study, or as an objectifiable source of knowledge. 

Authors

• Daniela Bascuñán, Toronto District School Board 

• Shawna Carroll, Okayama University

• Mark Sinke, University of Toronto

• Jean Paul Restoule, University of Victoria